What do you think?
- Very interesting and stimulating
- A little technical, but still appealing
- Could use clarification
- Impossible to understand
Social networks are composed of the connections between individuals and the contagions that flow between the individuals (influence, money, happiness, loneliness, violence, etc.). Social networks have topology, or a pattern of connections between individuals. Individuals can change the social network, but the social network can also change them.
Social networks are said to be emergent, meaning that the whole of a social network is greater than the sum of its parts. Some equate emergence in social networks to be like the existence of a super-organism. What if a person was imbued with the power to talk to the super-organism? What would it say? Would they be talking to God, or would the super-organism have a God? Would the person have a greater capacity to do good or ill with the power? What if there was more than one super-organism? What if social networks could include plants and animals too?
I am new to writing (including science fiction) and philosophy. I have in mind several different stories. My latest story is set in the future where a researcher creates a parallel universe in his laboratory. He is unwittingly transported to another Earth in the parallel universe where people are imbued with a sixth sense, the ability to sense what I call “sociological gradients”. The sociological gradients enable people to get knowledge about the social network from the emergent super-organism. The protagonist of the story (the hapless researcher) must learn like a child how sociological gradients work. He will then have to save the other Earth before he can make it home to his world.
