(1888PressRelease)
July 02, 2009 - Social networks and public forums are a hive of communal interaction. Most interesting is the fact that people from different time zones, cultures and geographical regions interact freely. The more assimilated people become within the groups, the easier they are able to interact. But how does this affect global cultural diversity?
This is a question MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Damon Centola, in collaboration with physicists from Mallorca, Spain, set out to answer using computer models of cultural evolution. They simulated social interaction among tens of thousands of individuals in a dynamic network model, and found that individuals form into tightly clustered cultural cliques.
Comparing the professors’ results with recent studies of behaviour in Internet communities, behavioural patterns were strikingly similar. Even those people with hundreds of connections on social networking sites appear likely to only interact online with the same clique of people on a regular basis. Moreover, the people in that virtual clique are likely to look and sound a lot alike.
“Some people think that the social cliques that we've observed for hundreds of years will vanish due to the massive connectivity of the Internet, but if you trace who interacts with whom on a regular basis on social networking websites, those networks and communities tend to reproduce the same clusters that we see in face-to-face communities,” said Centola. “The world doesn't change that much just because it becomes virtual.”
Surprisingly, Centola and his colleagues believe that this is good news for preserving cultural diversity. The results of their study show that the insular nature of online communities could actually help to maintain global diversity. Centola and his coauthors wrote, “Despite the growing technological trends toward increased connectivity and globalization, social diversity can be maintained even in highly connected environments.”
Recently launched international site, Skills Portal, supports this view of maintaining social diversity within highly connected environments. Through its sister sites skills universe and national Skills Portal site, Skills Portal aims to bring training, leadership, human resource and educational news to the world of work.
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