How to Start a Movement
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXMnDG3QzxE
We all have been aware of the societal pressures of conformity at some point in our life. There are very real reasons why everyday we wear clothes, wait in line, and don’t start randomly screaming in public. In Network Theory, the benefits we receive from going with the crowd are classified by two categories: direct and informational. These forces are very powerful, and in particular the direct benefit from keeping the status quo can cripple individuality.
The cited video, a three minute TED talk that concisely explains how to start a movement, itself contains a video which shows an individual fighting against the negative externality of opposing the crowd to create a new network. The aforementioned person starts by dancing shirtless on a crowded slope, an activity which opposes the list of society’s implicitly accepted behaviors. However, by the end of the video, we see that a majority of the people on the slope have congregated towards the center to dance with him. How is such a cascade possible?
The TED speaker, Derek Silvers, stresses that the tipping point for a given movement is gaining the critical first followers. These individuals in fact may be more important than the original leader in starting the movement. If we treated taking part of the movement as a good, we could model the value other individuals get from following the movement as a function (r) of their individual value from dancing multiplied by another function (f) that depends on the number of people who are already following the movement. This multiplier can be thought of as the direct benefit of being a part of a network.
Considering this model, we see that individuals must have r(x)f(z) greater than whatever cost is associated with the movement, where x is a variable for indexing consumers in the “reservation” function of the model, and z is the fraction of the population that have subscribed to the movement (both range from 0 to 1). This further explains why it may be necessary to reach some threshold proportion of the population to engage in some new activity before others would be willing to adapt to said practice, as z must be high enough to make f significant in the other individuals’ decisions. Thus, if you want to start a movement of your own, make sure you have a strategy for gaining initial followers who truly believe in what you are doing, as the network benefits will not yet be prominent enough to earn these early adapters on its own.