More Than Self-Governing, Social Networks Are Self-Creating

New scientific thinking (with video!) from Edge.org’s “Third Culture” on how our social networks create and recreate our changing reality, very much as biology does:

It is customary to think about fashions in things like clothes or music as spreading in a social network. But it turns out that all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow through social networks, and this process obeys certain rules we are seeking to discover.
We’ve been investigating the spread of obesity through a network, the spread of smoking cessation through a network, the spread of happiness through a network, the spread of loneliness through a network, the spread of altruism through a network. And we have been thinking about these kinds of things while also keeping an eye on the fact that networks do not just arise from nothing or for nothing. Very interesting rules determine their structure.

What about family privacy principles, culture, entertainment preferences and boycotts, religion, politics, free will and choice in all things large and small? Homeschool advocates working in the legislative process, for example, could certainly benefit from understanding it through this science!

And for real folks who wisely keep their distance from political social constructs, does this also apply to our deepest sense of who we are, and can it be studied and understood scientifically as “created” but right here on earth moment to moment, rather than being immutable and divinely ordained?

Hey! Could it be this emergent theory of human consciousness and experience of reality, rather than “evolution” per se, that is the elephant in education’s living room?

Is that the scientific theorizing that anti-science religious creationists REALLY fear humans learning about, and most intriguing to me then, do they so effectively spread this fear precisely through the kind of scientifically verifiable social contagion this research investigates, thereby validating it even as they preach against it??

You just gotta go read and think about this stuff! And then I hope we can socially spread the germs of our thinking all around our networks. . .Paul, Nance, Daryl, Scott and I had the vaguest glimmer of this idea being important back in the NHEN forums (wow, look, January 2004, four years ago already — maybe it’s the social contagion of election year politics that infected us??) and so we started a discussion there we boldly called, “Brainstorming Network and Systems Theory for Homeschoolers.” Of course we only scratched the surface of our ignorance, trying to find an intelligent QUESTION, never mind expecting intelligent answers at that point.

Now, today, here’s the barest hint of what the cutting edge of social network contagion sounds like (I’m so excited!) :

We have had advances in methods, we have had advances in data. We have also had advances in ideas. People are beginning to think more creatively about what it means to have these kinds of higher-order structures. Since the late 1990s and into the 2000s science more generally has been engaged in what I call the “assembly project” of modern science. Astronomers are beginning to think about how to assemble stars into galaxies, computer scientists are thinking about how to assemble computers into networks. With the development of the Internet in the mid-1990s, everybody began to think about computers, and their networks, and about how they interact and so forth. Engineers struggle with these problems.

Neuroscientists are beginning to think: okay, well, we understand a lot about neurons, but how do they interconnect to form brains? Geneticists are saying: at the end of the day, we will have understood all 25,000 (approximately) human genes, and then what? How do we put Humpty Dumpty back together again? How do we reassemble all of the genes and understand how they interact with each other in space and across time? We have seen the recent birth of a new field of biology called systems biology, which seeks to put the parts back together.

And similarly, in social science, there is an increasing interest in the same kind of phenomenon. We have begun to understand human behavior, and we have models of rational decision-making — rational actor models —which have led to further innovations. But these models all pertain primarily to individuals.

Adam Smith talked about markets as a phenomenon that emerges from the action of individuals, but nevertheless we have primarily focused on the actions of individuals. How do we put all these parts back together to understand groups? Again, the study of social networks is part of this assembly project, part of this effort to understand how you can then have the emergence of order and the emergence of new phenomena that do not inhere in the individuals.

We have, for example, consciousness, which cannot be understood by studying neurons. Consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal tissue. And we can imagine similarly certain kinds of emergent properties of social networks that do not inhere in the individuals — properties that arise because of the ties between individuals and because of the complexity of those ties.

Understanding all of this is what drives me and James Fowler to death right now. . . A lot of times, people fail to understand networks because they. . .think about the architecture of the network. They think about how people are connected, which is of course incredibly important and not easy to understand either. While on the one hand the topology can be understood or seen as fixed or existing, on the other hand this topology is itself mutable and changing and intriguing, and the origin of this topology and its change is itself a difficult thing.

But here is something else: . . . Things move through it, and this has a different set of scientific underpinnings altogether. Understanding how things flow through the network is a different challenge from understanding how networks form or evolve. . . You need to understand both. And they both interconnect and affect each other, just as in our bodies our anatomy and our physiology are interrelated.

This is what James and I are tackling right now. . .