Patterns of Social Unrest, Complexity, Conflict, and Catastrophe

by John L. Casti, Album, Der Standard, April 16, 2011
(reprinted with permission of author)

Social Unrest
On February 24, 2010 Greek police fired tear-gas and clashed with demonstrators in central Athens after a march organized by unions to oppose the government’s program to cut the European Union’s biggest budget deficit. The president of a large union stated, “People on the street will send a strong message to the government but mainly to the European Union, the markets and our partners in Europe that people and their needs must be above the demands of markets. We didn’t create the crisis.” Later, air-traffic controllers, customs and tax officials, train drivers, doctors at state-run hospitals and school teachers walked off the job to protest government spending cuts. Journalists joined into the strikes as well, creating a media blackout.

Fast forwarding a year, we’ve recently seen long-standing regimes in both Tunisia and Egypt sent packing literally overnight, with Libya now being torched by the very same revolutionary flames as rebels battle the entrenched Qaddafi government in an attempt to overturn forty years of oppression.

On the surface, these types of civil disturbances give the appearance of arising out of the public’s discontent with their government over high unemployment, rising food prices, lack of housing, and other such necessities of everyday life. But such explanations are facile and superficial, failing to address the “root” cause of the societal collapse. The real culprit resides much deeper in the social system. It is a widening “complexity gap” between the government and its citizens, revolution breaking out when that gap can no longer be bridged.

Complexity Mismatches
Some years back, American archaeologist Joseph Tainter put forth the idea that societies respond to crises by adding complexity in order to solve problems they encounter. But each unit of resource the society adds―energy or money, usually―yields less return than the previous unit. So the additional layers of complexity bought by this expenditure consume resources with no corresponding return until the marginal return on investment in social complexity turns negative. But since the society knows how to solve problems only by adding complexity, it then begins to collapse under its own weight.

In Egypt (and now Libya) the added complexity is not just any sort of complexity, but as noted by futurist Ramez Naam it is a very special type: parasitism. This is one of the worst forms of complexity, as it consumes more and more of society’s resources without producing any value at all.

For example, Egypt had a state-controlled economy that was wildly mismanaged for decades. Even the noticeable improvement in recent years has been a case of too little, too late. Moreover the country is monumentally corrupt, as crony capitalism runs rampant throughout the entire social structure. Such a system of corruption relies upon bribes to officials to get contracts,
obtain jobs or to find adequate housing. One rumor had it that in Egypt the drug Viagra was kept off the market because its manufacturer, Pfizer, failed to pay a large enough bribe to the Egyptian Minister of Health for its approval.

This type of parasitic mismanagement and corruption doesn’t really add constructive complexity to the government, but simply works to freeze in place an already low-complexity system. But modern communication and social networking services like Twitter and Facebook do act to dramatically increase the social complexity―but the increase is in the complexity of the population, at-large, not an increase in the complexity of the government. This is why governments routinely act to shut off these services when they’re under attack, as more voices are heard and more and more highly-connected social networks are formed.

At some point the complexity gap between the stagnant level of government complexity and the growing level of general-public complexity becomes too great to be sustained. Result: Ouster of the Mubarak regime, and the likely downfall of the Qaddafi government as well.

A complex system theorist recognizes immediately the principle at work here in narrowing the complexity gap. It’s is called the Law of Requisite Variety (Complexity). The Principle states that in order to fully regulate/control a system, the complexity of the regulating system has to be at least as great as the complexity of the system to be controlled. An obvious corollary is that if the gap is too big (in either direction) you’re going to have trouble. And in the world of politics, “trouble” is often spelled “r-e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n”!

Examples of such mismatches abound: ancient Rome is one case that always comes to mind, where the ruling classes used political and military power to control the lower classes and to conquer neighbors in order to extract tax revenues. Ultimately, the entire resources of the society were being used to maintain an ever-growing, far-flung empire that had grown too complex to be sustained. The ancient Mayan civilization is another good case in point. Some
scholars, like historian Paul Kennedy, have argued that the American Empire is in the process of coming undone for much the same reasons.

This type of complexity gap is not confined just to the political and governmental domains either, as evidenced by the ongoing social unrest in Japan arising out of the radiation spewing forth from the reactors damaged by the March 11 earthquake. The ultimate cause of this unrest is a “design basis accident,” in which the tsunami overflowed retaining walls designed to keep the water out. The overflow then damaged backup electrical generators intended to supply emergency power for pumping water to cool the reactor’s nuclear fuel rods. This is a two-fold problem: First, the designer’s planned the height of the walls for a magnitude 8.3 quake, the largest that Japan had previously experienced, not considering that a quake might someday exceed that level, and what’s even worse, (2) they placed the generators on low ground where any overflow would short them out. So everything ultimately depended on the retaining walls doing their job―which they didn’t! This is a case of too little complexity in the control system (the combination of the height of the wall and the generator location) being overwhelmed by too much complexity in the system to be controlled (the magnitude of the tsunami).

