from meme to social fabric

Social Media In China: From Personal Meme to Mass Impact

Isaac MaoSocial Brain Foundation

http://socialbrain.org2008/1

Two Types of Mindset

• Intelligent Design– Top Down– Elitism

• Evolution– Bottom Up– Collective Intelligence

Evolution of Social Media

• Sharism & Sharists

• Meme as gene

• Social Networking

• Tipping points

• Collective Intelligence

Paradigm Shift

• From isolation to connection

• Small ideas can find their own way of spreading

• Collective intelligence on the click of creation

• Truth comes from social perception

• (extra) Culture bridges

From isolation to connection

From isolation to connection

DNA & Meme

Paradigm & power model shift

Journalist

Reader

Blogger

Mass

Institutional Media

Blogosphere

Mind

Communication

Population Coverage

Suppose: Power = Population*Coverage

Someday, Blogger*Blogosphere >= Journalist*Institutional Media

Social Fabric

• Collective Intelligence

• The systematic effect

• Truth comes out via social perception

Power Law vs. Metcalfe's law

• One-to-many vs. many-to-many• Professional journalism vs. Back Channeling• Post mortem vs. Witness• Brand name vs. Social Capital and trust• Elite vs. Collective Intelligence• All rights reserved vs. “Some rights reserved”• Centralization vs. Distribution• Delivery vs. Reflection• Top-down vs. Bottom-up• Monopoly vs. Democracy

Cases in 2007

The Power of Longtail

• Global effect• Persistency• Free Scale• Decentralized• Where censorship fails

– Variety laws

• Creation at the speed of click– Soup.io– Twitter

Characteristics of Chinese Blogosphere I

Still the same old problem…• One way world: Due to language barriers

• Solution: Bridge blogs

EnglishBlogosphereChinese

Blogosphere

Thank YOU!

isaac.mao@gmail.com

http://isaacmao.com