Information Cascade in the Arab Spring
In my first blog, I wrote about the principle of the “strength of weak ties” and how it applied to the Arab Spring. I’m going to take the same event, the Arab Spring, and apply one of the newest concepts we’ve learned, the Information Cascade, to it – which, logically, also envelops the concept “the strength of weak ties”, which I will talk about later. The Arab Spring is a series of protests in the Middle East and Northern Africa that began in December of 2010. With the term “series” itself, it is easy to then assume that it was structured in the manner of an information cascade, which is a “pattern of matching decisions” (Anderson and Holt, 2000). Essentially, it’s where “…people make decisions on the basis of their observations of other people’s actions” (Fender and Ellis, 2011). In this case, a logical explanation for the successful spread of these protests, then, is that people decided to participate because they observed others do it and deemed it optimal to do so.
In their 2010 paper, “Information Cascades and Revolutionary Regime Transitions”, Fender and Ellis go into further detail of the information cascade’s theoretical application to protests such as the Arab Spring, specifying the mechanics of such a revolution. Specifically, “workers” (the working class, who would be revolting) will decide to rise up against authority or not by interpreting other people’s actions; if they see other people rebelling, they in turn, might also defy authority because they may interpret the other people’s rebellion as a sign of the authority’s weakness. That interpretation makes rebelling seem like the optimal decision and if enough people interpret the rebellion as such, then you have a “successful revolution and…rulers are overthrown” (Fender and Ellis, 2011). What makes an information cascade’s application to the Arab Spring distinctive, though, is that while its information cascades can definitely be found within the country, it is also evident in the spread of the revolution between countries. Dissenters in one country could interpret another country’s dissenters’ rebellious actions as a sign of hope that overthrowing a regime is possible, as inspiration, as proof, as a successful example to follow… And thus, something like the Arab Spring, is born.
Information cascades once again demonstrate the “strength of weak ties”. Information cascades are based on very weak ties in which people make decisions based on the actions of mere acquaintances; their relationships with the people on whom they base their behavior on are many times, barely anything. And yet, those relationships can instigate a “cascade” of identical actions. This blog post, and the concept of information cascades, is overwhelming proof of just how much weak ties can inspire and facilitate actual change.
http://www.eurasiareview.com/29102011-riots-and-revolutions-in-the-digital-age-analysis/
http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/atheoryoffads.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02401.x/pdf