Your LIfe is Driven by Network Effects
Your LIfe is Driven by Network Effects
By James Currier
Link : https://www.nfx.com/post/your-life-network-effects
James Currier is a sociologist that studies human interaction with the world around them. He wrote the article, “Your Life is Driven by Network Effects,” to show that realistically, we are not in charge of the decisions we make, but rather the networks around us are an unseen hand that controls us subconsciously. From what city you will live in when you’re older, to who you will marry, to the outfits you choose to wear everyday, these choices were all described to be much more constrained than we think primarily due to the networks we are surrounded by and what drives them.
What I found to be most interesting was not only the description of how life decisions become predictable once you immerse yourself into social networks, but that the more your “network forces” interact with one another, the more your destiny is shaped. Every network overlaps with one another and has external factors that carve the path of someone’s life.
Currier broke down our lives into 7 main decisions that shape our destiny. He estimates that within everyone’s life, they face 7 pivotal events or crossroads that cause them to make a major life choice. He claims that while knowing how much of an impact network forces have on your life, they should be the driving factor when making these decisions.
Zipf’s Law is a mathematical pattern that essentially quantifies decisions within a network. This law places a frequency on anything from the size of cities within a country, income distributions within an economy, trafficking, commonality of names, to even how many phone calls people receive. Essentially, Zipf’s law simplifies complex or chaotic everyday situations into a straightforward rule of math. In relation to these network forces, the law itself is an unconscious force that brings outliers to follow the same pattern as the rest. Take the population of the major US cities, for example. The population of Los Angeles has an impact on the population of NYC, Seattle, San Francisco, and so on. If one of these cities were to somehow strive away from the pattern, Zipf’s law will bring them back in line.
This force is so strong and so powerful that it cannot be controlled nor altered. In so many words, it is a larger power that controls everyone and everything without interference. Social networks have such an important role in decision-making, and by knowing Zipf’s law and the power it has over them, these decisions are essentially out of our hands.