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from the hanging-out-with-like-minded-people-is-boring dept.
[translation mine] Arab Spring 2011: Young people take to the streets, they fight for a better life. Only when the movement grows do older people gain the courage to join them.
Why did the young people see the possibility for change, but not their elders? Network researchers believe to have found a reason: the young people were able to imagine that the majority of the people stood behind them. They were under the so-called "Illusion of Majority."
People orient themselves to the majority. However, what they take to be the majority is distorted through social networks, says Kristina Lerman of the University of Southern California: "Under certain requirements a minority opinion can appear to be extremely popular."
That depends on the structure of networks. The users don't know all participants, only a part - those people with whom they're connected. Whatever the majority of their friends do, they conclude the majority of participants do. They are then readier to join the perceived majority.
People who are particularly connected to others play an especially important role in the phenomenon of opinion formation. The full paper from Kristina Lerman is here.
Social networks mediated by technology can be disrupted by tech-savvy governments. As more social connections become purely online, will revolution in the future become impossible?
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @03:33PM
Well welcome to fucking Soylent News and other echo chamber sites. Throw together enough of your hipsters and self-styled intellectuals who oppose any position or topic that is "mainstream" or "popular" and watch the circle-jerk go. You need a nice selection of epitaphs like "lame-stream media", "joe sixpack", and of course the most popular derisive term, "sheeple." We're cool because we're not majority cool; we are cool for not being cool, and in fact, "cool" is a terrible word because cool people use that word, so we are something like "insightful". Man, it sure is a burden when we're all the smartest fucking people in the room, isn't it?
And if any of the unpopular points of view or ideas take hold? Well, we now oppose them because that would make us a bunch of "joe sixpacks", now wouldn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @12:35AM
You do realise what you trolled was the opposite of the study the rest of us are talking about...
If hipsters etc, thought everyone else was just like them, they would have to move on to post-hipsterism or something else.