Continuing on the established trend of "shitty hand drawn sketches", here are a couple of thoughts:
1) If we still want to think in the direction of "Connections" here's a couple of options. Tho I think the 1st one is taken by some compositing package....
This one tries to convey that shading graph connection tends to be a tree, rather than a straight chain. Stupid, I know.... but.....
2) For the "just an icon" thinking, I was trying to previously convey something like this.... but ideally slightly better..... a wire-frame sphere "fading" over onto a halftone dotted sphere:
Which should work reasonably well even very small:
