Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

Consider the way people make friends online. Social networks endeavour to link us with people – the ‘people you may know’ who pop up on the side of your Facebook feed. These people are those with common traits: they went to the same university, or love the same soft rock band, or share your friends. As a consequence, social networks are more homophilous and clustered than the rest of society. And they are more cliquey, ultimately, for business reasons. People who are connected with like-minded people online seem to use social networks more. And groups with similar interests are more useful to advertisers: similar types of people tend to buy similar products, and that means they are easier to sell to. Thus there is a commercial incentive to group similar people into progressively more precise, and discrete, segments. In practice, however, these methods can end up pushing people into ever more isolated and extreme groups.