Lecture Videos

Lecture Videos

Michael Macy: “Social Wormholes and Parallel Worlds”

Symposium on the Future of the Social Sciences IV
Oct 26, 2018

Using global network data, we discovered the existence of social “wormholes” – high bandwidth social ties that bridge vast network distances, enabling rapid diffusion of costly, novel, or controversial innovations whose transmission depends on strong social relationships.

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“[T]he challenge is to specify and explicate the social mechanisms determining the relationship between the informal social organization of close-knit groups and the formal rules of institutional structures.”— Victor Nee