33 GENIUS INTERVIEW Taha Yasseri
WE CAN HAVE VALUE JUDGEMENT ONLY WHEN WE ARE COMPLETELY ISOLATED FROM SOCIAL INFORMATION
FEED talks to Dr Taha Yasseri from the Oxford Internet Institute about the influencer economy and how ‘group think’ affects us more than we like to admit
FEED: Let’s start by hearing about your background and your involvement with the Oxford Internet Institute. TAHA YASSERI: My training and background is in theoretical physics and the physics of complex systems, and then in network science. I joined the Oxford Internet Institute about seven years ago. I’m a senior research fellow in computational social science at the moment. I do a lot of network analysis to answer different questions, ranging from how information diffuses in social networks, all the way to how online dating is being revolutionised by mobile dating. Most of my work is based on larger-scale data analysis and mathematical modelling. FEED: Can you talk a bit about the power of social media influence and what its real value is? What is the difference between the real value of social media and its perceived value? TAHA YASSERI: Well, the fact we are influenced by others and, to a great extent, make our decisions based on what other people do (friends, family or colleagues) is not new. It’s not an internet phenomenon.
In 1969, 50 years ago, an American psychologist, Stanley Milgram, and his colleagues did some experiments. In one, they went to the streets of New York and started staring at a window – a random window of a random building – across the street, even though there was nothing going on there. Then they counted how many other people looked as they walked by, or stopped and kept looking. They counted this number and then changed the size of their own initial group to see how much more influence they could have as their group grew bigger. So, as I said, this has nothing to do with the internet. The phenomenon has been observed, and even experimented on and measured. The information we receive about what other people are doing – we call it social information – used to be limited by physical proximity. We could physically see what people did. Or, after we invented the telegram and telephone, we could know what our relatives or friends did, and then be influenced by them. But today on social media and online platforms, we receive information about what other people have watched, shared and done on a very large scale. We get information about thousands or millions of people that we’ve never
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