New Mobility

GLOBAL INVESTOR 2.13 — 51
where we can, to some approximation,
observe everything. And we can also track
exactly where everything is at a given point.
People who study diffusion are generally
looking for a critical threshold where ideas
go from not spreading to spreading like
wildfire.
And what have you found?
Duncan Watts: Initially, we found that
nothing really spreads like that. In a study of
millions of observations, 99% of everything
that happened, every “adoption” of an
idea, was within one degree of the source.
Which is almost the opposite of spreading.
In other words, I tweet something and
you re-tweet it. Your followers see your
re-tweet, but they don’t do anything.
It’s the re-tweet that we pay attention to.
When we described this result to our
colleagues, however, they often didn’t like it.
Why?
Duncan Watts: People are convinced
that certain things “go viral,” and that’s what
interests them. So they would say, “We
know some things spread. Look at ‘Gangnam
Style’ or the use of Hotmail or Facebook.
Maybe you didn’t see anything
spread, but you must only have looked at
things that weren’t any good.” So then we
did a second study where we really looked
at everything on Twitter – a billion observations
– for an entire year. And sure enough,
we found that some things do spread
quite a lot. But they are very rare, one in
a million events. And even they don’t
look like “social epidemics.”
Why not? Surely “Gangnam Style”
is a social epidemic?
Duncan Watts: Epidemic models
assume that ideas become popular by viral
word of mouth. But in the media world,
information can also spread because some
major channel or site picks it up – it gets
on the front page of Yahoo! or the “New
York Times” or whatever – and a million people
or a hundred million people see it. And
a bunch of them re-tweet it. That would still
be popular, but we wouldn’t say it had
spread virally. So when something becomes
popular, is it a “broadcast” or is it “viral”?
Intuitively, you might guess one or the
other. But when we looked, we found tremendous
diversity: some popular things
are pure broadcasts, and some display
pure viral spreading. We also found about
every conceivable mixture of the two.
There’s no typical way in which things
become popular.
“This is not
about cat videos
going viral –
it’s about changing
people’s
minds, and their
behavior.”
Duncan Watts is a principal researcher at Microsoft
Research NYC and an A. D. White Professor-at-Large
at Cornell University. From 2000 to 2007, he was
at Columbia University, then at Yahoo! Research.
He is the author of “Everything is Obvious (Once You
Know the Answer): How Common Sense Fails Us”
(Crown, 2011).
Duncan Watts: Unlike diseases, where
in general you only have one thing spreading
at a time, in ideas, it’s always a contest.
Everything that’s spreading on ing
for oxygen with everything else that’s
spreading on Twitter. It’s hard to be exposed
to one particular idea because there’s just
so much other stuff to pay attention to.
Occasionally something is able to rise above
the noise, and everybody hears about it and
pays attention to it. But that is extraordinarily
rare and somewhat arbitrary. If you’re a
social media strategist or a digital advertising
agency, basing a marketing or other
strategy on triggering a social epidemic is
probably not the best use of your resources.
You are also investigating the nature of
cooperation between people. How is that
related to the spread of ideas?
Duncan Watts: The spread of information
and the spread of cooperation are both
examples of social influence, so they’re
related, at least in principle. But it’s also important
to understand that different types of
influence are likely to spread in different
ways. Me persuading you to change your
political views is very different from me persuading
you to click on a video.
How so?
Duncan Watts: People do not easily
adopt ideas that involve changing their conception
of themselves. Not accepting the
idea of climate change might be tied up
with your political ideology, your suspicion
of government and your dislike of elite
intellectual types. When is an idea something
that you can adopt just because it’s
obviously right or obviously interesting?
And when is it something that is going
it’s tied up with all these other things?
What are the stakes?
Duncan Watts: This is not about cat
videos going viral, even if sometimes that’s
what we study because it’s what we have
the most data about. Really, it’s about
changing people’s minds, and their behavior;
and one way or another, everyone –
governments, corporations, marketers, policymakers
– is in the business of trying to
change people’s minds. Understanding how
that happens is one of the big questions
of social science. It’s frustrating that we’ve
been thinking about this for so long and
have very little in the way of concrete answers.
But maybe this particular period of