36
3 Social Forces
we can now create “socioscopes” to reveal the principles that make our society
succeed or fail.
3.1 Measuring the World 2.0
It’s a sad but well-known fact that the loss of control over a system often results
from a lack of knowledge about the rules governing it. Therefore, it is important that
we learn to measure and understand the hidden “forces” determining changes in the
world around us. This will eventually put us in a position where we can harness these
forces to overcome systemic instability and create complex dynamical systems with
particular structures, properties and functions.
Remember that some of the greatest discoveries in human history were made
by measuring the world. We have discovered new continents and cultures. We have
reached out to the skies and explored our universe to discover black holes, dark
matter, and new worlds. Now, the Internet is offering entirely new ways to quantify
what’s happening on our Earth. By analyzing the sentiment of blogs, Facebook
posts, or tweets, we can visualize human emotions such as happiness.
2 Furthermore,
it is possible to get a picture of the social, economic, and political “climate”, by
identifying the subjects that people publicly discuss.
3 By mining data on the Web,
we can also map social and economic indicators. This includes quantities such as
the gross domestic product per capita
4 or the levels of violence or crime,
5 highly
resolved according to geographic location and time.
6 It is even feasible to digitally
re-construct our three-dimensional world based on the photos that people upload on
platforms such as flicker.
7
We can now create “Financial Crisis Observatories” to detect the likelihood of
financial bubbles and crashes.
8 We can map crises and risks to help first-aid teams in
regions struck by disasters.
9 We can analyze and visualize the production of knowledge and the spread of scientific concepts, as I did it with Amin Mazloumian, Katy
Börner, Tobias Kuhn, Christian Schulz and others
10,11 (see Fig. 3.1). Furthermore, it is
fascinating to examine the way culture has spread across the world over the centuries,
2 See, for example, http://www.wefeelfine.org/index.html, http://hedonometer.org/about.html, and
http://sentistrength.wlv.ac.uk/.
3 http://gdeltproject.org/#watching.
4 https://sites.brown.edu/davidweil/.
5 https://www.trulia.com/neighborhoods/.
6 http://www.gapminder.org/.
7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cEQZreQ2zQ.
8 See https://er.ethz.ch/financial-crisis-observatory.html.
9 See http://crisismapping.ning.com/.
10 Mazloumian et al. [1]; see also the Living Science app at https://livingscience.inn.ac.
11 Kuhn [2].
3 Social Forces
we can now create “socioscopes” to reveal the principles that make our society
succeed or fail.
3.1 Measuring the World 2.0
It’s a sad but well-known fact that the loss of control over a system often results
from a lack of knowledge about the rules governing it. Therefore, it is important that
we learn to measure and understand the hidden “forces” determining changes in the
world around us. This will eventually put us in a position where we can harness these
forces to overcome systemic instability and create complex dynamical systems with
particular structures, properties and functions.
Remember that some of the greatest discoveries in human history were made
by measuring the world. We have discovered new continents and cultures. We have
reached out to the skies and explored our universe to discover black holes, dark
matter, and new worlds. Now, the Internet is offering entirely new ways to quantify
what’s happening on our Earth. By analyzing the sentiment of blogs, Facebook
posts, or tweets, we can visualize human emotions such as happiness.
2 Furthermore,
it is possible to get a picture of the social, economic, and political “climate”, by
identifying the subjects that people publicly discuss.
3 By mining data on the Web,
we can also map social and economic indicators. This includes quantities such as
the gross domestic product per capita
4 or the levels of violence or crime,
5 highly
resolved according to geographic location and time.
6 It is even feasible to digitally
re-construct our three-dimensional world based on the photos that people upload on
platforms such as flicker.
7
We can now create “Financial Crisis Observatories” to detect the likelihood of
financial bubbles and crashes.
8 We can map crises and risks to help first-aid teams in
regions struck by disasters.
9 We can analyze and visualize the production of knowledge and the spread of scientific concepts, as I did it with Amin Mazloumian, Katy
Börner, Tobias Kuhn, Christian Schulz and others
10,11 (see Fig. 3.1). Furthermore, it is
fascinating to examine the way culture has spread across the world over the centuries,
2 See, for example, http://www.wefeelfine.org/index.html, http://hedonometer.org/about.html, and
http://sentistrength.wlv.ac.uk/.
3 http://gdeltproject.org/#watching.
4 https://sites.brown.edu/davidweil/.
5 https://www.trulia.com/neighborhoods/.
6 http://www.gapminder.org/.
7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cEQZreQ2zQ.
8 See https://er.ethz.ch/financial-crisis-observatory.html.
9 See http://crisismapping.ning.com/.
10 Mazloumian et al. [1]; see also the Living Science app at https://livingscience.inn.ac.
11 Kuhn [2].