see post note added at end as well as link previously added 1 10 12
Large scale social change is a remarkable thing.
This blog is about a model for seeing change. It is about a tool that offers trending insight to large groups of people. Social mood, the primary social trend, operates at this level and it is here that it can be used to orient us to seeing why groups and our tools experience incremental changes at varying rates.
The socionomic model is a way to organize distinct trends in social change. It allows us to sort seemingly disparate changes based on subtle, shared beliefs that impact behavior. I often refer to these, here, as shared values.
The mass adoption of social media tools like Facebook and Twitter in the US has had an underlying set of assumptions (shared values) attached, very generally, to these endeavors. It is important to recognize them in case any of them begin changing: everyone is a potential friend, sharing is good, and more is better have been widely reflected in our US culture for many, many decades. So it's not surprising that when the initial open invite of social platforms turned to active marketing to sustain the impressive growth, we saw these shared values reflected to us in varied messages.
The wonder of our new connectedness using social media is unprecedented but even that becomes boring after hearing it many times. What is important now is how we might use this perspective to witness real granular change in the robust trend called social media.
Socionomics gives us the idea of social mood. Socionomics is a derivative of an earlier tool called wave principle (around for many decades) which is data driven method for visualizing trends in markets of people. Social mood and socionomics offers a better way to contextualize social trending in any society (or large market) of people and can be invaluable during those times when the velocity of change is speeding up.
Social mood offers us a basic array of emotive patterning that can be seen to manifest in large markets of people. Positive social mood and negative social mood each have unique generalized patterns. Each period expresses these patterns and they in turn affect how we create while gathered into groups. These changes are seen to manifest based on our (background) interpretation of future uncertainty. The future is always uncertain but how we think, feel and act toward that fact changes with social mood and that affects how we build and create and what we tear down and eliminate.
Headlines in recent weeks have been about social unrest in many foreign countries that are somehow less than free and open than the US. We also see increasing division and polarization in our domestic states with regard to capital allocation issues. The pace of social change seems to be increasing and it is too often celebrated how our new social media tools are enabling everyone to seek these changes as if it is the only thing that matters. It's not. Texting and emailing on smart phones alone might well enable much of what we have seen in recent weeks but rather than argue over a small point, let's look briefly at how these important social media tools may change and why.
The main point of this post is how social mood will generate pressure for these tools to change with us so that their utility will be be maximized as our shared values about how to collaborate change. Seeing this is all within the range of probability offered by socionomics as it lends an understanding of the polarity of social trends.
In time, social media tools will change precisely because the developing social mood will naturally correct further (move to the negative) as a society (in the US). As this happens our shared values will begin to shift reflecting the negative mood, and the companies running social platforms will eventually see the need to change.
What kind of changes in our shared outlooks will affect social media tools in time?
fewer, smaller, more qualified groups: The price of admission is going up. Admission to active networks will increasingly require something on the part of members of various active groups. Parallel with this tendency for more structured admission policies will be a greater tendency to for individuals to evaluate the long lists of groups they themselves belong to and access whether or not participation is beneficial in light of the other groups they belong. This dynamic should not be underestimated as we all belong to groups with diverging interests (values) that conflict. The very nature of a social correction is to identify what really matters most in the spirit of keeping the society strong overall. This subtle thinking process impacts areas of significance and also smallness too. The details of a social correction (extended periods of negative social mood) often seem chaotic but the process is rich with purpose.
discord and opposition expressed increasingly to ideas within and between groups that are more active and therefore make it more challenging to advance new ideas and endeavors requiring consensus...expect to re-evaluate existing commitments and expenditures of resources based on our changing outlook to uncertainty.
Many groups will wrestle with various measures of control....for instance: information; especially privacy issues because social mood revolves around our perception of future uncertainty and Facebook's paternalistic ownership of personal data may be increasingly viewed as a potential threat by a profit making enterprise struggling to maintain balance with its customers even though underlying assumptions that brought many people to them initially could shift substantially. Herein, also, is the much broader area of social contracts that will be brought up for review selectively.
Periods of deeper negative social mood produce polarity which leads to skepticism that in many cases will move people toward outrage and the sense something needs to be done! We see this today but intensity, overall, will increase with a deep correction.
