I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping Social Behavior (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life) by Mark Earls & Michael J. O'Brien & Alex Bentley

Author:Mark Earls & Michael J. O'Brien & Alex Bentley [Earls, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780262016155
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2011-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

Not Solid Ground

When we think about cascades of ideas and behavior—books on investing, the latest in home gadgetry, or healthy lifestyles—we tend to envisage the social landscape through which these ideas spread as firm ground, often as a fixed social network. What in reality are transient interactions and relationships—a conversation, a schoolmate, or a co-worker—are now so often portrayed as if they were fixed “wires” between people in online social networks. It’s as if we were cocooned in a fixed lattice of gooey incubators in The Matrix. Those who picture this fixed network of wires between us are excited to launch their idea across it through careful, strategic placement, to get it to spread on its own, say, from one Facebook page to another.

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point convinced people that ideas can spread into every corner as long as we can map the social network and find those “hubs,” those “influentials,” who sit at the center of social networks. Find the “influential”—a break dancer under a bridge, the creator of a hip new blog, maybe a parkour expert in Paris—and you need to convert only that one key person to set the idea spinning in all directions, from the influential’s connections to his or her connections, and so on. The subtitle of market research gurus Ed Keller and Jonathan Berry’s The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy—reveals the marketing bestseller to be the latest version of this line of thought.

It is certainly true that all kinds of things spread through social networks. In Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler give plenty of examples of behaviors spreading through social networks—paranoia in communities or even the giggles, which spread over a period of weeks in Africa without anything being funny. It is all too easy, however, to mistake the network metaphor for a rather more fluid and messy reality. When we join in the fashion for network analogies, we tend to forget that the social landscape is dynamic, that for most humans living today, social interactions and relationships are mostly fleeting and multifarious. Unlike the small kinship-based social networks that shaped the lives of our ancestors, the social networks in which most modern humans are embedded are in constant flux.

What’s more, even if the social network stays the same, which it doesn’t, of course, everyone else is also trying to spread his or her ideas the same way. It’s like shouting across Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Most of our attempts to spread our ideas or to generate attention for them fail because, as Charles Darwin realized upon reading Thomas Malthus’s essay on population and food supplies, there is only limited space for success. Hindsight is 20/20, so we look back, trying to emulate past successes that no one predicted beforehand, no matter how lucky or complex or timely those past successes were. We try to adapt our new efforts to align them with what we perceive worked in the past, but this almost never succeeds.

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