Every day, a typical person might meet friends and colleagues, log in to email and twitter accounts, send text messages and answer phone calls. There’s more: when this typical person takes a plane, makes purchases, or transfers money, it implicates her in further networks. In an IT intensive society, all these actions leave tracks. This poses huge privacy protection questions, but it also provides an unprecedented opportunity to study people and networks quantitatively.

Concerning e-reading, digital technology gives us access to information, to content, if you will, on a scale never before possible. But it works two ways, giving content, or content providers, access to us as well. Our keystrokes, our browsing history, our likes and dislikes, all of that becomes the property, not of the reader, but of the digital rights manager.

Criticism of network sciences should be taken seriously: risks can include unreliable data, carelessness with details, drastic simplifications in models, and fake trends. In general, scientists are, with reason, suspicious towards holistic all-purpose ‘theories of everything’. However, careful and intelligent application of network tools can continue to deliver a wealth of results in the future.