Who’s Next?
When a society collapses, be it ancient Rome, the United State tomorrow or Egypt and Tunisia yesterday, it quickly loses complexity. All institutions, laws and technologies become simpler, a lot simpler. Moreover, the range of social roles and behaviors open to the population of such a society dramatically shrink.

These factors lead to a rapid reduction in living standards, since without complex institutions, infrastructures, technologies and social roles, large populations cannot be sustained at their previous standard of living. Consequently, people consume far less, stay at home, turn inward, and die much sooner.

What can we expect to over the next year or two? A good guess is that as people lose confidence in the ability of their governments to solve the financial crises and experience other social stresses that increase the government-public complexity gap, they’ll break out into violent protests and/or assaults on those they see as responsible for their misery. This group will certainly encompass government officials and bankers, but may well also include immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities, landlords, and even corporate managers and bosses.

If you want to be grimly impressed, start putting pins on a map where such violence has already broken out. Cities like Athens, Sofia (Bulgaria), Port-au-Prince, Riga (Latvia) and Vilnius (Lithuania) are on the map, and even much larger cities like Moscow, Rome, Paris and Dublin have seen huge protests over rising unemployment and declining wages. But security police in these cities have managed to keep the protests orderly, if not peaceful (so far). While it’s very likely such societal disruptions will be confined to specific locales, we cannot entirely discount the possibility that as the global economic situation worsens, some of these localized incidents will overrun national borders and become far more widespread and long-lasting events. Armed rebellions, military coups, and even wars between states over access to resources cannot be excluded.

Early-Warning Indicators
All civil disturbances have the same general two-part structure: a lack of confidence in the ability of established institutions to solve the problems at hand, and fear of the future. So any methodology purporting to provide earlywarning signals of social unrest will have to embrace these two factors. It turns out that a theoretical foundation for just such a theory was put forth by American political scientist James C. Davies more than fifty years ago.

Like all great insights, Davies big idea is simple: Social unrest takes place when a society’s rising expectations are suddenly dashed. In other words, a society’s mood, how they regard the future, grows increasingly positive as the society gets richer. But when the rug is pulled out from under citizen’s hopes for a brighter future, things turn ugly―fast. And as the gap between expectations
and reality widens, the mood of the population moves deeper into negative territory until it finally erupts into violence and revolution.

To illustrate Davies thesis, let’s take an item from the “It Can’t Happen Here” department. In a recent article in Vanity Fair magazine, Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz noted that in terms of income inequality, the United States today lags behind every country in Europe, ranking down with Russia and its oligarchs and Iran in the category of countries where the top 1% of the population control 40 percent or more of the nation’s wealth. As with the situations in the North African and Arab lands today, there are again two systems in conflict. But in the developed countries like the USA, the systems are not the government and the public; rather, they are the “haves” and the “have nots.”

In a society like the USA that is sharply divided in terms of wealth, the rich lead a high-complexity style of life that doesn’t rely on government to supply common needs like parks, education, security or medical care. The “haves” can supply all these things for themselves. In fact, this high-complexity life-style strata of society is one that worries a lot about strong government, especially a government that would reduce its complexity by doing things like raising taxes.

This attitude ultimately leads the have-nots to see the already low complexity of their lives become even lower, as a sense of living in an unjust system with shrinking opportunities creates feelings of alienation. Does this sound familiar?

Rising food prices, growing youth unemployment and lack of adequate housing and education are exactly the surface causes of the revolutions taking place today in Africa and the Middle East. Question: When will it come to America?

We’d like to be able to develop procedures for anticipating when that gap between the rich (read: high complexity lifestyles) and the not-so-rich (low complexity lives) will widen to an unsustainable level. How to do that?

The first step in identifying the “danger zone” where the gap between expectations and reality is reaching a critical level is to measure the society’s expectations, what we might term its “social mood”. This is the view the society holds about its future, optimistic (positive) or pessimistic (negative) on various time scales, weeks, months, years, or more. We then look for the turning points in this mood as an indicator of where society will move from one overall psychological mindset to another. Of course, the danger zone is the point at which the social mood begins to roll over from positive to negative, since that’s the point at which the society can “tip” from hope to despair. This is precisely where Davies’ theory suggests a civil disturbance becomes much more likely than not.

John L. Casti (casti@iiasa.ac.at) is a Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg bei Wien, und Founder of the Kenos Circle, a Vienna-based society for exploration of the future. His most recent book is Mood Matters: From Rising Skirt Lengths to the Collapse of World Powers (Copernicus Books, New York, 2010).

To print a copy of this article, click here.