You also know negative social mood is manifesting more deeply in a society when the sense that violence is increasingly justified is put forth and is disagreed with less strenuously than in the recent past. Based on this week's events I offer how it is essential to balance many events and not only use isolated examples. There is a reason why social mood is made visible inside of large moving averages of social endeavor. It is about how markets and societies rotate through stages of growth as part of their evolution. The freer the expression, the more fluid the changes that will be witnessed.
There are and will be exceptions to all these generalities but again, the key is to grab a sense of an overall moving average of events.
Maybe the most obvious to the point of this post...
the nature of disagreement. The polarization of ideas is common now but it will grow increasingly vociferous as mood declines. In fact, the sharp nature of criticism is colored by social mood and this dynamic will increasingly beg the question: Is what we say digitally something that we should be held accountable for? How about the groups we belong to? Are we accountable simply because we are a member? Increasingly, this answer will move toward "yes" as social mood declines. This single dynamic may add layers of legal agreements to our lives as social media providers will look to indemnify themselves against perceived losses from negative chatter in the same way that internet providers (ISP's) are now fighting liability over their pirating customers. Does a Tweet or RT involve a legal commitment of some kind? Facebook's fine print says they own our info so that must mean they own our mistakes too right? ( I am not trying to pick a fight, this is just the way perceptions might get turned around by the polarity of social mood.) These social developments over time will see many active groups tighten up membership and policy as a result. Members will share differently, and when that time comes, the perceived benefit of ever expansive networks will have already peaked.
Is it any wonder that the origins of etiquette and formality came about during a social correction? The decline of decorum, and negative reactions to it, will lead directly to many new rules. This should be viewed (broadly) as the social polarity of what was socially accepted during peak free wheeling periods of social expansion, when independent expression was encouraged and admired more. These kinds of extremes represent peak polarity and eventually, based on our own reactions to ourselves, groups head all the way back to socially orchestrated movements (of all kinds) and rules of all kinds as the social correction peaks.
These events can be seen unfolding in multiple time frames and this is important to conceptualize.
Social media tools are powerful additions to how we create when gathered in groups. Social mood will have a clear and regulating effect on how we use these tools in the years ahead. Social media tools will need to change for us as the overall pace of social change increases.
Background Reading: Socionomics, R. Prechter
3 03 11 A friend pointed out two links yesterday, one in the Wash Po (late Feb.) and one in Information Week Magazine about how government interests and political organizations are both known to be using people and bots to create false social media entities to seek and diseminate information inside of social netwokrs. This kind of follow-up reading links are almost too convenient in making the story I suggest above, seem to develop now. I will wait to post them waiting to see more information but they are already credible sources. My point is that I am not personally attached to the outcome I describe above as likely. The socionomic model points in a direction and we can use it along with other insight to see important directionality. Dave
3 17 11 The Need To Protect The Internet from Astroturfing Grows More Urgent The Guardian
The social perception that "we" must be protected is a very typical result of a period of social correction. Previously, during the social expansion, it was all upon us to adapt to these kinds of changes. Now they have become nefarious and in need of structures and systems to save the innocent. the time to build partitions is upon us and as we do that, "what really matters" must be decided first.....and later over and over. Fake people that sound convincing and invade discussion to sway opinion is now dangerous. Who is it good for? The people who build fences.
1 10 12 post note: G+ just launched its content added to Google search results this week and the white noise from the industry is remarkable. Lot's of intersting pro & con arguments but what goes unaddressed is the nature of how it is about profitability matters more than how these tools are deployed. Look for blowback later in the year. Last year, social adoption surged with the add of the mobile connected devices. That incremental surge was remarkable too. This can probably be viewed as a late growth spurt to the trend. The question left hanging in the air right now is this: Does digital data privacy really matter? or is it just a passing issue (skepticism) not to be taken seriously? If you are not completely on-board with this trend right now you are fighting the crowd. I suspect that 2012 will reveal a lot that is just not known right now that will seem very important later. What is that? It is one of the main lesson that social mood teaches us after observing it for a while. How we value things and ideas of all kinds changes as social mood changes and what we pay attention to changes with social mood. This sounds general (or even vague) but I suspect it be applied specifically in this area of enterprises.
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