The Power Law of Social Media: What CIOs Should Know

The Power Law of Social Media
What CIOs should know

Srinath Srinivasa
IIIT Bangalore
sri@iiitb.ac.in

DQLive 2013, Mumbai, India, Dec 11 2013

Recent new additions to our vocabulary
Telemedicine
SMS/MMS
Elearning / MOOC
Net Banking
Eticketing
Creative Commons
Tweeting
Social media

Phishing
Hacking
Cyberstalking
Virus / Spyware / Adware /
Malware
Cyber squatting
Identity theft
Piracy
Spam


The “Information Age”
The core driving force behind the new vocabulary
Comprehensive change brought by information and
communication technologies (ICT)

Qualitative changes affecting the underlying mental
model or the “paradigm”
Changes affecting the way we live (not just businesses)
Separation of information transactions from material
transactions

The “Information Age”

Information exchange network

e,
obil
m
net,
r
Inte

tc
s, e
se
aba
dat

Material exchange network

Material versus Information
Information Exchange

Material Exchange
Constrained by the laws of physics
Conserved transactions
High cost of replication and
transportation
Material affects what we have and how
we live

Intangible (little or no physical constraints)
Nonconserved transactions
Extremely low replication costs
transportation costs with today´s ICT, leading
do formation of frictionless systems
Hard to “snatch away” internalized
information
Information affects

who we are!


Is this separation natural?

Image source: Wikipedia,
HSTA

Note the separation between material and information logistics.
Nature is already in the information age since several millenia!

Networks compared..
Material networks
–
–

Exchange of resources (and
in turn, energy)
Waste disposal

Information networks
–
–

Control
Semantics


What “flows” in an information network?

Information?
Well yes..
But that is not the whole story..


Elements that “flow” on a social information
network include elements of human cognition,
like:
●

Attention

●

Emotional state

●

Trust

●

Novelty

●

Acquaintance

●

etc.

Memory Processes
Declarative memory

Procedural memory
Reflexes

Semantic

Motor control
Episodic

Working memory
Active mental model
Emotional state
(System 1)

Long-term
memory

Memory Processes
Skills, reflexes
from Procedural memory

Conscious thinking
Managed by
Working memory


Theoretical knowledge
from Semantic memory
Beliefs about intentions
and risktaking
Influenced by our active
Mental model
in turn influenced by our
emotional state

Skills, reflexes
from Procedural memory
Theoretical knowledge
from Semantic memory

Conscious thinking
Managed by
Working memory


Beliefs about intentions
and risktaking
Influenced by our active
Mental model
in turn influenced by our
emotional state

The Economics of “Attention”

[Goldhaber 1997]

The commodity of scarcity in an
informationrich world: Attention
Takes on different forms in media studies:
Eyeballs, Immersiveness, PageRank, etc.
Attention: The process of concentrating on
one piece of information from the
environment while ignoring all others

Why does attention matter?


Image Source: Wikipedia

Why does attention matter?
Did you ever imagine you'd be thinking about Himalayas /
Tibet / Buddhism when you decided to attend this talk?

Attention controls what gets loaded into conscious
(working) memory
Attention is a conserved entity unlike information,
and hence is scarce
Extended attention form associations, whether or not
they represent real associations found in nature


Attention
Properties of Attention (cf. [BH 04])
Exclusivity: increased attention on an input channel attenuates
attention on other channels
Autobiographical: Reference to the subject on an attenuated
channel, increases attention content onto that channel
Early selection versus late selection debates and the cocktail party problem

Transitivity: Attention by a subject to a speaker can result in the
speaker transferring subject's attention onto a third topic or
speaker


Modalities of Attention Transfer Online
Hyperlinks
User clicking on a hyperlink transfers attention from
host page to target page
PageRank of a page is a measure of overall attention
received by the page by random surfers on the net

Twitter followers / subscriptions
List of followers of a person indicates people who wish
to pay attention to a person's tweets

Acquaintance
Social association between people, acknowledging the existence
and attributes of the other
The first stage of several forms of social phenomena like
influence, trust, cooperation, etc.
Increasing levels of acquaintance imply increasing levels of
knowledge about the other party
Acquaintance directly affects the availability heuristic in
building mental models

Acquaintance networks form the basis for several social
phenomena like hiring, dating, doing business with, etc.


