The Social Network Is the Computer
By: Mit Ide
Tags: Information Technology, Social Network, Social Media, AI, Digital Marketing

The Social Network Is the Computer

What does the explosion of social media and the Hype Machine mean for society and our world?

By Irving Wladawsky-Berger

“Human beings have always been a social species,” writes MIT professor Sinan Aral in the opening paragraph of The Hype Machine, his recently published book. “We’ve been communicating, cooperating, and coordinating with one another since we were hunting and gathering.” Our increasingly complex social interactions have been the critical factor in the exponential increase of human cranial capacity over the past few million years.

“But today something is different. Over the last decade, we’ve doused our kindling fire of human interaction with high-­octane gasoline. We’ve constructed an expansive, multifaceted machine that spans the globe and conducts the flow of information, opinions, and behaviors through society.”

Professor Aral has been studying social media since its beginning in the early 2000s, when it was driven by the idealistic vision of connecting the world and providing free access to information. The Hype Machine is what he now calls our global social media ecosystem. This ecosystem has been designed to stimulate and manipulate the human psyche, “to draw us in and persuade us to change how we shop, vote, and exercise, and even who we love.”

His book nicely explains how the social media industrial complex works, how it affects us, and what we can do to help achieve its original vision while avoiding its later perils. Let me discuss a few of its key points.

The Social Network Is the Computer

For years, The Network Is the Computer was used as a marketing tagline by Sun Microsystems — now part of Oracle- to emphasize that in the Internet age, networked systems and applications were far more powerful than any single computer. Aral tells us that on a visit to Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, a particular mural caught his attention, so he took a picture with his phone. As he was trying to understand the inner workings of the Hype Machine, the mural’s image kept coming to mind. It simply said The Social Network Is the Computer.

For Facebook, this was a reasonable marketing tagline. “But for me the mural had a deeper meaning,” said Aral. “It described a view of the world in which society is essentially a gigantic information processor, moving ideas, concepts, and opinions from person to person, like neurons in the brain or nodes in a neural network, firing synapses at each node in the form of decisions and behaviors — what products to buy, who to vote for, or who to date — billions of times per minute, every day. In this analogy, we are the nodes, and the architecture of the information-processing machine we collectively inhabit is the social network.”

If the social network is the computer, what’s its underlying architecture?; how does it work?; and how does it change our behavior?

The Technology Trifecta

Three technologies make the Hype Machine possible by transforming how information is produced and consumed: digital social networks, machine intelligence, and smartphones.

The digital social network is the substrate at the core of the machine, the underlying architecture which determines how information flows. Social networks have seen explosive growth since their inception as Web 2.0 about 20 years ago. According to Our World in Data, Facebook grew from 100 million users in 2008 to 2.4 billion in 2019; YouTube grew from 20 million users in 2006 to around 2 billion in 2019; and WhatsApp from 300 million users in 2013 to also around 2 billion. Behind these three leaders are another set of fast growing social networks, including Instagram, WeChat, Tumblr, TikTok, Redditt and Twitter. Social networks are now used by one in three people in the world and over two-thirds of Internet users. The social network has truly become the computer.

Machine intelligence, the second trifecta technology, is the process that controls what information flows over the network and how it’s distributed around the world. After decades of promise and hype, machine intelligence has finally reached a tipping point of market acceptance thanks to advances in machine learning algorithms, powerful and inexpensive computer technologies, and access to huge amounts of data, including data about human behaviors and opinions. The cyclical interplay between machine and human intelligence determines what we focus on, what stories and pictures we see, suggestions on potential colleagues and dates, as well as the ads shown alongside the content. The Hype Machine then observes how we consume this information and make decisions, learning what and who we like and how we think so that it subsequent suggestions will be even more engaging.

Smartphones are the medium, the key input/output devices for interacting with the Hype Machine. With roughly 3.5 billion users around the world, smartphones are far and away the primary devices for engaging with social media, an always on environment through which information is provided to and received from the Hype Machine. Future medium devices could also include augmented and virtual reality headsets, in-home virtual assistants, and wearable technologies.

The Hype Loop

The Hype Loop is the engine of the Hype Machine — a constantly evolving feedback loop with four components.

At the heart of the Hype Loop are its two fundamental elements: machine intelligence and human behavior. The two are intimately intertwined by the sense and suggest loop which structures how machine intelligence influences human behavior, and the consume and act loop, which determines how human agency, our response to the machine’s recommendations, influences what the machine does next.

Let me briefly describe each component.

Machine intelligence. Machine intelligence analyzes what’s happening inside the Hype Machine in order to optimize its overall objectives, such as maximizing engagement or increasing viewership. “The machine ingests what we post, how we read, who we follow, how we react to the content we see, and how we treat one another. It then reasons over this data to display new content, friend suggestions, and advertisements that maximize specific goals.” We tend to choose among the machine’s suggestions because we don’t have the time or attention to search more broadly. “By providing us with an algorithmically curated set of options, technology both enables and constrains us. In this way, the Hype Machine influences what we read, who we friend, what we buy, and even who we love.”

Sense and Suggest Loop. The machine then senses our behavior based on the massive amounts of information posted and consumed on social media every minute of every day — e.g., what we read, the videos we watch, who we friend, what we buy. After analyzing all this information, it then makes suggestions that nudge us in the directions that maximize its overall objectives. “The major social media platforms use deep learning neural networks to analyze the text we type, the audio we speak, and the facial expressions and body positions in our pictures and videos to understand what we are doing, what we are interested in, what makes us happy or sad, and how the things that motivate us are related to our engagement, purchasing patterns, and connectivity.”

Human Behavior. Technology is a major part of the story. But so is human behavior — how we respond to the machine’s nudges and recommendations. “Although the Hype Machine helps to create our reality, we are the ones who ultimately appropriate and act on this technology. Human agency shapes the inputs that our machines analyze to suggest new alternatives. Our behavior — what we post, what we read, how we make friends, and how we communicate and interact with one another — shapes how the Hype Machine interprets what we want from technology and how we want to live and be treated.”

Consume and Act Loop. While machines attempt to structure our reality, humans are responsible for consuming and acting on those suggestions. “[T]he Consumer and Act Loop is our process of turning recommendations into action and feeding the resulting behaviors, reactions, and opinions back into the Hype Machine.”

“There’s been a lot of debate about how the Hype Machine influences, polarizes, and incites us,” writes Aral. “But it’s important to remember that we control how we react to and use social media. The norms we develop as a society play an important role in our relationship with this technology, and a linear view of technology as only impacting us removes our agency and our responsibility to consider how our appropriation of technology contributes to the outcomes we are experiencing…”

“One thing I’ve learned, from twenty years researching and working with social media, is that these technologies hold the potential for exceptional promise and tremendous peril — and neither the promise nor the peril is guaranteed,” he writes.

“Social media could deliver an incredible wave of productivity, innovation, social welfare, democratization, equality, health, positivity, unity, and progress. At the same time, it can and, if left unchecked, will deliver death blows to our democracies, our economies, and our public health. Today we are at a crossroads of these realities.”