Well, I may be being too harsh in the title, but Reed’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law are both slightly wrong. They both treat the subject at hand, Social Systems too simplistically.
One of the phenomena of social systems is that they undergo connection reduction when they reach a certain size. Luhmann identifies two levels of scale in social systems. Simple systems where every actor in that network is connected to ever other (a simple network graph, which does match Reed’s Law). But when they reach a certain size they have to become complex networks; the linkages are not evenly distributed and not every actor is linked to every other. This in my opinion happens when a social group gets above about 150 in the real world (maybe a few more when computer supported). This is your tribe, or wider circle of friends. Beyond this point clustering happens. So in a network of up to 150 then Reed’s law applies, beyond that it is 2^N less some level of conection simplification.
There needs to be some kind of expected value or statistically reduced value of the links that could possibly be made above a certain level. Social systems do not split evenly down the middle when they reacha certain size, they end up as a complex but not fully linked system.
Even Metcalfe’s law seems to me to be mistaken. The network of communication is only as valuable as the number of people you want to talk to. So althought the global communication network is constantly adding people in developing countries the value to the network to me isn’t increasing. If the people I want to talk to are hooked up, and all the people I could ever really want to talk to are hooked up then the value to me is fixed. I think that Metcalfe’s law is stuck in first order cybernetics. The value of the system needs to be worked out in a slightly different way, and taking into account the observer; the person making the value judgements.
