We think of messages as the carriers of event notifications. In the real world, we are notified of events via sent by text messages, or email, or maybe a newsfeed. We therefore make a distinction between an event and the communication of it. This is a very important distinction to make, because it illustrates that we are coupled to the event via a medium.

Let us now plant the idea—which we will return to later—that although there is a singular event, multiple participants can be notified via separate message notifications. We see that there is a loose coupling between event-producer and event-consumer. It all means events have a slightly intangible quality—their slightly abstract nature makes them hard to pin down except through the messages through which they are perceived.

A word of mild caution might be appropriate now—we can loose focus on what's important if we obsess about events. Firstly, it's obvious that we need to consider only significant events—events that will likely result in some kind of action. Everything other than the event is just noise—we don't need to consider it. And of course, what constitutes significant is going to be domain-, and problem-, specific—a stock market price rise is significant in a financial network, but not an educational network. So for now, let's use events as a tool for when significant things happen in a business network, when we need to understand what prompts participants to act. Let's see how that tool can be used.