When you've been brought up with some IT industry certainties, such as Moore's Law of transistor doubling or Metcalfe's Law of network value, it can be daunting to realise that these laws can have other unintended, but significant, consequences.
Metcalfe's Law says the value of telecoms network increases with the square of the number of connections. Whether that rule is precise or not has been the subject of some debate, with various proponents of different formulae, but that is not the point.
It has always been pretty clear from the days of the telegraph to phone, fax, web connection or mobile phone that each of these networks pass some sort of tipping point, as the number of users soars when the network becomes mainstream.
Impact on individual users
However, while the total value of each network grows - and that's great for all those providing products or services in the supply chain - how does it affect individual users? For each individual there is the increasing value in being able to reach more and more contacts within the one medium.
After all, being the only person on the planet with a fax machine is pretty useless, but when there's a few others it becomes marginally interesting, and when all business associates have one it becomes a powerful tool.
But is there a downside to network connection ubiquity?
Clearly some networks become stretched to breaking point as their available resources struggle to cope with the demands of increasing numbers of users.
Some mobile networks in particular have been hard hit, dealing with surges in new users or new mobile application usage, with the iPhone and Android platforms being cases in point.
Impact on the value of networks
The problem is, once people have a new, highly flexible tool, it is difficult to predict the variety of innovative uses to which it will be put.
This issue is especially true of communications devices where it is even harder to predict the speed at which innovation will propagate.
But something other than stretched resources is starting to affect the value of networks: a corollary of Metcalfe's Law is that the larger the physical network of connection points, the larger the social network of people.
This relationship can prove really useful, as it increases the likelihood, for example, of someone having an answer to that tricky question, or someone being interested in a particular quirky subject, but it also increases the volume of the banal, irksome, trivial and stupid - in short, the more chaff there is to disguise the wheat.
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