Social Networks and the Bystander Effect

Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant New Yorker piece, "Small Change", on how the Civil Rights Movement could never have been accomplished with Facebook and Twitter, reminds me of the murder of Kitty Genovese and the bystander effect; basically the more witnesses there are to some horrible event, the less likely it is that any one witness will intervene.  

The basic premise is that, for example, if there is a man dying on the street and there is one witness, there is a 90% chance that that witness will stop to help the dying man; if there are two witnesses, each will stop to help 40% of the time, totalling an 80% chance that the man will be helped; with three witnesses, each will help 25% of the time, totalling 75%; with four witnesses, each will help 15% of the time, totalling 60%; five witnesses, 10%, totalling 50%; 6, 7%, 42%; 7, 5%, 35%; 10, 1%, 10%, etc. 

Rock-solid research has shown such a diffusion of responsibility to be a highly predictable phenomenon: in inverse proportion to the number of witnesses, we are far more likely to do the right thing if other people are not watching.  Even without modern empirical scientific research, however, spontaneously evolved cultural institutions, like the ombudsman or a neutral proxy as absolutely essential to conducting business in Japan, show that the diffusion and avoidance of responsibility is a natural part of being human.  

When I first came to Japan, I witnessed a man lying in the middle of the street in front of the train station at rush hour.  There must have been hundreds of people who saw, and they all walked past or around him as he lay on the ground.  At that time, I spoke no Japanese, I had no cell phone, and I had no idea what to do in an emergency situation in Japan, so I ran into the nearest English school to tell someone.  By the time I took the elevator up five floors, explained the situation to a speaker of English as a second language, went back down five floors with said local, and made my way back to the man in the middle of the street, he was definitely dead: glossed eyes facing the sky.  Just as we arrived, an ambulance pulled up.  A few businessmen had stopped to be belated heroes by making the bare minimum effort to call 1-1-9.  (On a related note, public defibrillators have doubled post heart attack survival rates.)

Gladwell's article makes me wonder whether the inherent connectivity of social media will adhere to or even create a strong bystander effect in ways we can't really predict now:  Will America become a conformist, heroless nation?  Will our interconnectivity make us into the borg?  Are we heading inevitably towards THX 1138? 

Comments

[Dyske]

I think Gladwell is making the common mistake of assuming that connections made online is by nature weaker than the connections made in person. This is not true, and it reminds me of what originally motivated Derrida to coin the term Logocentrism where he was criticizing the common assumption that speech is superior to writing (or speech as the origin of writing). The on-line vs off-line hierarchy is just another form of prejudice.

What you are discussing above, is not what Gladwell is arguing in his piece, and in fact your argument is more interesting than his.

The connection between you and I, for instance, is quite deep in some sense even though we've never met in person. I can share with you kind of things/thoughts that I cannot even share with my own wife. Physical proximity does not correlate to closeness or depth of connection at all. And, the Internet allows us to make deeper inner connections.

Online networks simply make connections more efficient, which does not necessarily mean your connections would be deeper or more meaningful by default. Some people crave for deeper connections while others don't. The latter would not make any deep connections no matter how many "friends" they have, and no matter how sophisticated the social networking becomes.

Those civil rights activists Gladwell mentions are the type who seek out deeper connections; they would have certain benefitted from having the Internet in terms of finding like-minded others. They wouldn't have been limited to the people who just happened to be close to them physically.

The question is whether the size matters in activism, and as you argued above; not necessarily. The size can in fact work against it. Online network is great for increasing the size fast, but at the heart of activism, it's the quality that ultimately matters. The real difference between online and offline activism is the speed or the efficiency, not the size or the quality. Both online and offline networks have the same potential and effectiveness. It makes no difference; online or offline. In this sense, both Gladwell and Shirky are wrong.

It's like online dating; I don't think the technology resulted in more happier marriages.

[Christopher Carr]

Whenever there is a new technology or discovery, there is a period that follows where it is wildly overrated. More than anything else, Gladwell's piece brought web 2.0 madness back down to Earth. I had a similar discussion with a friend shortly after I wrote this piece. He sent me a link to an old NYTimes article about how flashmobs were using Twitter to organize for violent purposes. We seemed to agree that technology makes communication more efficient, but can't possibly change the nature of that communication.

Reductionism is a sick force that seems to pervade much of human activity. Incidentally, I have a piece coming up on genetic reductionism sometime within the next month or so which you may find interesting.