Nexalogy Environics | Social Media Intelligence

One thing we can learn from even a casual inspection of the science of networks is the limits of our everyday understanding of people. For example, consider how much time and energy social metrics companies are spending convincing us that they can find those with the highest levels of influence (‘influencers’) relative to a market or a group of brands, and once discovered, these influencers simply need to be influenced as a stepping stone to convincing the entire market to buy your corn flakes, mobile device, or book. A sort of marketing Domino theory.

But it turns out that people — and marketers — don’t really understand influence very well, despite being embedded in social networks their entire lives: we really don’t understand the way that we are influenced by other people. For example, if someone touches you when you first meet, you are ten times more likely to remember that person. But we are unaware, later, that the touch was the reason for our recollection. We underestimate the impact of a kind word, or the chilling effects of workplace fear. There are dozens of examples of this sort coming out of cognitive science that demonstrate that we are being strongly influenced below the conscious level, physiologically, all the time. The actions of others can make us fearful, or confident, or curious, or suspicious — and it can happen invisibly. People just don’t have a great insight into the social interactions of people, despite being involved in them.

Most contemporary thinking about our social interactions is derived from an economic view that considers groups as collections of individuals, where each individual makes more-or-less rational decisions intended to maximize benefits to themselves and their loved ones.

I think there is a analogy with the historical physics view of how fluids work, like water, or water specifically.

Like people, water is everywhere. and we come into contact with it everyday, when we wash, cook, drink, or bathe. But, just like people, close contact with water does not let us understand water’s workings. And, strangely, we don’t come into regular contact with other liquids to any extent like our experience of water, so it is both familiar and yet badly understood.

For example, liquid water is not a amorphous blob of H20 atoms, as I was taught in high school. It is a complex, quasi-crystalline substance, with giant aggregations of water molecules forming and breaking apart all the time. These supermolecules are responsible to a great extent for the extremely unusual qualities of water, like its high heat coefficient: water changes temperature very slowly because these supermolecules are slow to change their rates of vibration. If water was really just a bunch of uninvolved H2O molecules, it wouldn’t be anything like water. Water is also inclined to move from networks of supermolecules into a crystalline solid as it gets colder, which leads to one of the strangest qualities of water: solid water floats on liquid water. We take this for granted, and don’t consider it unusual: but it is very very unusual, and life on Earth depends on that property of water.

Just like water, we are around people all the time, but we don’t understand how connected together we are. It’s easy to consider people as individuals, bumping into each other like billiard balls, making independent decisions, individuals coincidentally living and working in close proximity. But we aren’t like that, at all, any more than water is made up of totally independent molecules.

The new physics has opened our understanding of the most common liquid on earth, one absolutely central to life, one that we touch everyday. Just so, social physics will allow us to understand our connection to each other, and how our thinking, beliefs, values and behavior are almost totally shaped by social ties to others. But it may require that we reconsider almost everything we think we know about ourselves and others.

The city is a built environment, and has been designed by our actions and behaviors. I grew up in Boston, where there is a perplexing layout in the oldest sections of town, with the apocryphal rationale is that the streets were paved over the wanderings of cows and drunken sailors.

There are cognitive universals in how people chose to wander, and what paths we would rather use in cities, and what emerges is a spectrum of quite complex societal outcomes.

Walk this way via The Economist

According to Ruth Conroy Dalton of the University of Northumbria, people perceive routes with changes in directions to be longer than straighter ones, even if they are actually the same distance. Odder still, equivalent routes that have landmarks on them are also reckoned to be longer than routes that do not. That may be because memorising changes in direction and landmarks both require the brain to do more work than a route that simply heads in as straight a line as possible.

These preferences may help explain why it is that some city streets are more crowded than others. Why is it that Oxford Street, for instance, is London’s busiest shopping street and not, say, Regent Street or Piccadilly? Tim Stonor of Space Syntax, an architectural consultancy, says that the answer lies in graph theory, a branch of mathematics that studies nodes and the connections between them. Counterintuitively, though, Space Syntax’s model represents street segments as the graph’s nodes and road intersections as connections between the nodes. The resulting topsy-turvy simulation is then used to chart the most linear conceivable route to join every street in a city with every other street. It soon becomes clear that not all roads are equal. Some are more accessible and integrated than others—which is why Oxford Street is more likely to be walked along than any other street in London.

That has implications for how street layouts can be consciously designed to create areas that are more or less vibrant—more suited to shopping, say, or family living. It can also be used to identify places that are unhealthily segregated. Mr Stonor points out that 85% and 96% of riots last August in north and south London respectively took place within a five-minute walk of a post-war housing estate. Most observers would put that down to the fact that the estates’ cheap accommodation draws poorer folk, resulting in pockets of poverty and deprivation whose denizens are more likely to commit crime and engage in acts of vandalism. But Mr Stonor believes that the complex, insular design of many housing estates exacerbates the problem by limiting interactions between people and thus encouraging anti-social behaviour—the exact opposite of what their creators envisaged.

So, network science seems to get at some fundamentals in our thinking about space, and our movement through it. Stonor’s observations show that alienation will arise when groups are  dead-ended in pockets of our cities’ networks of streets, and the result is a corresponding isolation from the non-physical, societal social networks and the social capital that they create, and distribute.

I wonder how we will be able to work through complex social issues like the riots in London, the underlying motivations of the Occupy movement, or the growing inequities of or globalize economy, when our leaders have no understanding of the social physics that underlies human association? We are in a world dominated by business leaders, lawyers, and economists, alas, and far too few anthropologists, physicists, and scientists.