Last week, I posted a blogpost talking about an analogy between social epidemics and mechanical wave. For a week, I have been thinking about the aspects of mechanical waves (or waves in general) that can be applied to social epidemics. First, let me thank @lou_kay, @hamraniii and @iBaUbaid for acting like a resounding board and resonating some ideas in my mind. However, what I’m thinking to include this time around is, you guessed it, resonance frequencies.
Resonance frequencies are specific frequencies that vary from one medium to another such that a small driving force can drive the system to oscillate on much higher amplitudes. For example, we all asked our parents to push us on a swing in a playground. If your parent pushes you at the right moment you will go higher but if they push you at the wrong moment your swing can die on spot (and most probably you’ll be hurt as well).
We now know two things, resonance directly depend on the medium (or system) a wave is operating in. Also, for resonance to happen, the driving force has to happen on specific time windows. And before I project the analogy, let me just emphasize that the resonating driving force in a social system (or any system) doesn’t necessarily need to be the same impact point (or originating force). I’ll give two examples where resonance effect can be seen in a social trend.
1) I read, in an article, that the confrontations between Iranian Revolutionaries, back in 1979, and the Shah’s Imperial forces followed a certain schedule. In Iran, when a person dies, their family have a three-day funeral then a memorial on the seventh day after that person’s death and, finally, after 40 days the mourning ends. What happened was that Iranian demonstrators were suppressed by Imperial forces and many of them died. When their funerals took place, big demonstrations went out in those three days to mourn; more deaths happened. Seven days later, a memorial demonstration goes out and, obviously, more deaths occur and, finally, the same scenario happens at the end of the 40-day mourning period. So, in Iranian society, a very obvious resonance example is that if person XYZ dies on day one, his mourning resonant frequencies are 3, 7 and 40 days.
2) If you have been in touch with the internet pop-culture in the last few years, you must remember Tom Cruise’s Scientology video. Turns out that Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, was actually targeting celebrities so he can convert them to Scientologists. He thought that having celebrities on board would serve as a huge driving force to keep Scientology alive. I think, he understood the concept of driving force but his successors didn’t know anything about resonance. The way I see it, is that the Tom Cruise video came out in the exactly the wrong time; the time when everyone was looking for a new internet meme to make fun of. For all intents and purposes, the “leaked” video killed Scientology for a huge portion of the Internet generation.
From those two simple examples, we can see that social epidemics actually can be enforced by resonance and vice-versa. Now, I don’t claim that I know how social epidemics work but I would really appreciate it if any of you, my dear readers, refer these two blogposts to a sociologists (NOT a Scientologist). As a next step, I think I might include damping and constructive/destructive interference or I will try to compare mathematical models of the two concepts (If I actually find a suitable one for Social Epidemics). Finally, I’m really sorry for the longer-than-usual blogpost. Thanks a lot for reading!