Acquaintance
Triadic closure
A characteristic feature of social acquaintance networks is the property of Triadic Closure

A

B

C
Informally: Two people who have a common friend are likely to become friends themselves. The
more closer they are to their common friend, the more likely is it that they become friends
themselves


Acquaintance and Entrenchment
Triadic closure property creates an effect of “entrenchment” in
acquaintance networks (Image Source: [EK 10])
Entrenched networks:

low in novelty, dissonance in beliefs
high in mutual familiarity, trust


The Strength of Weak Ties
Image Source: [EK 10]

Bridges are links connecting two entrenched components of a network.
In social networks, bridges are necessarily “weak links” as strong ties would
have resulted in triadic closure around the bridge. Bridges are the primary
source of novelty in an entrenched network.
A famous paper [Granovetter '73] shows the importance of weak ties in
social networks. People make major decisions of their lives (career,
marriage,...) based on connections obtained from weak ties, rather than
strong ties.

Mental Model
A collection of consistent, declarative representations that forms
the axiomatic basis of reasoning (the “box” in which we think)
Active mental model
Reasoning and deduction carried out within the framework of
the currently active mental model
Mental model used for reasoning, influenced by our emotional
state and the intuition subsystem (System 1)
Dissonance with active mental model usually elicits an
emotional reaction (laughter, terror, etc.)


Emotional State
A physiological configuration (joy, fear, panic, euphoria,...) based on
mental state
Affected by dissonance in mental models
Affects the choice of active mental model
Has the property of emotional contagion – strong emotional states
are mirrored by others in the vicinity
Emotional states can “flow” through an information network like
the Internet!


Conformance
Asch Conformance Experiments


Diffusion of Ideas

Image Source: [Sri 06]

Information diffusion is faster in sparsely connected parts of a network,
rather than densely connected (entrenched) parts due to conformance effects.
Node d in the above figure does not switch to the new idea because of
conformance pressures from nodes e, f and g


Mental Models, Weak Ties and the
Emotional Contagion


Spread of Ideas
and the
Emotional Contagion
Spread of ideas hampered by entrenchment effects and conformance
pressures
Spread of emotions facilitated in entrenched and tightlyknit
networks
Information age interactions typically span mental models
Interaction across mentalmodels increases dissonance and
emotionally charged conversations

Emotions spread faster on the Internet than ideas!


Crowds, Herds and Mobs
Crowds
●

A sharedattention group debating about a topic

●

Rich in diversity of viewpoints and argumentation

●

Wisdom of the Crowd

Herds
●

A shared mentalmodel group, all possessing the same or similar beliefs

●

Potent in strength of conviction of beliefs

●

Unwise as a collective and potentially manipulable

●

Herd Mentality

Mobs
●

A shared emotionalstate group, all possessing the same emotional state, but no
shared mental model or attention

●

Extremely unpredictable, unwise and potent as a collective

●

Mob fury

Takeaways for CIOs
Social Media a great tool for fighting entrenchment effects and infusing
novelty
Increase in novelty comes at a cost – dissonance in mental models
leading to turmoil, distrust and defensiveness
Creating awareness about critical thinking, dispassionate
argumentation and emotional contagions, very important to create wise
crowds, rather than herds or mobs
Wise crowds selfregulate and offer rich outcomes, while unwise herds
or mobs not only pose hurdles, but also resist being regulated
So.. get it right the first time..!


Takeaways for CIOs
Ingredients of a great online social experience:
●

Shared attention

●

Diversity in mental models

●

No dominant emotional state

●

Dispassionate and objective argumentation


Thank You!


References
[BH 04] Claus Bundesen, Thomas Habekost. Attention. In Lamberts, K.
Goldstone, R. (Eds.) Handbook of Cognition, SAGE Publications, 2004.
[GoldHaber 97] Michael H. Goldhaber. The Attention Economy and the Net. First
Monday, Volume 2, Number 4 7 April 1997.
[Granovetter 73] Mark S Granovetter. The strength of weak ties. American
journal of sociology (1973): 13601380.
[EK 10] David Easley, Jon Kleinberg. Networks, Crowds and Markets: Reasoning
about a Highly Connected World. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
[Sri 06] Srinath Srinivasa. The PowerLaw of Information: Life in a Connected
World. Response Books, Sage Publishers, 2006.

The Power Law of Social Media: What CIOs Should Know

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (11)

Similar to The Power Law of Social Media: What CIOs Should Know

Similar to The Power Law of Social Media: What CIOs Should Know (20)

More from Srinath Srinivasa

More from Srinath Srinivasa (15)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

The Power Law of Social Media: What CIOs Should Know