I recently read Social Physics by Alex Pentland. His research centers around the insights we can derive from the massive amount of data we have on how people interact (buzzword break people analytics). I will detail the findings of the book when I’m less lazy but it’s worth checking out and a quick read (the people analytics book is more focused but I suggest starting with Social Physics). The introduction has some interesting thoughts that were worth noting. We often don’t think about how much our person-machine network interactions have changed the world and how we still cling onto old models of describing the world.

In the last few years, however, our lives have been transformed by networks that combine people and computers, allowing much greater participation and much faster change. As the Internet makes our lives increasingly connected, events seem to move faster and faster. We are drowning in information, so much so that we don’t know what items to pay attention to and which to ignore.

As a result, our world sometimes seems to be on the edge of spinning out of control, with posts on social media such as Twitter causing stock market crashes and overthrowing governments. So even though the use of digital networks has already converted the workings of our economy,business, government, and politics, we still don’t fully understand the fundamental essence of these new human-machine networks. Suddenly our society has become a combination of humans and technology that has powers and weaknesses different from any we have ever lived in before.

Unfortunately, we don’t really know what to do about it. Our ways of understanding and managing the world were forged in a statelier, less connected time. Our current conception of society was born in the late 1700s during the Enlightenment and crystallized into its current form during the first half of the twentieth century. Things moved more slowly back then, and usually it was only a small group of traders, politicians, or wealthy families who really moved things along. Therefore, when we think about how to manage our society, we speak of “markets” and “political classes,” abstractions that events move slowly, so everyone has pretty much the same information and so people have time to act rationally.

…To understand our new world we must extend familiar economic and political ideas to include the effects of these millions of people learning from each other and influencing each other’s opinions. We can no longer think of ourselves as only individuals reaching carefully considered decisions; we must include the dynamic social effects that influence our individual decisions and drive economic bubbles, political revolutions, and the Internet economy.

Random commentary/babbling follows. If you hate the word network just read it as internet you big baby. Node is a person + machine on the network.

Now that we’ve moved to a world where information cascades through the network in almost real-time we start to see some interesting properties. The individual now is given a great deal of leverage but at the same time is massively influenced by the network (feedback loops yay!). The positive aspects are it enables humans to be much more creative, innovative and collaborative at pace never seen before. The negative side is groupthink and information bias also become fast spreading and infectious. The network has tendency to amplify information signals and these lead to emergent properties (the good and the bad) yet the network is agnostic to the intent of those signals.

The negative properties tends to develop when you have the same information looping around a subset of the network without the information itself changing or sufficient push back from other parts of the network to modify it. Every new node that is added to the negative subset network doesn’t change the information but parrots what was passed on before. Either it leads to a collapse or it forced onto another part of the network. The core problem here is no new valuable information is being created and only weakens the network.

The classic case is information bubbles where people get caught up in a frenzy and once it collapses haven’t really gained anything (nothing or very little new information has been created). Another type of property related to bubbles we see is that of information violence. Where there is some kind of information bias in the system that an aggressor subset of the network decides to target another victim subset. The information flow is destructive in nature and leaves the victim with very little ability to push back. It has to be noted that the aggressor may very well think it is doing the right thing but since it’s resistant to outside information there is no way for it to modify it’s beliefs. Yet consequences can ripple for an extended period of time.

Now that we’ve covered some of the negative aspects let’s go back to feeling good about ourselves in our newly augmented network world. Information flowing through the network that is dynamic creates more value with every interaction. By getting rid of the monopoly on information which used to be controlled by a few (think governments, news organizations, illumanati, mr burns etc) we have given a whole class people the ability to push back and influence these very powerful but static institutions. Old institutions will in turn evolve over time to better interact with the more dynamic nature of the network. My suspicion is that we’ll see more monolithic entities deconstruct themselves to cope with the changes.

Governments around the world have been forced to grapple with this in the last 5 years or so. Where there used to be a much more powerful signal/information flow from one side, we have seen the network amplify it’s own signal and in some cases totally change the existing order of things. What starts of as primarily networked becomes kinetic (i.e physical) as we have seen with several revolutions. This is not to say revolutions didn’t happen before but they took much longer to gather momentum, revolutions + network access are more powerful.

We are starting to see the proliferation of new types of markets which can take advantage of massive distribution inherent in the network down to the most niche subset. One of the greatest challenges we face as a species is as technology disrupts many kinds of traditional industries how do we provide people with work that gives them both a livelihood and dignity? New types of markets have the ability to create jobs that never existed before which hint at the possibility of the displaced (this will be a much bigger issue over the next 10-20 years than people realize — we can either throw our hands in the air or figure something out).

What should put things into perspective is that we only have about 2.5 billion people participating in this network right now and we’re already seeing this shift from an old static centralized world to something much more vibrant and dynamic. What happens when the next 4.5 billion come on board? How will they influence us and vice versa? The world is slowly being deconstructed in front of us and you have a front row seat — participate.