May the Force Be With You has become part of popular culture since the words were first uttered in the 1977 Star Wars film. As we know, The Force is a source of power for those who, like the Jedi, feel its flow. “The network force is similar,” wrote Silicon Valley network expert and entrepreneur James Currier in Your Life is Driven by Network Effects. “You don’t always see it, but it is exerting itself on you. It wants something from you. Your network force proactively guides you down a path.”
“When you start to see that dialogue between you and your network, the push-pull, you see it everywhere. The chaos of the world diminishes a bit and becomes more understandable and predictable. And you understand more why things are the way they are and why they stay that way. Hopefully, it will also give you insights as to where you can push to change things that should be changed, not just about you, but about your company, your city, and your world.”
Over the past few decades, network forces have been influencing many aspects of business, the economy, and our social interactions. The Internet’s universal reach and connectivity have led to increasingly powerful network effects, such as, for example, platform economies.
Scale increases a platform’s value. The more products or services a platform offers, the more consumers it will attract, helping it then attract more offerings, which in turn brings in more consumers, making the platform even more valuable. Moreover, the larger the network, the more data is available to customize offerings and better match supply and demand, further increasing the platform’s value. The result is that a small number of companies have become category kings dominating the rest of their competitors in their particular markets.
Network effects have led to our rising inequality. For the past few decades, the demands for high-skill jobs have significantly expanded, with the earnings of the college educated workers needed to fill such jobs rising steadily. Talent has become the linchpin asset of the knowledge economy, making companies highly dependent on talented experts to navigate our increasingly global and highly complex business environment. This has been driving the high levels of executive compensation as well as the compensation of skilled professionals in industries like finance, entertainment, software and consulting. Lower- and mid-skill workers have been losing out in this increasingly talent-based economy.
Network dynamics also apply to cities and metropolitan areas. In the 1990s, the Internet was supposed to usher a more decentralized economy and society. Some management experts predicted that the rise of the Internet would lead to the decline of cities. People could now work, shop, be in touch with friends and colleagues, and get access to all kinds of information and entertainment online regardless of where they lived.
But, instead of declining, urban areas have boomed over the past three decades. “The most important and innovative industries and the most talented, most ambitious, and wealthiest people are converging as never before in a relative handful of leading superstar cities that are knowledge and tech hubs,” wrote urban studies professor and author Richard Florida in a 2017 article. “This small group of elite places forge ever forward, while most others struggle, stagnate, or fall behind… They are not just the places where the most ambitious and most talented people want to be - they are where such people feel they need to be.”
It’s hard to anticipate how the Covid crisis will transform urban life over time. “Predictions of the death of cities always follow shocks like this one,” said professor Florida in a recent article. “But urbanization has always been a greater force than infectious disease… Some aspects of our cities and metropolitan areas will be reshaped… But other forces will push people back toward the great urban centers… Great cities will survive the coronavirus.”
According to Currier, network dynamics also exert a powerful influence in the choices we make in our lives, - the cities we live in, who we date or marry, the jobs we choose, the clothes we wear. Our choices are more constrained that we think. “The unseen hand in them all is the networks that surround us and the powerful math they exert on us… the networks of human connections in your life create a force that guides you down a path not always fully of your intention, through the mechanism of 100s of small interactions.” Moreover, network forces compound over time. “The longer your relationships, cliques, and communities persist, the more they shape your destiny.”
As we navigate life, we all try to make the best possible decisions. We have agency and free will, but the decisions that feel most right, more natural and lower friction are those that closely align with our networks. “Network proximity makes some options more appealing than they would be in a vacuum, while network distance can impose a high friction on other options.
Currier reminds us that certain networks are particularly consequential: the families we’re born into, the friends we make in high school and college, our choice of life partners, our colleagues at work, the places where we live. But, is there a scientific way to determine which networks or social groups have the most impact on our beliefs and behaviors?
Yes, says MIT professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland in his 2014 book Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread - The Lessons from a New Science. “The engine that drives social physics is big data: the newly ubiquitous digital data now available about all aspects of human life. Social physics functions by analyzing patterns of human experience and idea exchange within the digital bread crumbs we all leave behind as we move through the world, - call records, credit card transactions, and GPS location fixes, among others. These data tell the story of everyday life by recording what each of us has chosen to do… Who we actually are is more accurately determined by where we spend our time and which things we buy, not just by what we say we do.”
Social Physics is the result of over a decade of research to quantify the nature of human social interactions. Professor Pentland, along with his students and research associates, analyzed real-world data, properly anonymized to protect the privacy of individuals and discovered that all event-data representing human activity contain a special set of social patterns regardless of what the data is about. These patterns are common across all human activities and demographics, and can be used to detect emerging behavioral trends before they can be observed by any other technique.
The patterns are the result of the network forces that influence our behavior within our respective social groups. They’ve have been tested across a variety of applications involving people, including strategy formulation in business, economic activity in cities, and cybercrime detection. As long as the data involves human activity, - regardless of the type of data, the demographic of the users or the size of the data sets, - similar behavioral dynamics apply.
What accounts for such universal social physics principles? The answer most likely lies in evolutionary biology and natural selection. Survival is a key evolutionary imperative. And surviving in a changing environment requires a combination of social learning and new ideas. Humans have thus evolved with the drive to learn from each other. But, at the same time, mutations and innovations will vary among different groups, with natural selection favoring those human groups better able to adapt to changing conditions.
Finally, as MIT professor Sinan Aral explains in his recently published book The Hype Machine, highly sophisticated, technology-based social media networks have been exerting a strong influence on our beliefs and behaviors.
“Human beings have always been a social species,” wrote Aral in the book’s opening paragraph. “We’ve been communicating, cooperating, and coordinating with one another since we were hunting and gathering… But today something is different. Over the last decade, we’ve doused our kindling fire of human interaction with high-octane gasoline. We’ve constructed an expansive, multifaceted machine that spans the globe and conducts the flow of information, opinions, and behaviors through society.” The Hype Machine, - what he calls this global social media ecosystem, - has been designed to stimulate and manipulate the human psyche, “to draw us in and persuade us to change how we shop, vote, and exercise, and even who we love.”
But, professor Aral reminds us that while technology and network forces are a major part of the story, so is human agency, - how we choose to respond to their nudges and recommendations. Social networks may exert a strong influence on our behavior, but in the end, we’re responsible for our actions.
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