The Analysis of Social Networks ... Caution Advised
Monday 27 July 2009 at 12:05 Kovas Boguta has written a posting on work in progress in trying to evaluate the masses of data emerging from social networks like Twitter. It is not a clear read for non-specialists but it gives some sense of what is currently going on to manage flows of information arising out of social networks.
This is evidently going to be a central area for future governmental soft power and security investment. A new industry is already tentatively emerging that hopes to creates the mathematical and analytical tools needed to draw useful conclusions from raw data.
We are both impressed and sceptical. Impressed because the sheer intellectual force being applied to problems of assessing how populations and political movements react to events (and consumers to new products and services or crises) will certainly increase the bounds of knowledge.
As with all other major technological innovations, these analyses are going to change how we think of ourselves. They will rewrite our past histories and place new pressures on our governments and administrators. They may undercut a generation of 'experts' and create new business opportunities.
But we are sceptical because there is a real danger that a mathematical or computational approach to politics and society will result in an over-enthusiasm amongst amateurs and promoters that contains the same potential for disaster as mathematical model-making has done within our economic system.
The same major errors are likely - a failure to understand that no system can contain all necessary information for all moments of time to make it reliable and the same delegation of judgement and decision-making to experts whose understanding is more limited than anyone will dare admit.
If you add the propensity of the 'few' (those in the know on the technicals) to bamboozle without intending harm those who do not even know how to ask the right questions but who have responsibility for making decisions affecting all our lives, then we should be a little worried about where this may go.
An extension of 'science', mathematics and quantification into politics and social management looks as if it could be the intellectual fashion for the next decade or so. Politicians are already under intellectual siege. There are no easy solutions and there may be a tendency to grasp at straws.
There is also a very thin line between scientific analysis and technological innovation. The leap from the theory of physics to the nuclear bomb happened very quickly. Many of the more intellectually-driven scientists soon became horrified at what had grown out of their blue skies thinking.
Something similar is threatened us by the massive re-direction of government security investment from hardware designed to exercise physical force to software designed to analyse insurgency. It is a small step from this to actively creating social and political change through intervention.
This could be as scary as Robert McNamara's 'brilliant' attempts to use intellectual analysis to win an unwinnable war in Vietnam or Herman Kahn's cold analyses of survivability in a nuclear holocaust. Only this time, we are talking about the potential social or economic meltdown of whole societies.
The urge to intervene on the basis of 'insights' developed from a new scientific engagement with political and consumer decision-making could result in successes but also hubris. Stored up resentments at manipulation may explode in a political crisis analogous to the recent collapse in credit.
As one anarchist friend told me with glee, every move made by the system can be countered by the people at large in what might amount to a socio-political arms race in which Baudrillard's apparently daft claim, that the Gulf did not actually take place but was a simulacrum on our TV screens, becomes true.
Each attempt at manipulation by social scientists, who must themselves be manipulated into believing that their actions are 'progressive' or 'patriotic', depending on the culture, can be countered by a public determination to react with a possibly justifiable paranoia, a conscious irrationality or just plain defiance.
Like the bureaucrat who thinks that writing something is doing something, the progressive or security activist might mistake 100% support by all persons engaged within his system as 100% of all minds with a stake in a situation. We think the Western media certainly made this error in assessing events in Iran.
The interplay between authority and its subjects is never simple. Not only can the subjects of authority hide information and even themselves (in effect becoming a 'black society' with a 'black economy') but they can supply their own false information - such as lying on censuses and tax forms.
The State, of course, is constantly engaged, on its side of the arms race in gathering information - this is one of the primary drivers for the introduction of identity cards in the UK - but few really believe that its knowledge covers everyone or is timely.
Eventually people will smell a rat - is all this data gathering designed to protect or control them? It comes down to trust and trust in authority is in increasingly short supply. Ideologies of resistance may thus wax and wane to the degree that manipulation is perceived and resented.
Indeed, Boguta's own posting exposes this very air of public distrust. The first comment from dallasm12 asks: "Hmm ... could twitter be abused in the future to falsely imply a social uprising that isn't really there?" Very good question!
The conspiracy theory is a tool of resistance that irritates authority intensely. More dangerous still is the ideology of 'leaderless resistance'. An attack either never comes in a decisive way (the attacker is a lone nutter) or it comes everywhere at once because widespread anger reaches a tipping point.
This is definitely not an argument against research but it is an argument for an early political scepticism of any analyses that are delivered as 'expert' and a strategy of engaging decision-makers directly with their populations rather than using such tools to extend the compass of more manipulative strategies.
If new analytical tools are to be used as substitutes for direct commitment to community democracy, the result must be expensive failure, A major crisis for the existing political system will then come out of the blue much as the credit crisis has done. You read it here first.
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