Definitional issues aside, we see three main strands of argument against the above resolution. First, social networks can lead to a counter-productive over-exposure to information. Second, social networks facilitate the proliferation of less-effective mechanisms for action (the “slacktivism” effect) and information-sharing (the weakness of weak ties effect). Third and finally, effective organizational leadership and skill will continue to be hugely important drivers of success – and social networks should simply be viewed as the tool or vehicle through which these traits are expressed.
Drinking from a Firehose and Drowing in a Sea of Information: The Pitfalls of Information Overload in Social Networks
We, like the government, note the explosion in social networking technology – particularly the advent of social media and telecommunications tools that allow for an increase in connections between individuals and the sharing of information along those connections. However, we are much less sanguine about the results of this explosion. As Valente notes in the introduction to Social Networks and Health, “too much density [in a network] creates redundant communications and reduces the ability of people in the network to access outside sources of information and influence.” (Valente, 18) Valente’s empirically-based observation is that networks with too many connections between individuals can make certain productive outcomes less likely. Social networking technology enables an ever-increasing number of ties (some weak, some strong) between individuals – but more connections does not necessarily lead to more successful outcomes. We take this argument one step further to suggest that having too much information flowing along these connections can similarly constrain the opportunities for success. Social networking technologies dramatically increase the amount of information flowing along ties between individuals. As a powerful example, Facebook’s 800 million worldwide users add 2 billion comments and 250 million photos every day. (Zuckerberg’s Unspoken Law) This is information-generation on an almost unimaginable scale – as Google CEO Eric Schmidt notes, humanity is creating as much information every day or two as it did from the dawn of time through 2003. Moore’s law (after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore) – holding that computer processing power doubles every two years – has proven remarkably accurate. Sadly, however, the processing power of the human brain and attention span remains more or less fixed. As our ability to forge more and more connections and share more and more information over those connections continues to increase, there exists the very real possibility of information overload. Perhaps the amount of information available to us is manageable now (though a strong argument could be made that we are already overwhelmed by information flowing through our social networks), but by 2025, it is very likely that we will simply be unable to process it all.
Information overload from increased connectivity and access to information as a result of social networking tools and technologies will have very real consequences for organizations in 2025. The downside effects of social networking on productivity and outcomes are already apparent. For instance, Nucleus Research reports that firms that allow employees to access Facebook face a 1.5% loss in total productivity – a loss that could be unacceptable to companies with thin profit margins. Moreover, according to Nielsen data, in 2008, the average American teenager sent 2,272 text messages per month, which represented a doubling of the previous year’s average. At the time, the phenomenon was already beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who were concerned about “anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury, and sleep deprivation.” (NYTimes) Not surprisingly, the doctors’ concerns did little to constrain the growth in texting – by 2010, teenagers were sending 3,339 texts per month, and a quick stroll through a typical high school cafeteria proves that the trend shows no sign of stopping. It is all well and good for today’s high schoolers (the mid-level employees of 2025) to be doing all this networking – but how will their organizations fare if none of the employees can differentiate between Pythagoras and Plato?
Click-Button Activism and the Weakness of Weak Ties: The Pitfalls of Shallow Engagement in Social Networks
When it comes to organizational success, social networks take a back seat to internal unity and clarity of focus. As Malcom Gladwell points out in his succinct New Yorker article “Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be tweeted,” past successful revolutions have been rooted in the strength of the ideological connection of members to the movement as well as trust between those members. The civil rights movement in the US during the 1950s and ‘60s exhibits this type of devotion and trust. Furthermore, the movement was military-like in its organizational strategy, with a clear leadership, structure, and focus. Its success was achieved through effective organization of its network of supporters, not the network’s mere presence or size. Gladwell contrasts this movement to more recent ones. Contemporary political movements have been effective at attracting participation through Twitter and Facebook, but those mediums have not, he argues, supplanted strong ties, formed and maintained offline, in achieving the sort of devotion needed for true activism. Gladwell notes the success of social media and its preponderance of weak ties in finding bone marrow donors and retrieving cell phones; both low-risk endeavors which require a low level of participation. True political activism requires a great deal of risk and participation - or at the very least, some actual expenditure of effort. As Evgeny Morozov argues, the type of activities that social networks often enable, such as simply adding one’s name to a petition or sending a form-letter email to a Congressman, do very little to create change. Communications and demonstrations that involve more of a personal sacrifice (be it of time, money, or security) matter much more, and are often discouraged by click-button activism. These are sacrifices which only strong ties can help create, and which some social networks actually may discourage.