The Corporate State Wins Again

The Corporate State Wins Again, Chris Hedges, CommonDreams

"When did our democracy die? When did it irrevocably transform itself into a lifeless farce and absurd political theater? When did the press, labor, universities and the Democratic Party—which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible—wither and atrophy? When did reform through electoral politics become a form of magical thinking? When did the dead hand of the corporate state become unassailable?

The body politic was mortally wounded during the long, slow strangulation of ideas and priorities during the Red Scare and the Cold War. Its bastard child, the war on terror, inherited the iconography and language of permanent war and fear. The battle against internal and external enemies became the excuse to funnel trillions in taxpayer funds and government resources to the war industry, curtail civil liberties and abandon social welfare. Skeptics, critics and dissenters were ridiculed and ignored. The FBI, Homeland Security and the CIA enforced ideological conformity. Debate over the expansion of empire became taboo. Secrecy, the anointing of specialized elites to run our affairs and the steady intrusion of the state into the private lives of citizens conditioned us to totalitarian practices. Sheldon Wolin points out in “Democracy Incorporated” that this configuration of corporate power, which he calls “inverted totalitarianism,” is not like “Mein Kampf” or “The Communist Manifesto,” the result of a premeditated plot. It grew, Wolin writes, from “a set of effects produced by actions or practices undertaken in ignorance of their lasting consequences.”

Corporate capitalism—because it was trumpeted throughout the Cold War as a bulwark against communism—expanded with fewer and fewer government regulations and legal impediments. Capitalism was seen as an unalloyed good. It was not required to be socially responsible. Any impediment to its growth, whether in the form of trust-busting, union activity or regulation, was condemned as a step toward socialism and capitulation. Every corporation is a despotic fiefdom, a mini-dictatorship. And by the end Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs had grafted their totalitarian structures onto the state."

***

"We live in a fragmented society. We are ignorant of what is being done to us. We are diverted by the absurd and political theater. We are afraid of terrorism, of losing our job and of carrying out acts of dissent. We are politically demobilized and paralyzed. We do not question the state religion of patriotic virtue, the war on terror or the military and security state. We are herded like sheep through airports by Homeland Security and, once we get through the metal detectors and body scanners, spontaneously applaud our men and women in uniform. As we become more insecure and afraid, we become more anxious. We are driven by fiercer and fiercer competition. We yearn for stability and protection. This is the genius of all systems of totalitarianism. The citizen’s highest hope finally becomes to be secure and left alone."

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

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On Resilience

On Resilience, Carl Folke, Seed Magazine, 2/9/11

"Loosely defined, resilience is the capacity of a system—be it an individual, a forest, a city, or an economy—to deal with change and continue to develop. It is both about withstanding shocks and disturbances (like climate change or financial crisis) and using such events to catalyze renewal, novelty, and innovation. In human systems, resilience thinking emphasizes learning and social diversity. And at the level of the biosphere, it focuses on the interdependence of people and nature, the dynamic interplay of slow and gradual change. Resilience, above all, is about turning crisis into opportunity.

Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and coevolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held, implicit assumption that systems respond to change in a linear—and therefore predictable—fashion is altogether wrong. In resilience thinking, systems are understood to be in constant flux, highly unpredictable, and self-organizing with feedbacks across multiple scales in time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmark features of complexity.

A key feature of complex adaptive systems is their ability to self-organize along a number of different pathways with possible sudden shifts between states: A lake, for example, can exist in either an oxygenated, clear state or an algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession. Conventionally, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change in a smooth way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed, at which point the water abruptly goes turbid. Resilience science focuses on these sorts of regime shifts and tipping points. It looks at incremental stresses, such as accumulation of greenhouse gases in combination with chance events—things like storms, fires, even stock market crashes—that can tip a system into another equilibrium state from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to recover. How far can a system be perturbed before this shift happens? How much shock can a system absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different? How can active transformations from an undesirable social-ecological state into a better one be orchestrated? That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the resilience challenge.

The resilience line of thinking helps us avoid the trap of simply rebuilding and repairing flawed structures of the past—be it an economic system overly reliant on risky speculation or a health-care system that splits a nation at its financial seams and yet fails to deliver adequate coverage. Resilience encourages us to anticipate, adapt, learn, and transform human actions in light of the unprecedented challenges of our turbulent world."

Resilience in design is how to handle complex systems that run normally in non-equilibrium states. It is not a solution for all types of complex systems.

In my opinion, resilient design is how to deal with complex systems in non-equilibrium only. To cope with co-evolving systems you have to join in the co-evolution.

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Complexity, Change and Well Being

Some interesting thoughts about complexity by Mike Bell from his LinkedIn Group Social Entrepreneurship and Complexity.

