The Internet creates many weak connections allowing the technology sector to grow rapidly
An article by “The Guardian” (http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/dec/06/technology-sector-growing-faster-economy) describes the technology sector as growing faster than the entire US economy, which isn’t surprising considering the world is constantly centered on new electronics and gadgetry. In addition, it is said to keep growing faster for several decades longer. Thus, it makes sense that technology startups are able to grow much faster than business and financial startups. This is mostly due to the connected network of technology.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/technology/instagram-founders-were-helped-by-bay-area-connections.html. This article shows how Instagram rose extremely quickly in its user base and brings up the critical question – how and why do technology companies grow faster than other sorts of companies? The biggest reason is because of the interconnected networks that technology creates. The internet is the key creator of many weak connections. As we learned in class, these weak connections create the most opportunity for information transfer. By having technology being in the center of internet, there is a constant stream of information that gets passed around. For example, if a new email client is opened now, there would be a small number of people who would want to try it for the first time. Every time a person now sends an email, the receiver would become curious about the new email company since the address would be from there. This would create of an offset where many others would join due to this, making more join in response. Thus, the internet offers a way to allow companies to market extremely effectively with initial success. This is what happened with Instagram, as narrated in the article. As a few people started to use Instagram, more people did so until it became a huge company.
This shows that in the modern world, networks are very important and powerful to the growth of our economy. Since, technology lies around internet, its network is very vast of full of weak connections that allow information to transfer extremely fast resulting in very fast rate of growth for the technology sector.