The Math of Society

[Sentinel owl]

So here's a nice break from "how do I integrate this" threads. I'm interested on your thoughts on the mathematics of social interactions; that is, to what extent can we accurately model social dynamics? What brought me to ponder this was actually seeing the google trends graph for "michael jackson"

http://media.bestofmicro.com/google-michael-jackson-graph,B-F-215547-13.png

it's a PNG, so not sure if it will show up. Here's the link just in case.
http://media.bestofmicro.com/google-michael-jackson-graph,B-F-215547-13.png

As you can clearly see, the number of queries for MJ follows an almost perfect exponential decay line after its peak. If you took away the axes labels and title, a chemist might think this is a flow-injection graph--it's that precise. So this leads me to ask, "can we predict how society will react and behave in a given situation"? So, if we knew that 20 million people would see ten hours of TV coverage on a certain subject over the next month, could we predict how popular it would be? I bet we can. And in fact, I bet there are people who already do. People who work for large media corporations, record companies, or governments. Imagine this: country X wants to invade country Y, so they calculate how much TV exposure they need of allegations against country Y until a majority of the population would support a war. This isn't totally new, of course; epidemiologists have been successful modeling the spread of disease for a long time now. But the idea that we can model the thought process of millions of people is intriguing.

It's a dangerous path to tread, but it's frightening how predictable humanity can be at times. "Sheeple" is being generous. Thoughts?

[electric wizard]

Why were you googling Michael Jackson?

[Bilbo]

Pretty interesting stuff... AFAIK statistical and mathematical patterns definitely arise in all of existence, and there can certainly be somewhat predictive macroscopic (many people) models constructed from previous data sets on social "flow." However, the usefulness of these mathematical models for advertising and media seems limited, as a lot of what appeals to the general human psyche and what will generate a large spike in social awareness is already public knowledge. Though I am no expert, I feel like mathematical models would serve as a more diagnostic tool rather than a tool to "control" people.

It is interesting that you refer to the spread of diseases; information flow can be similar to the spread of viruses with certain restrictions, of course. This paper might be interesting to you (www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/flow/flow.pdf). From the abstract (and skimming) I take it that there is a damping factor and decay related to the flow that is heavier than viral spread. It is also worth noting that the advent of quick global communication via television, radio, and internet allows a mathematical study of information flow to be semi-rigorous. I would raise the problem of applying the same findings to information flow without the rapid information transmission, such as information flow due to hearsay.

That many people all across the world share the same thought patterns is not surprising. Evidence for human brains working in similar fashions can be found throughout history in regards to religion, science, emotion. What is interesting to me is the degree of spontaneity or deviation from the norm that we would see upon attempting to approach attempting to model macroscopic movement - that is, could modeling macroscopic social flow be like modeling macroscopic or "classical" physics? Can universal laws be defined? Of course, that is where I believe the difficulty lies... the tangible definition of intangible societal movement...

Some more papers that may be interesting (there is an entire field dedicated to this subject!):

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=16862693839290983353&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=EDWbSsWIGciTlAeB9aChBQ&sa=X&oi=science_links&resnum=2&ct=sl-citedby