0:11because this is the current. Um we are unfortunately not going to be able to cover many of the layers of your book.
0:15Which is really about networks and how networks can influence the way that change takes place.
0:20And there's there are many dimensions that that we will have to um touch on only briefly.
0:26But I wanted if we could have a conversation that starts with looking at um a change moment.
0:35And having you explain it to us as as you do in your book actually, um explaining what drove the forces of change and uh and then perhaps we can compare that with where we're at in the states at the moment where it feels like we're having a change moment and I'd be interested to know how you read and interpret that.
0:50So the one I was going to start with if you don't mind, um is the Arab Spring, you talk about this in your book, because it has it has an interesting combination of drivers.
1:01Um there's there certainly many of us remember.
1:04Well going in the Google engineer, was the was the Arab Spring in Egypt engineered by Google?
1:14Um you you tell the story somewhat differently.
1:20And I I wonder if you wouldn't mind just telling it for us now how that change took place.
1:26Sure.
1:27Um and the first thing to understand is that this is really a brand new science.
1:33Is that we haven't really had a way historically of studying these kinds of social change processes.
1:42Because if you think about it, something like Arab Spring, it happens once, like you look at Egypt and you watch the revolution explode and then typically what we've had to do is to look back through the data and try to figure out what happened.
2:22Um and then you compare a bunch of successes side by side and say what do they have in common?
2:28And then try to infer what makes social change happen.
2:33And the big new thing we can do today, that sort of the new science um that's really motivated this book, is that we can study these kinds of social change processes experimentally.
2:47Which sounds sort of crazy because it means you can actually create little social worlds with, you know, thousands of people in them and study whether or not specific changes to the social network or to people's interactions, give rise to these kinds of social change processes.
3:02And then one of the other sort of complimentary things we can do is look at the data in a very rich and detailed way from social change like what happened in Arab Spring.
3:16So, um there were over 13 million um tweets and messages that were recorded and then analyzed in a sort of subsequent study of what happened in Arab Spring.
3:34And what's interesting about that story is that initially some of like the very high-profile activists, the people we think of as like influencers, very connected on social media, had tried to initiate a revolution.
4:29Basically, two weeks earlier, Tunisia had the sort of successful movement, um overthrown its government, and Egypt was, you know, suffering under the despotic rule of Hosni Mubarak, and one of the main activists in Egypt had decided to try to initiate change by going to the famous Tahrir Square and trying to start up, you know, a massive protest.
5:22But all of her social media efforts, despite sort of the wide dispersal of the message, um didn't result in people showing up, in fact, it was just sort of her by herself, and she and a few people were arrested, and that was the end of that.
5:58Um and then what wound up happening was a sort of coalescence of um both emotional excitement and logistical coordination through the sort of social networks in Egypt that weren't among, you know, powerful, um highly connected activists.
6:41Weren't among sort of the high-profile influencers on social media, it was just regular people, you know, school teachers, students and folks like that.
7:07And what you see is that the actual revolution, when it took hold, took hold in the edges or what I refer to as the periphery of the social network, and that spreading process essentially grew a critical mass that wound up taking over the entire country and leading ultimately to the toppling of of the government.
7:51Um and so it kind of turns things on its head because we've typically thought that, um social movements, social change, big things happened from highly connected influencers who kind of initiate change and tell everyone else what to do.
8:21And this sort of study of of Arab Spring leads into a set of studies that I've done that have shown time and time again.
8:36And it's, you know, for social change, for, you know, political upheaval, for changes in norms like marriage equality in the U.S. and the acceptance of Black Lives Matter in the U.S. and around the world, but also for the adoption of like new products.
9:07Um we see the same dynamics again and again, which is that the classic story that it spreads from an influencer to everyone.
9:21Just doesn't explain what happened.
9:25And when we try to study these kinds of things experimentally, we can show in a very like clear, replicated fashion and even make predictions about where in a social network change will take hold.
9:43And how effective that will be for getting the entire population to come along.
9:57So in that case in in Egypt, the activist herself even in her in her failed demonstration.
10:08Uh she perhaps is reflective of the fact that there is already a ground swell that exists.
10:25And they haven't all turned out for her because she's telling them to do it.
10:34But she is she is more symbolic of the fact of the ground swell than she is actually leading people to that to that opinion.
10:45Is that is that am I reading that right?
10:50It's also a factor of um of timing and coordination.
10:56So here's the fact, a lot of people can be discontent.
11:02But if they're not coordinated, that discontent doesn't manifest.
11:09It doesn't initiate any kind of change process.
11:13And so what we saw in Egypt was that the data going back a year or two had these kinds of moments of, you know, really outspoken cries.
11:26People were burning themselves, the sort of emulation um in protest, and there was a lot of clear discontent um with the government.
11:42But it wasn't manifesting in any way.
11:48And so the real question is when we see this kind of explosive change, what was different?
11:58Right, that's always what we're trying to figure out.
12:00What happened differently because we can look at the population of, you know, the sort of mood in the country.
12:09And see that it sort of was constant over a long period of time.
12:18And so something different had to happen in order for the sort of spark to explode because there were lots of different sparks that didn't really trigger any kind of change.
12:31Um and, you know, to tie this back to the US context, this is, you know, we see this with Black Lives Matter too, that there were all kind there were many, many events, many murders, and many sort of, um, uh public outcries.
12:46Um, and there was, you know, there were videotapes of choking deaths pushed on social media back in, you know, 2014, and there was basically no response to it.
12:57Um, and then 2020, a video tape of a choking death was pushed on social media and there was a worldwide protest.
13:05Like what was the difference?
13:08Um, and that's really scientifically what's interesting because we want to understand what causes this kind of change to take hold.
13:15And it's not just the fact that populations are fed up, and there are, you know, well understood, totally valid grievances, there's something else going on.
13:29And it's that something else that's really the the core sort of story of the book is figuring out what that is.
13:38And also how we can sort of see it in our lives.
