Dogs Group, Cats Network
This morning I was hurrying to catch up with a group I walk with every morning. One of the members has a puppy who’s training to be a therapy dog. When this puppy saw me on a perpendicular street, walking toward the group, he began encouraging me. His body turned toward me, he looked at me as if to say “come on, we’re all moving this way!” and he didn’t stop fidgeting around until I physically joined the group, even though his owner kept tugging at the leash and telling him to heel. I noticed that, possibly as a result of this canine acceptance, I was more social in the group this morning; usually I say very little other than “good morning”.
I was reminded of my theory regarding students having cat or dog learning styles.
Then I made the connection to this week’s topic: groups versus networks.
Groups are full of dogs, eager to do what the others do and all be accepted. The alpha dog sets the agenda, and everything is distributive. As Stephen Downes puts it, they “risk anything for that team feeling” (2006). They do work together, are rule-bound, and for the most part subsume individual identity. They even “form linear hierarchies“.
Networks are how cats operate. 
Cats form connections for their own autonomous purposes, and only when needed. They will cuddle up to a human being, or another cat, to keep warm one day and not notice you the next. They are sociable only when it pleases them to be so, and often don’t seem to recognize their own similarity to other cats. You can’t get much more open and diverse. I couldn’t even consider them to form a community.
They say that dogs have owners, but cats have staff. The autonomy of cat thinking makes them supremely independent and able to ignore many external social checks on their viewpoint. They do not organize well, and their selection of nodes for their network can be extremely limited. Occasionally they choose to live in colonies (according to the article, when food is abundant), where they tend to live and let live. But is their network effective? If the cat is getting what she wants from it, then by definition it is. I do think, however, it would very, very difficult to rate the benefit of her network from the outside.
