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Information Cascades: Fighting for Democracy

Thinking about the Arab Spring or the fall of the Soviet Union, it seems that the entire action grows exponentially out of nowhere – suddenly a massive number of people started protesting across countries. But how did all this start? why then and not before?   and why did it happen in such a big scale? The answer to those questions lays in understanding the concept of “information cascade”.

An information cascade is a phenomenon where individuals act in a certain way  regardless of what signals and private information they get. When an information cascade starts, people start doing action X simply because everybody else is doing X. This “Jump-on-the-bandwagon” phenomenon is very common and can be seen in multiple example such as fashion fads and new technologies booming in the market. Information cascades are very fragile though, and the action that the crowd is following in an information cascade doesn’t have to be correct or right – it’s possible that everybody is doing the wrong thing.

Take the Arab Spring as an example. The use of social media was the mean to start the cascade going. Before the cascade started, protesters did not think they can overthrow the government or thought that they were a minority and everybody else liked the government. However, when protesters at Tunisia started building up numbers and successfully overthrew the government, protesters in Egypt started doing the same thing; soon afterwords, the informational cascade effect spread all over the region and we started seeing several revaluations in such places like Libya, Yemen, and Syria. The social media facilitated the start of the information cascade by providing protesters a way of interacting with others who share the same interest, letting them now that they are not a minority and in fact a majority.

Attached is a link from voxeu.org that includes an article discussing informational cascade phenomenon in depth, taking the Arab Spring as a case study:

http://www.voxeu.org/article/riots-and-revolutions-digital-age

 

– haa54

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