Self-Organised Criticality and Emergent Hyperbolic Networks -- Blueprint for Complexity in Social Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper explores how self-organized criticality and hyperbolic network geometries underpin social dynamics in online knowledge-sharing platforms, using empirical data to draw analogies with complex physical systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach applying physics-inspired models to analyze social knowledge-sharing, highlighting the emergence of hyperbolic networks and criticality in online interactions.

Findings

Self-organized criticality governs social knowledge-sharing dynamics.

Hyperbolic geometry emerges in co-evolving social networks.

Empirical data supports physics-based modeling of online social systems.

Abstract

Online social dynamics based on human endeavours exhibit prominent complexity in the emergence of new features embodied in the appearance of collective social values. The vast amount of empirical data collected at various websites provides a unique opportunity to quantitative study od the underlying social dynamics in full analogy with complex systems in the physics laboratory. Here, we briefly describe the extent of these analogies and indicate the methods from other science disciplines that the physics theory can incorporate to provide the adequate description of human entities and principles of their self-organisation. We demonstrate the approach on two examples using the empirical data regarding the knowledge creation processes in online chats and questions-and-answers. Precisely, we describe the self-organised criticality as the acting mechanisms in the social knowledge-sharing dynamics and demonstrate the emergence of the hyperbolic geometry of the co-evolving networks that underlie these stochastic processes.