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Presented during the 10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
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Fabio [.] Giglietto [@uniurb.it] Deparment of Communication Studies| LaRiCA | Università di Urbino Carlo Bo
ON USER GENERATED CONTENT, TELEOLOGY AND PREDICTABILITY IN SOCIAL SYSTEMS
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Summary
• Purposefulness and Teleology;• What Society Wants?;• Case Study: Facebook Likes & Local Elections
in Italy.
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Purposefulness and Teleology
Behavior
Active
Purposeful
Feed-back (teleological)
Predictive (extrapolative)
Non-Predictive (non
extrapolative)Non Feed-back (non telelogical)
Non-purposeful (random)
Non Active (passive)
Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian BigelowBehavior, Purpose and Teleologyin: Philosophy of Science, 10(1943), S. 18–24
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
What Society Wants?
• Parsons: A.G.I.L. functional imperatives;• Luhmann:– Evolution of the structure of society;– Improbability of communication;• Language;• Distribution media (time/space);• Symbolically generalized communication media.
– Semantics.
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Impact of the Internet on the evolution of distribution media
persistence scalability replicability searchability Locability/delocability
few Writings Printing press, newspapers Digital media (pc, video-cameras)
World Wide Web + Google (Google News, Book Search)
Mobile phones, Internet real time communication, GPSmany Writings Personal online publishing /
Social Media (Blogs, Flickr, YouTube)
Digital media (pc, video-cameras)
World Wide Web + Google (Google Blog Search)
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Effects of the Internet
• Increased number of permanent, searchable communications -> effect on the probability of communication;
• Society may observe itself as never before (Google Books Ngram Viewer);
• Can we predict the behavior of social systems by analyzing the patterns of previous communications?
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Literature review
• Predicting Search Trends, Digg and YouTube video popularity, Unemployment Rate (US, Germany);
• Google Flu Trends;• Previous study on Facebook and Elections (1, 2
, 3).
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Case study: predicting Italian local elections with Facebook
• Case– 15th and 16th of May;– More than 3000 municipalities involved.
• Methodology– Data collection
• Google Spreadsheet (platform for collaboration & sharing);• Manual search and data entry of candidates and their
official Facebook Pages;• Google Script to automatically retrieve and save the number
of Likes.
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Case study: predicting Italian local elections with Facebook
• Sample– 29 municipalities*, 229 major candidates;– 102 Facebook Pages (44,5% of candidates);– Over 300.000 total Likes.
* All the provincial capitals
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Case study: predicting Italian local elections with Facebook
• Analysis– Index of Prediction accurateness [on a scale 0 to 10];– - calculated by candidate, by municipality and by
political areas).
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Case study: predicting Italian local elections with Facebook
Results
18%
43%
39%The winner was correctly predicted
Most popular candidate on Facebook arrived second in the election
Other
82%
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Case study: predicting Italian local elections with Facebook
Results– Index of prediction accurateness
Most poular candidate on Facebook won
Second most poular candidate on Facebook arrived second
Second most poular candidate on Facebook won
Most poular candidate on Facebook arrived second
6
4
3
3
score in pointsaverage score: 4,7
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Left Center-Left Center Center-Right Right Civic lists 5 stars movment
Others Average
-10.43%
-4.16%
-0.87%
8.00%
-9.33%
-13.17%
-5.33%-4.64% -4.89%
Case study: predicting Italian local elections with Facebook
Results Average Municipality
10th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, Cracow, Poland, 20-25 June 2011
Conclusions
• Predicting the semantics (based on past ) in social systems appears to be promising;
• The accurateness of prediction is correlated to the quantity of data available;
• Emergence of new feedback loops.
