While on the face of it such a study is closer to social science than anything else, the maths and stats involved in studying connections between people, computers and other man-made nodes, and even the communication of materials & information around the natural world, have massive overlaps.
It is one of those areas where the same maths is applicable to seeming disconnected practical/physical areas, like how psychologists are starting to use the maths of quantum probability to model certain human behaviours (apparently it seems to much more accurately model the fuzziness of our thought processes than any "traditional" statistics methods).
The applicability of the same maths to seemingly disconnected areas is one of the things that convinces many that a "grand theory of everything" may one day be possible rather than there being disparate base laws at different scales and locations (or the third possibility of course: turtles all the way down).
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While on the face of it such a study is closer to social science than anything else, the maths and stats involved in studying connections between people, computers and other man-made nodes, and even the communication of materials & information around the natural world, have massive overlaps.
It is one of those areas where the same maths is applicable to seeming disconnected practical/physical areas, like how psychologists are starting to use the maths of quantum probability to model certain human behaviours (apparently it seems to much more accurately model the fuzziness of our thought processes than any "traditional" statistics methods).
The applicability of the same maths to seemingly disconnected areas is one of the things that convinces many that a "grand theory of everything" may one day be possible rather than there being disparate base laws at different scales and locations (or the third possibility of course: turtles all the way down).