Complexity, Change and Wellbeing

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Autonomy

Yochai Benkler has written a masterful book on social production and networks. As I read this section last night I was struck with the thought that autonomy is the unspoken word at the center of a lot of controversy in our society. The conversation should be focused on autonomy overtly:

• How much autonomy is required for individual freedom?
• When does my autonomy begin to impinge on yours?
• How does my autonomy empower yours?
• What’s the boundary between my autonomy and limits placed by government, corporate and religious interests?
• How do government, corporate and religious entities empower my autonomy?
• How do we protect the personal autonomy that is emerging through the Internet, social production and web 2.0 software?
  

“The autonomy deficit of private communications and information systems is a result of the formal structure of property as an institutional device and the role of communications and information systems as basic requirements in the ability of individuals to formulate purposes and plan actions to fit their lives. The gains flow directly from the institutional characteristics of commons. The emergence of the networked information economy makes one other important contribution to autonomy. It qualitatively diversifies the information available to individuals. Information, knowledge, and culture are now produced by sources that respond to a myriad of motivations, rather than primarily the motivation to sell into mass markets. Production is organized in anyone of a myriad of productive organizational forms, rather than solely the for-profit business firm. The supplementation of the profit motive and the business organization by other motivations and organizational forms-ranging from individual play to large-scale peer-production projects-provides not only a discontinuously dramatic increase in the number of available information sources but, more significantly, an increase in available information sources that are qualitatively different from others.

Imagine three storytelling societies: the Reds, the Blues, and the Greens.

Each society follows a set of customs as to how they live and how they tell stories. Among the Reds and the Blues, everyone is busy all day, and no one tells stories except in the evening. In the evening, in both of these societies, everyone gathers in a big tent, and there is one designated storyteller who sits in front of the audience and tells stories. It is not that no one is allowed to tell stories elsewhere. However, in these societies, given the time constraints people face, if anyone were to sit down in the shade in the middle of the day and start to tell a story, no one else would stop to listen. Among the Reds, the storyteller is a hereditary position, and he or she alone decides which stories to tell. Among the Blues, the storyteller is elected every night by simple majority vote. Every member of the community is eligible to offer him- or herself as that night's storyteller, and every member is eligible to vote. Among the Greens, people tell stories all day, and everywhere. Everyone tells stories. People stop and listen if they wish, sometimes in small groups of two or three, sometimes in very large groups. Stories in each of these societies play a very important role in understanding and evaluating the world. They are the way people describe the world as they know it. They serve as testing grounds to imagine how the world might be, and as a way to work out what is good and desirable and what is bad and undesirable. The societies are isolated from each other and from any other source of information.

Now consider Ron, Bob, and Gertrude, individual members of the Reds, Blues, and Greens, respectively. Ron's perception of the options open to him and his evaluation of these options are largely controlled by the hereditary storyteller. He can try to contact the storyteller to persuade him to tell different stories, but the storyteller is the figure who determines what stories are told. To the extent that these stories describe the universe of options Ron knows about, the storyteller defines the options Ron has. The storyteller's perception of the range of options largely will determine the size and diversity of the range of options open to Ron. This not only limits the range of known options significantly, but it also prevents Ron from choosing to become a storyteller himself. Ron is subjected to the storyteller's control to the extent that, by selecting which stories to tell and how to tell them, the storyteller can shape Ron's aspirations and actions. In other words, both the freedom to be an active producer and the freedom from the control of another are constrained. Bob's autonomy is constrained not by the storyteller, but by the majority of voters among the Blues. These voters select the storyteller, and the way they choose will affect Bob's access to stories profoundly. If the majority selects only a small group of entertaining, popular, pleasing, or powerful (in some other dimension, like wealth or political power) storytellers, then Bob's perception of the range of options will be only slightly wider than Ron's, if at all. The locus of power to control Bob's sense of what he can and cannot do has shifted. It is not the hereditary storyteller, but rather the majority. Bob can participate in deciding which stories can be told. He can offer himself as a storyteller every night. He cannot, however, decide to become a storyteller independently of the choices of a majority of Blues, nor can he decide for himself what stories he will hear. He is significantly constrained by the preferences of a simple majority. Gertrude is in a very different position. First, she can decide to tell a story whenever she wants to, subject only to whether there is any other Green who wants to listen. She is free to become an active producer except as constrained by the autonomy of other individual Greens. Second, she can select from the stories that any other Green wishes to tell, because she and all those surrounding her can sit in the shade and tell a story. No one person, and no majority, determines for her whether she can or cannot tell a story. No one can unilaterally control whose stories Gertrude can listen to. And no one can determine for her the range and diversity of stories that will be available to her from any other member of the Greens who wishes to tell a story.

