Network effect is a concept from economics that explains situations in which something becomes more valuable as more people use it. The classic example is the telephone; as more people and businesses adopted telephones, they became more useful (you could call a larger number of people you might wish to contact). More usage increased the value of the product, both for existing users and potential users. Social media work much the same way — an issue Google has faced as they try to pull enough users into Google+ to make it competitive with Facebook.
Over the weekend Matthew Hurst posted a video at Data Mining that illustrates the network effect…with dancers using an open area at the Sasquatch music festival. The video starts out a little slow; one guy starts dancing in the field, and a second guy joins him. For about a minute, it’s just the two of them. At 0:54, a third dancer appears. Through all of this, the surrounding crowd mostly ignores them, showing no inclination to participate. But at 1:12, a couple more people arrive, following immediately by more, and suddenly we’ve reached a tipping point: that open area is now a highly desirable spot to dance. People start running in from all directions, and many who had been ignoring the dancers suddenly jump up and join. It’s a great illustration of instances in which use drives more and more use:
Comments 15
Ljhudson — May 14, 2012
Also a cool example of collective effervescence!
Digital DNA: Monday May 14 Edition | Haworth News — May 14, 2012
[...] a piece about the Network Effect in Sociological Images, in which the principle is illustrated in a funny way by way of a dance mob at the 2009 Sasquatch [...]
Thomas Gokey — May 14, 2012
It seems like Occupy had a similar network effect. Like most people I thought the call for 20,000 people to occupy wall st. that went out over the summer would most likely fizzle. Maybe they'd get a few thousand tops. And indeed, it was only a few hundred for the first few weeks. But they stuck with it and made it worth while for more people to give their time and efforts to it (and shocking police brutality brought it to more people's attention and made them mad enough to put their bodies on the line too).
decius — May 15, 2012
The value of the telephone is determined by how many other people have it.
Is the value of dancing linked to the number of other people dancing?
Redlark — May 15, 2012
I'd want to define "value" pretty narrowly here. I DJ occasionally and go dancing fairly regularly, and my understanding is that it's more a "disinhibition in a crowd" effect than a "the dance floor is now seen as a valuable place to dance" situation - very different from Facebook, as folks in general were not yearning to use Facebook but too embarrassed. Here's how it goes down: folks want to dance, but they're shy or embarrassed; a few people who either really like to dance or are already a bit lit up start dancing; a few of their friends join. Then things get equivocal - if the folks dancing are not well-known in the crowd, or if they are awkward-looking or terrible dancers, or if they are unusually good, or if they are locally famous and thus intimidating, or if the tracks being played are unfamiliar (never play a lot of unfamiliar stuff early in the evening; you won't get anywhere no matter how deliciously danceable it is)...anyway, in those circumstances you can have a little dance party for six going on for half an hour until other folks have had a few drinks and get disinhibited that way.
The other thing that distinguishes dancing from Facebook (besides the obvious, anyway) is that the dance floor gets too crowded. Past a certain point, more dancers make the dance floor less fun and useful, because you can't move nearly as much without hitting someone and you're more likely to end up in a weird spot (I always seem to end up in some odd little space beside a pillar).
Now, that's assuming that you're going dancing predominantly to dance - I imagine it's rather different in scenes where the purpose of dancing is predominantly to hook up/make out on the dance floor, because then crowding would be a plus, as it would provide more potential partners, more of an audience should you wish to show off and also more cover should you wish to be discreet.
I mean, it definitely is a network effect, but subsuming that under the sign of "value" seems to me to make value meaningless, or to turn us all into calculating Benthamites - "this dancefloor is more valuable to me now that more people are there because I value the disinhibitory effect of the larger crowd, which provides me with greater utility as I am no longer embarrassed to dance".
Jeremy Eades — May 16, 2012
This video was used in a TED talk, but not to demonstrate a network effect. It was meant as an example of leaders and followers. Pretty cool talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html
Vlad — May 16, 2012
Hate to be a stickler here, but the video is more specifically an example of a social phenomenon with a threshold effect rather than a network effect. Mark Granovetter identified these phenomena in [1] and linked them to social movements and fads. The reason why I'm making the distinction is, as other coments have pointed out, it is difficult to put an explicit value on dancing. Not impossible, of course - one could define value in terms of the social acceptance beneft / social exclusion cost tradeoff in this case - but I think it's easier to just say that, in the above video, we have a population of people with different thresholds for dancing. The initial dancer had a threshold of zero, and activated the second dancer, who had a threshold of one. The two dancers activated the third dancer, who had a threshold of two, and so on. This is precisely the kind of situation that Granovetter describes in his paper, and one of the things that's so fascinating about it is its wide applicability - from dancers on a beach to riots in Tarhir square!
[1]Granovetter, M. (1978). "Threshold Models of Collective Behavior". American Journal of Sociology 83 (6): 1420–1443.
How to Start a Freakout Dance Party! | SociologyFocus — May 1, 2013
[...] Special Thanks to Sociological Images for Introducing This Video To Me [...]
Digital DNA: Monday May 14 Edition | Haworth Marketing + Media — April 29, 2015
[…] a piece about the Network Effect in Sociological Images, in which the principle is illustrated in a funny way by way of a dance mob at the 2009 Sasquatch […]