Damon Centola’s work analyzing the ability of social networks to motivate behavioral changes supports Gladwell’s view. In his study, “The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Network Expirement,” published in Science Magazine, he found that individuals do not exhibit changes in behavior through the influence of weak ties alone. Rather, only after repeated signals within the network, from various members therein, do individuals consider changing their behavior. Unlike some contagions, where weak ties across groups are effective transmitters, clustered ties are more effective at spreading long-lasting behavioral changes. If the behavioral change needs a cluster, then our logical conclusion is the cluster is the dominant factor, not the network between clusters. Clusters have existed for centuries, in our families and in our communities. Thus, technology-based social networks, which provide links between traditional ties, are less powerful than the traditional ties themselves.
Social media and social networking are best at helping individuals and organizations form and maintain weak ties. Certainly, there is strength in weak ties, as the oft-cited Mark Granovetter has taught us. Weak ties, however, have limits. They do not drive activism or behavioral change. If organizations are to achieve success, they will need to base that success on more than weak ties and the social networking which helps to form them.
Skilled Leadership and Individual Talent: The True Key Drivers of Organizational Success
Following our explanation of the two main pitfalls of an over-reliance on social networks for organizational success (namely, the potential for information overload and the slacktivism/weak tie effect), we propose a counterthetical argument: that leadership and individual skill are the most important drivers of organizational success, and that they will continue to be through 2025. In fact, effective leadership and superlative skill can shape, tweak, and guide social networks toward organizational success in a way that those networks could not achieve on their own. As such, we argue that social networks could best be understood as vehicles rather than drivers of organizational success.
In their opening constructive, the government reminded us of Robert Cross’s argument from The Hidden Power of Social Networks: “there is dependable evidence that well-managed network connectivity is critical to performance, learning and innovation in organizations.” (Emphasis Added) We agree with the government, and with Cross, that networks can be critical to achieving organizational objectives - but without high-quality management of those networks, their value to the organization is severely diminished. Without talented managers clearly defining a vision, creating incentives for success, elaborating intermediate goals - and even optimizing their organization to reflect the insights gained by social network analysis - organizations will have great difficulty achieving success. Gladwell’s discussion of the civil rights movement is a particularly illustrative example of this idea, as he finds that clearly defined organizational goals and a singularity of focus within the movement were key drivers of success. Even in the government’s example of the UAW contract negotiations, leadership that set clear goals and tactics for meeting those goals was a key component of the success of the negotiation. One could even argue that the UAW’s use of Facebook was as much a negotiating ploy to demonstrate the resolve and engagement of its members as it was a pure use of a social network. Social networks and social network analysis are valuable tools to help organizations and leaders move toward successful outcomes, but networks by themselves do not produce results. Rather, skilled management is essential for generating the conditions that lead to success.
While management can help set the conditions for success, successful organizations are also driven forward by skilled individuals. Perhaps the best analogy for this point is contained in the graphic below. The graphic shows a network of connections (passes, in this case) between players in the 2010 World Cup final during the 26th minute of overtime. While somewhat helpful and informative, this network map fails to capture the creativity, imagination, and skill that the individual players exhibited in creating the game-winning goal.
Overall, then, leadership and individual skill are absolutely essential to organizational success. Social networks, like any other tool, can be used for good or for evil, for progress or to constrain progress - the tool in and of itself does not generate an outcome. Thus, social networks are best viewed as a vehicle, while leadership and skill are the actual drivers that can use the vehicle to achieve organizational success. When this insight is combined with the very real possibility that social networks will lead to information overload (and a resultant decrease in productivity) by 2025 and the pitfalls of the slacktivism/weak tie effect as described earlier, we believe that there is a compelling case to reject the resolution at hand.
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