The difference between the Reds, on the one hand, and the Blues or Greens, on the other hand, is formal. Among the Reds, only the storyteller !hay tell the story as a matter of formal right, and listeners only have a choice of whether to listen to this story or to no story at all. Among the Blues and the Greens anyone may tell a story as a matter of formal right, and listeners, as a matter of formal right, may choose from whom they will hear. The difference between the Reds and the Blues, on the one hand, and the Greens, on the other hand, is economic. In the former, opportunities for storytelling are scarce. The social cost is higher, in terms of stories unavailable for hearing, or of choosing one storyteller over another. The difference between the Blues and the Greens, then, is not formal, but practical. The high cost of communication created by the Blues' custom of listening to stories only in the evening, in a big tent, together with everyone else, makes it practically necessary to select "a storyteller" who occupies an evening. Since the stories play a substantive role in individuals' perceptions of how they might live their lives, that practical difference alters the capacity of individual Blues and Greens to perceive a wide and diverse set of options, as well as to exercise control over their perceptions and evaluations of options open for living their lives and to exercise the freedom themselves to be storytellers. The range of stories Bob is likely to listen to, and the degree to which he can choose unilaterally whether he will tell or listen, and to which story, are closer, as a practical matter, to those of Ron than to those of Gertrude. Gertrude has many more stories and storytelling settings to choose from, and many more instances where she can offer her own stories to others in her society. She, and everyone else in her society, can be exposed to a wider variety of conceptions of how life can and ought to be lived. This wider diversity of perceptions gives her greater choice and increases her ability to compose her own life story out of the more varied materials at her disposal. She can be more self-authored than either Ron or Bob. This diversity replicates, in large measure, the range of perceptions of how one might live a life that can be found among all Greens, precisely because the storytelling customs make every Green a potential storyteller, a potential source of information and inspiration about how one might live one's life.

All this could sound like a morality tale about how wonderfully the market maximizes autonomy. The Greens easily could sound like Greenbacks, rather than like environmentalists staking out public parks as information commons. However, this is not the case in the industrial information economy, where media markets have high entry barriers and large economies of scale. It is costly to start up a television station, not to speak of a network, a newspaper, a cable company, or a movie distribution system. It is costly to produce the kind of content delivered over these systems. Once production costs or the costs of laying a network are incurred, the additional marginal cost of making information available to many users, or of adding users to the network, is much smaller than the initial cost. This is what gives information and cultural products and communications facilities supply-side economies of scale and underlies the industrial model of producing them. The result is that the industrial information economy is better stylized by the Reds and Blues rather than by the Greens. While there is no formal limitation on anyone producing and disseminating information products, the economic realities limit the opportunities for storytelling in the mass mediated environment and make storytelling opportunities a scarce good. It is very costly to tell stories in the mass-mediated environment. Therefore, most storytellers are commercial entities that seek to sell their stories to the audience. Given the discussion earlier in this chapter, it is fairly straightforward to see how the Greens represent greater freedom to choose to become an active producer of one's own information environment. It is similarly dear that they make it exceedingly difficult for any single actor to control the information flow to any other actor. We can now focus on how the story provides a way of understanding the justification and contours of the third focus of autonomy-respecting policy: the requirement that government not limit the quantity and diversity of information available.

The fact that our mass-mediated environment is mostly commercial makes it more like the Blues than the Reds. These outlets serve the tastes of the majority-expressed in some combination of cash payment and attention to advertising. I do not offer here a full analysis-covered so well by Baker in Media, Markets, and Democracy-as to why mass-media markets do not reflect the preferences of their audiences very well. Presented here is a tweak of an older set of analyses of whether monopoly or competition is better in mass-media markets to illustrate the relationship between markets, channels, and diversity of Content. In chapter 6, I describe in greater detail the Steiner¬Beebe model of diversity and number of channels. For our purposes here, it is enough to note that this model shows how advertiser-supported media tend to program lowest-common-denominator programs, intended to "capture the eyeballs" of the largest possible number of viewers. These media do not seek to identify what viewers intensely want to watch, but tend to clear programs that are tolerable enough to viewers so that they do not switch off their television. The presence or absence of smaller-segment oriented television depends on the shape of demand in an audience, the number of channels available to serve that audience, and the ownership structure. The relationship between diversity of content and diversity of structure or ownership is not smooth. It occurs in leaps. Small increases in the number of outlets continue to serve large clusters of low-intensity preferences-that is, what people find acceptable. A new channel that is added will more often try to take a bite out of a large pie represented by some lowest-common denominator audience segment than to try to serve a new niche market. Only after a relatively high threshold number of outlets are reached do advertiser-supported media have sufficient reason to try to capture much smaller and higher-intensity preference clusters-what people are really interested in. The upshot is that if all storytellers in society are profit maximizing and operate in a market, the number of storytellers and venues matters tremendously for the diversity of stories told in a society. It is quite possible to have very active market competition in how well the same narrow set of stories are told, as opposed to what stories are told, even though there are many people who would rather hear different stories altogether, but who are in clusters too small, too poor, or too uncoordinated to persuade the storytellers to change their stories rather than their props.

