Social Graphs v. Marx

In my last post, I mentioned Robert Sapolsky’s response to The Edge Annual Question – 2008.  As I continued to read the other responses to the question, I came across Tim O’Reilly’s response, which is about the importance of social graphs.  While having heard about MySpace and Facebook, I had never given much thought to social graphs.  So I googled “social graphs” and found Brad Fitzpatrick’s comments at the top of the search results.  Fascinating stuff.

The day after I read those web pages, I was reading Schumpeter’s 1942 essay about Marx called “The Marxian Doctrine.”  Schumpeter boils down Marx’s Economic Interpretation of History to only two points, the first of which is: “The forms or conditions of production are the fundamental determinant of social structures.”  So if MySpace, Facebook, or even the SixApart effort starts providing a much more useful fundamental determinant of social structures (shared interest rather than shared occupation), then Marx has another thought coming.  Especially as on-line social communities continue to blur the “line” between bourgeoisie and proletariat  The social graph has a much different (and much more subtle) topology than Marx’s bright line.  And without Marx’s line, there goes the class struggle as well.

The social graph idea raises a thousand questions: How does social graph technology affect governments? economics? media? politics? political campaigns?  Does social graph technology reveal special interest groups?

When social graphs are applied to media, do the nodes become information filters and the edges information flows?  If so, how does one become a major, central node?  Trustworthiness?  Volume?  Filtering for what is “important” (to other nodes) out of the information deluge?  Graph nodes start to look like the birth, growth, and death of brain neurons.  Or websites like Google.

What happens when robots become functional nodes in the social graph?  Even central to it? 

And is it important to be a central node, instead of on the periphery?  Is the periphery where the frontier is, where “start-ups” get built?  Is it less risky to be a central node?

And so we come full circle to Sapolsky’s response – the more-connected primates are the healthier primates; so are the more central nodes the most fit?

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