A-Lex-I-Con

The 4th Social Study if ICT Open Research Forum (SSIT-ORF) took place 23-24 April 2008 at LSE. The idea of the event is to provide an informal forum for Ph.D. students to discuss their work with senior academics. Here is one, totally miscellaneous, idea that crystallized in the discussion about the relationship between local and global.

On 16 August 2007 Microsoft made an update to Windows operating system which resulted in millions of computers restarting nearly simultaneously. Since Skype is often configured to login automatically after restart, the peer-to-peer system experienced millions of login requests while running with reduced number of available nodes maintaining the system. Given a software bug that was later found in the peer-to-peer algorithm the system was not able to cope with the unprecedented load and collapsed for days.

Was Skype outage global or local event? I argue that it was both. Skype system lives in the millions of copies of the application installed on workstations and home PCs all around the world. Every single restart and login attempt was a local event - even more so as Skype is based on a peer-to-peer architecture instead of a central server. Yet there was something undeniably global in the event. The very simultaneity of local micro-events made the experience global. It was not just you who could not login, but as the news quickly broke out you knew that all the others all around the world were as well unable to login at the moment.

This little example does not solve the question about the relationship between local and global, micro and macro, but it highlights the need to take the role of temporal patterns and their alignment into consideration.