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Register a new userSocial Expansion versus Social Fragmentation
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Authors
Ingo Piepers
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The process of social expansion in Europe can be better understood with various concepts related to complexity science. Findings of exploratory research show a typical process of social expansion in Europe within the period 1495-1945, in which wars have been instrumental. Furthermore, this research enables the identification of vulnerabilities, and conditions for success in a process of social expansion.
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With the availability of cell phones, internet, social media etc. the interconnectedness of people within most societies has increased drastically over the past three decades. Across the same timespan, we are observing the phenomenon of increasing levels of fragmentation in society into relatively small and isolated groups that have been termed filter bubbles, or echo chambers. These pose a number of threats to open societies, in particular, a radicalisation in political, social or cultural issues, and a limited access to facts. In this paper we show that these two phenomena might be tightly related. We study a simple stochastic co-evolutionary model of a society of interacting people. People are not only able to update their opinions within their social context, but can also update their social links from collaborative to hostile, and vice versa. The latter is implemented such that social balance is realised. We find that there exists a critical level of interconnectedness, above which society fragments into small sub-communities that are positively linked within and hostile towards other groups. We argue that the existence of a critical communication density is a universal phenomenon in all societies that exhibit social balance. The necessity arises from the underlying mathematical structure of a phase transition phenomenon that is known from the theory of a kind of disordered magnets called spin glasses. We discuss the consequences of this phase transition for social fragmentation in society.
We propose a model to represent the motility of social elements. The model is completely deterministic, possesses a small number of parameters, and exhibits a series of properties that are reminiscent of the behavior of comunities in social-ecological competition; these are: (i) similar individuals attract each other; (ii) individuals can form stable groups; (iii) a group of similar individuals breaks into subgroups if it reaches a critical size; (iv) interaction between groups can modify the distribution of the elements as a result of fusion, fission, or pursuit; (v) individuals can change their internal state by interaction with their neighbors. The simplicity of the model and its richness of emergent behaviors, such as, for example, pursuit between groups, make it a useful toy model to explore a diversity of situations by changing the rule by which the internal state of individuals is modified by the interactions with the environment.
We study the consequences of introducing individual nonconformity in social interactions, based on Axelrods model for the dissemination of culture. A constraint on the number of situations in which interaction may take place is introduced in order to lift the unavoidable ho mogeneity present in the final configurations arising in Axelrods related models. The inclusion of this constraint leads to the occurrence of complex patterns of intracultural diversity whose statistical properties and spatial distribution are characterized by means of the concepts of cultural affinity and cultural cli ne. It is found that the relevant quantity that determines the properties of intracultural diversity is given by the fraction of cultural features that characterizes the cultural nonconformity of individuals.
Social systems must fulfil four basic functions to ensure their survival in competitive conditions. Social systems must provide for: (1) energy and other necessities of life, (2) security against external and internal threats, (3) identity and self-development, and (4) consistency and direction. These functions result in four more or less autonomous aspect systems; these aspect systems interact. Between the variables of basic functions and variables of aspect systems, a minimal level of consistency is required to facilitate growth and development, and to ensure the (future) survivability of the social system. Sooner or later, growth, change, and differentiated development result in inconsistencies within/between basic functions and aspect systems. These inconsistencies affect the effectiveness and efficiency of these social systems to provide for the basic functions. Periodically, deliberate or spontaneous corrective adjustments of social systems are required, to correct for these inconsistencies.
Social fragmentation caused by widening differences among constituents has recently become a highly relevant issue to our modern society. Theoretical models of social fragmentation using the adaptive network framework have been proposed and studied in earlier literature, which are known to either converge to a homogeneous, well-connected network or fragment into many disconnected sub-networks with distinct states. Here we introduced the diversities of behavioral attributes among social constituents and studied their effects on social network evolution. We investigated, using a networked agent-based simulation model, how the resulting network states and topologies would be affected when individual constituents cultural tolerance, cultural state change rate, and edge weight change rate were systematically diversified. The results showed that the diversity of cultural tolerance had the most direct effect to keep the cultural diversity within the society high and simultaneously reduce the average shortest path length of the social network, which was not previously reported in the earlier literature. Diversities of other behavioral attributes also had effects on final states of the social network, with some nonlinear interactions. Our results suggest that having a broad distribution of cultural tolerance levels within society can help promote the coexistence of cultural diversity and structural connectivity.
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