The networked information economy is departing from the industrial information economy along two dimensions that suggest a radical increase in the number of storytellers and the qualitative diversity of stories told. At the simplest level, the cost of a channel is so low that some publication capacity is becoming available to practically every person in society. Ranging from an e-mail account, to a few megabytes of hosting capacity to host a subscriber's Web site, to space on a peer-to-peer distribution network available for any kind of file (like FreeNet or eDonkey), individuals are now increasingly in possession of the basic means necessary to have an outlet for their stories. The number of channels is therefore in the process of jumping from some infinitesimally small fraction of the population-whether this fraction is three networks or five hundred channels almost does not matter by comparison-to a number of channels roughly equal to the number of users. This dramatic increase in the number of channels is matched by the fact that the low costs of communications and production enable anyone who wishes to tell a story to do so, whether or not the story they tell will predictably capture enough of a paying (or advertising-susceptible) audience to recoup production costs. Self-expression, religious fervor, hobby, community seeking, political mobilization, anyone of the many and diverse reasons that might drive us to want to speak to others is now a sufficient reason to enable us to do so in mediated form to people both distant and close. The basic filter of marketability has been removed, allowing anything that emerges out of the great diversity of human experience, interest, taste, and expressive motivation to flow to and from everyone connected to everyone else. Given that all diversity within the industrial information economy needed to flow through the marketability filter, the removal of that filter marks a qualitative increase in the range and diversity of life options, opinions, tastes, and possible life plans available to users of the networked information economy.”

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler, Yale University Press, 2006

An Interview with Cheryl Honey

Community Weaving is a grassroots community mobilization strategy that weaves the social fabric of community. This social change methodology incorporates the use of web-based technology to weave the human and tangible resources of the grassroots with the knowledge and skills of formal systems to create new ways of being in community. The approach raises social consciousness and awakens the human spirit to its purpose by engaging people to take responsibility for what they care about to create a more caring, just and civil society. In this networking session, Cheryl will reveal the techniques she used to grow a Family Support Network across the U.S. This transformative community building approach weaves a multi-cultural community tapestry of connections within communities, across organizations and around the world. Community Weaving is a cutting-edge methodology featured in the new Change Handbook, 2nd Edition. You don't want to miss this incredible opportunity to learn simple tips on how to grow your networking potential exponentially.

Cheryl Honey, C.P.P., of Bothell, WA, is president of Excel Strategies, Inc. and pioneer of Community Weaving, a social change methodology. She founded Family Support Network, Int'l and developed web-based technology to weave fabric of community within community systems around the world. Cheryl spearheaded a national movement by engaging citizens to take responsibility to creating a more caring, just and civil society. She is an advisor to the Alliance for Human Empowerment and member of the American Creativity Association. She received a B.A. in Liberal Arts & Transformative Community Building from Antioch University, Seattle. She authored Community Weaving in The Change Handbook 2nd Edition, and published numerous articles on community organizing and volunteerism. Communities tap her expertise to develop innovative approaches to build and bridge social capital. She's an Ambassador for Peace, and recipient of the Excellence in Leadership Award and the Giraffe Award, for sticking her neck out.

The Hidden Influence of Social Networks

We're all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits -- from happiness to obesity -- can spread from person to person,showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don't even know.

People aren't merely social animals in the usual sense, for we don't just live in groups. We live in networks -- and we have done so ever since we emerged from the African savannah. Via intricately branching paths tracing out cascading family connections, friendship ties, and work relationships, we are interconnected to hundreds or thousands of specific people, most of whom we do not know. We affect them and they affect us.

Nicholas Christakis' work examines the biological, psychological, sociological, and mathematical rules that govern how we form these social networks, and the rules that govern how they shape our lives. His work shows how phenomena as diverse as obesity, smoking, emotions, ideas, germs, and altruism can spread through our social ties, and how genes can partially underlie our creation of social ties to begin with. His work also sheds light on how we might take advantage of an understanding of social networks to make the world a better place.



At Harvard, Christakis is a Professor of Medicine, Health Care Policy, and Sociology, and he directs a diverse research group investigating social networks. His popular undergraduate course (Life and Death in the US) is podcast [available on itunes]. His book, Connected, co-authored with James H. Fowler, appeared in 2009, and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. In 2009, he was named by Time magazine to its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and also by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of 100 top global thinkers.

Social Media and Marketing: Evolution or Revolution?

Alex Wong

Social Media

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All request please fwd to Alex Wong.My LinkedIn is wah17@yahoo.com.A copy of the full research is here:

Social Business

Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of The Grameen Bank, explains his "social business" model, a plan for addressing social issues through entrepreneurship. This program was recorded in joint collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California and Link TV.

Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of The Grameen Bank, speaks about his new book Creating a World Without Poverty.

Complete video

Social Forms

Quote to think about:

"The first of all moral obligations is to think clearly. Societies are not like the weather, merely given, since human beings are responsible for their form. Social forms are constructs of the human spirit."

Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

Think Social Media (Web 2.0) Is a Fad?

From Socialnomics09: Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? Welcome to the World of Socialnomics

The Social Technographics Of Business Buyers

How Technology Buyers Engage With Social Media
This is the first document in the “B2B Social Media Strategy” series.
by Laura Ramos and G. Oliver Young
with Peter Burris, Josh Bernoff, Bradford J. Holmes, and Zachary Reiss-Davis
Forrester

Social media give a voice to buyers who can now describe their experience and disappointment to a global audience. And, wow, are they saying a lot. Forrester surveyed more than 1,200 business technology buyers and found that they exceed all previous benchmarks for social participation. B2B marketers, eager to know how social media fits into the marketing mix, can use the Social Technographics® Profiles of business decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers.

According to Forrester's research initial B2B social marketing efforts have failed to attract buyers because:

• Marketers don't know how business buyers use social technologies
• Successful track records are rare and copying others doesn't work
• Rapid technological changes leave no time to master current approaches
• Executive and legal departments see social activity as a risk to business brands

They also found:

• .Business buyers participate socially more than adult US consumers
• Social activity carries over into the workplace
• Subtle differences separate technology category buyers

Creating a social technology marketing strategy is difficult because:

• Social participation does not yet translate into purchase influence today
• But social media importance will increase during the next 12 months

I have one criticism of their research. In asking the question, "Which of the following sources of information impact your decision making process?". 84% of the buyers responded "Peers and colleagues (word of mouth". Yet, for example "Forums, online communities, social networks" which are word of mouth only garnered 45%. Arn't all of the social media word of mouth. That's what makes it so powerful. I think it would be better if they gathered the data in a matrix with media on one axis and ,method along the other axis. I did this on market research technologies in order to more clearly see the substitutions that are are ongoing. A substitution analysis would also help.

I think it's understandable that B2B is lagging consumer adoption of social technology for marketing. The key obstacles to overcome in B2B social media marketing are competitive advantage, intellectual property and control.

The customers in a B2B market are all competitors. As a result they are still reluctant to collaborate with each other and sometimes even the supplier. They fear that in collaborating with their competitors that someone else will gain the competitive advantage they hold. They are even sometimes reluctant to collaborate with the supplier because of fear that what they teach the supplier will be passed on to their competitors. I used the word "still" because this situation exists in most B2B markets in spite of the success of many open source types of collaborations and consortia.

Suppliers have a similar fear that what is learned in the collaboration could be passed on by the buyers to other suppliers, or even that the buyers will start to make the product themselves.

Suppliers have a fear of loss of control of intellectual property and the brand message.

Until these concerns are alleviated, outgrown or boxed in legal agreements, adoption social media marketing in B2B will be slow.

I, like the authors, believe that this is tide will not be overcome in consumers, and that I think will eventually sweep through B2B. However, I wish the authors would treat these adoption issues more thoroughly. Furthermore, I would feel more comfortable with a rigorous substitution analysis.

See Groundswell for more information on Forresters approach.

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The Social Technographics® Of Business Buyers

View more presentations from Oliver Young.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

This is a very good book. It provides structure, process, anecdotes and histories for the rapidly changing practice of using social technologies for marketing. It’s primarily written for consumer marketing, but some of the ideas can be used for B2B.

The authors use the term “groundswell” to mean a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies. The technologies they refer to are the social technologies that I like to put into the category of web 2.0. Web 2.0 technologies enable many to many communication and conversation.

The authors believe as I do that this groundswell effect, or by any other name, is real, here to stay for awhile and transformative or disruptive; that all attempts to thwart its spread will likely fail; and while all attempts to foster a groundswell will not succeed, not using the web 2.0 technologies for consumer marketing is a failing strategy.

There are a lot of barriers to the diffusion of this type of marketing, not the least of which is letting go of the illusion of message control. The marketing arms of companies passionately attempt to control the brand message. These techniques turn that concept over and returns the “control” of the message over to customers.

Why should you have to relearn all you know about marketing? The authors’ research clearly supports the trend. My research on the social impact of the web 2.0 technologies is inline with the conclusions of this book. Furthermore they assert, as examples, that:

“If you work for a media company, look out. Advertisers are shifting more and more of their money online. The groundswell is creating its own news sites (like Google News or Digg). The very idea of news is changing, as bloggers jostle with journalists for scoops. People take entertainment properties like TV shows and movies, rip them off the airwaves and DVDs, hack them, and repost new versions on YouTube or Dailymotion.

If you have a brand, you're under threat. Your customers have always had an idea about what your brand signifies, an idea that may vary from the image you are projecting. Now they're talking to each other about that idea. They are redefining for themselves the brand you spent millions of dollars, or hundreds of millions of dollars, creating.

