On April 16, 2000, a diverse group of activists, anarchists, artists, anti-corporate agitators, union members, and students converged on Washington D.C. Their common purpose, as much as there was one, was to disrupt the meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in an attempt to draw attention to their perception of the organizations’ agendas, and to encourage discussion of specific issues which were not being addressed in the political arena. The protesters hoped to build on the success of the Seattle World Trade Organization protest of November 1999, and intended to employ similar tactics . I was among a group of students from Bennington who went down to take part in the rallies. I had some idea of what to expect, but was still blown away by the intensity of the action and the experience. The details of events, political agendas, encounters and their impact upon me are not relevant here. What is important is that, at least in later considerations, the actions and interactions of those three days served to focus my interest on the relationship between communication, the structure of social relations, and human events.

Fig. 1.a Confrontation between a protester and a man who tried to cross through the line at the IMF/World Bank protest. (Washington D.C. April 16, 2000, photo by author)

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The field of “information theory” or “communications theory” has as its core concept the idea of the transmission of information as the “reduction of uncertainty” about possible states of the source. The definition is very mathematical and involves very specific concepts of “message,” “encoding,” and the characteristics of the channel of transmission. Even though the formalization is in very mechanistic communications theory terms, the idea of reduction of uncertainty is a powerful tool for describing many information and transmission related phenomena. But there are also other common-use conceptions of information which, at least on the surface, appear unrelated to the communications definition. We often speak of objects as “containing information,” as if it were a kind of liquid which could be poured into a book-shaped container by the author and wrung out drop by drop as the reader pages through it. It may be that speaking of information as if it were a substance is simply a convenient short-hand which makes it possible to avoid the headaches and convolutions necessary to describe information as a time-based communicative process. But it is also true that the classic (Shannon, 1948) definition could simply be too rigid to express the complex shifting semantic meaning systems employed by humans in the processes of perception and communication.

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Social relations tend to have an amorphous and ephemeral quality, making the term “social structure” at times seem like an oxymoron. Yet it is clear that there are also reoccurring patterns in individuals’ social contacts, and both people and organizations often describe the patterns in terms of fixed relationships. The abstract ties of extended family lineages, social support networks, organized webs of informants, and hierarchical political organizations are frequently spoken of as structures or networks – sets of relations between individuals which may partially predict or explain their behavior. It is often useful to conceptualize these patterns of interaction, friendship, or aid as formal “webs” or “networks” in order to visualize them more completely, compare them, and analyze their properties. A formal network description usually involves delineation of the ties or connections which interrelate a group of individual actors according to some criteria. (Figure 11)

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In the previous sections I’ve made some speculative predictions, both at the level of the individual or dyad and also at the level of groups, about the dynamics of information which is socially transmitted. One thing which has become apparent to me as I become more familiar with decentralized systems and emergent behavior is that it is extremely difficult to guess what the system’s global performance will be, even when the rules of the components are fully understood. It might seem that many of the statements I’ve made about the properties of social networks and information transmission imply dynamics which would lead simply to a general homogenous mixtures of transmitted culture. Yet there are many real-life experiences of social structure and transmission where this is not the case. How could simple transmission rules create complex patterns? What are the potential impacts of cultural transmission for the creation and modification of social groups? What classes of processes might drive group formation and dissolution, and how does the presence of groups in social structure affect transmission and population-level properties?

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All networks can be represented solely in terms of the connections between their elements, assuming that whatever combination of factors making people more or less likely to associate with each other is accounted for by the distribution of those associations that actually form. … The likelihood of a new connection being created is determined, to some variable extent, by the already existing patterns of connections. (Watts, 1999)

Because the actual functions governing the when, where, and amount of information transmission are so complex and context dependent, there are a great number of dimensions for conceptualization, experimentation, and analysis. I’ve already mentioned some previous work involving the effects of status and trust on transmission. There are numerous other possibilities to examine: power, transactional exchanges, sex differences, etc. As the problem is so multidimensional, it is difficult to ascertain which perspective would provide the most informative perspective from which to view the data. And of course which variables are relevant also depends on what scale the phenomena are examined and explanation is desired.

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