social media stability margin

[JohnRoberts]

PS: To better state my analogy "the added gain from social media has destabilized the servo loop of modern culture causing overshoots and ringing."

I thought this deserved more inspection away from political noise.

We are all familiar with system instability from high gain circuitry using negative feedback. The basic criteria is that negative feedback must actually still be negative as long as loop gain is positive to avoid oscillation. For active circuitry delay/phase shift is the bad guy that causes instability.

For social media feedback loops I would substitute "Fact shift", for phase shift. Not unlike the old game of "telephone" we played in grade school where we whisper a sentence into the ear of the student next to us, they pass it along, and by the time the original sentence comes out of the last student it is a garbled mess.

Not a perfect analogy but perhaps suggests a way to improve stability... Factual integrity seems important. Of course this is too important to be trusted to big business, or government... wiki seems to get it right most of the time, but not necessarily quickly enough to maintain stability (recall that negative feedback needs to be correct, and fast).   

Just thinking out loud here...

JR

 

[gyraf]

Saw it with interest in the noisy thread - yes, definitely an interesting analogy.

imo some of the oscillation is because of unstable reference points

Jakob E.

 

[JohnRoberts]

A new thought but an old technique, sometimes adding a delay (lag) can improve stability...

Perhaps if social media accounts were not so immediate there would be less overshooting and instability...?

I sometimes delete entire responses... Just writing them made me feel better, so why make other people feel bad...?

JR

PS: My brother (the smart one, not the dead one) shared a story about how slowing down a fuel delivery system sensor in (F15/16 jet engines) eliminated a phase/timing instability that prevented in air restarts, a serious problem for single engine aircraft. 

 

[boji]

Over my head, but these are thoughtful analogous extrapolations.

IMO all popular media before it gets disseminated needs some kind of first pass that attaches a bias tag, not of opinion but of validity wrt origin and facts. This would be good for the media delivery human sensor.

 

[DaveP]

Good analogy, but it's also often more like a resonant circuit of indignation!

When the resistance is low the Q gets tighter!

I have often wondered how long it would be until someone comes up with emotional equations

Then they can turn social engineering into a proper science!

DaveP

 

[JohnRoberts]

Good analogy, but it's also often more like a resonant circuit of indignation!

When the resistance is low the Q gets tighter!

I have often wondered how long it would be until someone comes up with emotional equations

Then they can turn social engineering into a proper science!

DaveP

Even after hundreds of years of study, and tons of equations, economics is not a proper science (IMO), so don't hold your breath for something easy or obvious about social interactions, while people have been trying to "engineer" such responses for a long time (look at advertising).

I am just trying to connect some dots about the change in rate of change for modern culture... It seems to be moving faster but I'm old so everything seems to be moving faster (except me).

JR 

 

[alexc]

I remember working in the first years of the nineties, on telecomms, when the first nationwide digital rollout was happening in this country before the internet.

The net world was all 'bulletin' boards in the public space, and arpanet, darpanet and all the commercial wans and whats not in industry.

Never in my wildest dreams back then, did I think something would arise, out of it, that resembles todays 'world wide net', with respect to the 'social media' phenomenon. I'm pretty sure that it *was* suggested to me, and I thought something like 'no way - who would want that? ' or some such.

It's hard to see where it can all go further, what with all the difficulties inherent, including everyone and their bots having an unlimited, amplifying platform to broadcast to everywhere, all time and persistently.

Will it really eventually turn out like in Futurama ?

I have a fair idea on trends for most of my bunch of years forward, but howabout 25 years hence or 50?

Boggles the mind really. Cliques of near immortal vampires living  glamourously in free range zones, all 'elegant nets' and cybercoins'  with robocops patrolling the global ghettos ?

I suppose. Like in those films.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I remember working in the first years of the nineties, on telecomms, when the first nationwide digital rollout was happening in this country before the internet.

The net world was all 'bulletin' boards in the public space, and arpanet, darpanet and all the commercial wans and whats not in industry.

I was using a crude form of the web back in the '80s (to electronically transmit my magazine column to the editor to save me days of lead time waiting for snail mail to cross the country, and then have them re-key in my copy.)

A friend who was the "boffin" traveling with AC-DCs sound system used a precursor of modern email to communicate with his management in UK and band management in OZ at all hours of the day .

Never in my wildest dreams back then, did I think something would arise, out of it, that resembles todays 'world wide net', with respect to the 'social media' phenomenon. I'm pretty sure that it *was* suggested to me, and I thought something like 'no way - who would want that? ' or some such.

It's hard to see where it can all go further, what with all the difficulties inherent, including everyone and their bots having an unlimited, amplifying platform to broadcast to everywhere, all time and persistently.

Will it really eventually turn out like in Futurama ?

I have a fair idea on trends for most of my bunch of years forward, but howabout 25 years hence or 50?

Boggles the mind really. Cliques of near immortal vampires living  glamourously in free range zones, all 'elegant nets' and cybercoins'  with robocops patrolling the global ghettos ?

I suppose. Like in those films.

Predicting the future is the work of science fiction writers. Some do a lot better job at that than others.

JR