If you are a retailer, your lock on distribution is over. People are not just buying online; they are buying from each other. They are comparing your prices with prices all over the Internet and telling each other where to get the best deal on sites like redflagdeals.com. As Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail has pointed out, shelf space creates far less power when there's nearly infinite selection online.

If you are a financial services company, you no longer dominate flows of capital. Trading happens online, and consumers get financial advice from message boards on Yahoo! Finance and the Motley Fool. Companies like Prosper allow consumers to get loans from each other, instead of from banks. PayPal makes credit cards unnecessary for many transactions.

Business-to-business companies are, if anything, more vulnerable to these trends. Their customers have every reason to band together and rate the companies' services, to join groups like ITtoolbox to share insights with each other, or to help each other out on LinkedIn Answers.

Even inside companies, your employees are connecting on social networks, building ideas with online collaboration tools, and discussing the pros and cons of your policies and priorities.

The groundswell has changed the balance of power. Anybody can put up a site that connects people with people. If it's designed well, people will use it. They'll tell their friends to use it. They'll conduct commerce, or read the news, or start a popular movement, or make loans to each other, or whatever the site is designed to facilitate. And the store, or media outlet, or government, or bank that used to fill that role will find itself far less relevant. If you own that institution, the groundswell will eat up your profit margins, cut down your market share, and marginalize your sources of strength.”

Web 2.0 technologies are being created at an incredible pace. What technologies will be part of a groundswell effect. As the authors point out, it’s not the technology but the relationships. The authors suggest the following questions when evaluating a new technology:

• Does it enable people to connect with each other in a new way?
• Is it effortless to sign up for?
• Does it shift power from institutions to people?
• Does the community generate enough content to sustain itself?
• Is it an open platform that invites partnerships?

The groundswell has two ingredients – technology and people. To understand what types of people would play what roles in the groundswell, the authors introduce the social technographics profile. It characterizes people by creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives. Once you know what the profile is for your customers, you can plan the appropriate social media approach.

If you’re not involved in any groundswell activities, you may wonder, “Why do people participate/” The authors give several reasons why:

• Keeping up friendships
• Making new friends
• Paying it forward
• The altruistic impulse
• The prurient impulse
• The creative impulse
• The validation impulse
• The affinity impulse

Not only is it important that you know your customers’ technographic profile, you have to have clear objectives before you start a program. The authors list five basic objectives for any groundswell program:

1. Listening
2. Talking
3. Energizing
4. Supporting
5. Embracing

The authors provide ample evidence and examples of how to employ web 2.0 marketing. And, as a result, I highly recommend this book.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Harvard Business Press, 2008, 269p

Groundswell

Social Technographics Explained

View more presentations from jbernoff.

The Social Technographics® Of Business Buyers

View more presentations from Oliver Young.

When Sensors and Social Networks Mix

Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb

The integration of sensors with social networks will lead to real-time data and more useful web apps.

In recent posts we reviewed an MIT experiment called WikiCity, that gathered real-time location data from mobile phones in Rome and graphically mapped trends from it. We then looked at a more commercial product doing similar real-time location data analysis, called Citysense. That product aims to let users find the most popular night spots in San Francisco and the most efficient ways to get to them. The next stage of projects/products such as Wikicity and Citysense will be to enable users to social network, using data from sensors as one input.

Citysense is already heading in that direction, with the next release of its product aiming to guide 'tribes' of people together using location data. It will soon be able to show not only where anonymous groups of people are in real time, but where people with similar behavioral patterns to you are. To do this Citysense will categorize people into "tribes" - so far 20 tribes have been identified, including "young and edgy," "business traveler," "weekend mole," and "homebody." It will use not just GPS (location) data from mobile phones and taxis, but also publicly available company address data and demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

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See also Smart Mobs

Patrick Duffy and the Crab Discuss Social Media

Web 2.0 and Social Media

This an excellent overview of the differences between web 1.0 and web 2.0.

Web 2.0 and Social Media

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: shantanu media)

Social Media

All request please fwd to wah17@yahoo.com.My linkedin is wah17@yahoo.com. A copy of the full research is here:
http://www.scribd.com/share/upload/4814477/2dx6gqho7w9gwvvrwbhq

Social Media

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: evolution networking)

Disruptive Social Innovation

Powerpoint presentation by the Disruptor's for the session 'Disruptive Social Innovation' - Chain Reaction 2008

The Disruptors

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: chainreaction08 disruptive)

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Can Social Media Produce World Changing Creativity?

Creativity with a Capital C Every two or three years, I return to the book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Creativity is based on a rigorous study of 91 internationally recognized creative people as part of his “effort to make more understandable the mysterious process by which men and women come up with new ideas and new things.” He called it Creativity with a capital C, because their contributions had world changing impact.

http://www.successful-blog.com/ 1/ can-the-social-media-produce-wor...