In social networks, group boundaries promote the spread of ideas (2015) | Hacker News Reader

In social networks, group boundaries promote the spread of ideas (2015)

phys.org

54 pointstriplesec6 comments

Modern discourse is clearly affected by the "leveling" of communication that a popular internet provides. People frequently interact with very large conglomerations of people, rather than primarily with their geographic neighbors. This analysis suggests to me an explanation for why massive internet inter-communication can be a bad thing for discourse.

And this matches intuition in the real world for different reasons - friend groups formed mostly by environmental and proximal circumstance result in more diverse yet still tightly-knitted communities than, say, a niche hobbyist subreddit might. So you have the opportunity to be exposed to new ideas by trusted members of your in-group.

Should mass communication be deliberately dampened?

Examples:

1. Ban on Televsion News during the weekend. 2. High taxes on mass produced media for general audiences. 3. Internet time limit restrictions for social media.

I'm sure I'm not the first to suspect talking all the time to everybody is unhealthy. It sounds like the inverse of autism. I believe surveys show the hyper-social media users are often mentally unstable.

It seems difficult to imagine any reasonable means to restrict communication like this, especially government imposed. Alternate possibilities:

1. People eventually tire of mass online communication and use it less. One can hope! 2. The continued abuse of public internet space by interested groups (political and commercial astroturfing, etc.) results in a drastic decline in the quality of public internet content (tragedy of the commons) and people migrate to more niche semi-private communities.

I know that, and think it immoral myself.

I want to see better ways for people to 'opt out', because otherwise they will begin making demands that put other people's options in jeopardy.

Kinda reminds me of how the United States is set up. California and Alabama are composed of different populations, differ on key issues, but still share many overarching principles and laws.

Group identities are key to the functioning of society - we cannot destroy them, nor should we endeavor to do so. Instead, the differing identities of a people should serve to unite them, with diversity becoming a strength shared by those who identify with multiple groups.

More concretely, within a workplace, as long as each different group of people is connected somehow by another group, things should work out fine.

This also seems to be the equilibrium solution that academia has reached. You have your specialization, but your whole department has events and colloquia and discussions meant to stir the pot and move information between groups.

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