If pheromones serve as distributed biasing agents in ant colonies—amplifying certain behaviours through environmental feedback—then their analogue in human societies lies not in scent, but in symbols. Social meanings, norms, reputations, values, and ideologies form a semiotic pheromone field: an emergent informational environment that biases the actions of individuals through shared cultural traces. But beyond the realm of traditional social norms, new digital arenas have introduced additional forms of collective influence. One such force is the ubiquitous "like" on social media platforms, an interactive symbol that shapes behaviour in much the same way as a pheromone trail guides ants.
The Function of “Likes” in Social Media: A Semiotic Pheromone System
In the same way that ants follow pheromone trails to navigate towards food or away from danger, humans follow "likes" and engagement signals to navigate the vast terrain of social media. These “likes” serve as a symbolic signal, indicating approval or endorsement, amplifying certain content through the actions of individuals within the network.
Much like how a pheromone trail in an ant colony grows stronger with each additional ant following it, the more "likes" a piece of content receives, the more likely it is to be seen, shared, and imitated. The power of "likes" emerges through feedback loops, in which the actions of individuals—clicking “like,” sharing, or commenting—serve as indicators of social preference and significance, creating emergent patterns of visibility and influence.
Memory, Attraction, Amplification, and Decay: The Cycles of Meaning
Much like the pheromonal feedback loops in ant colonies, social media "likes" also follow cycles of reinforcement and decay:
-
Memory: Social media platforms act as memory banks for cultural trends, opinions, and behaviours. Popular content, or content that resonates with a particular moment in time, is reinforced through repeated "likes" and shares. These "liked" items accumulate cultural significance, acting as a collective record of what has captured attention.
-
Attraction: Users are drawn to content that has received significant engagement, much like ants are attracted to stronger pheromone signals. People are more likely to engage with posts that already have high visibility, contributing to the self-reinforcing nature of viral content.
-
Amplification: When content receives numerous "likes," it amplifies its visibility. This amplification is the digital equivalent of a pheromone trail growing stronger with each new follower, intensifying the spread of ideas, trends, or memes across the social network.
-
Decay: As new trends and content emerge, older content—especially that which has lost its resonance—fades into obscurity. Just as pheromone trails decay over time if not reinforced, social media content that no longer attracts engagement becomes irrelevant, gradually fading from public view unless it is revitalised by new interactions or trends.
Reflexivity and Negotiation: The Role of Human Agency
While pheromones in ant colonies operate largely as unconscious cues for behaviour, humans operate within a symbolic domain. Meaning is not just a cue to act; it is a medium through which the act itself is framed. Humans negotiate, reinterpret, and resist the meanings embedded in social signals like "likes," adding reflexivity to the system.
Social media users actively shape the meaning of their "likes"—what they endorse, what they ignore, and how they respond to the feedback they receive. In contrast to the relatively automatic responses of ants to pheromone signals, human engagement with social media content is influenced by personal choice, identity, and an awareness of the social implications of those choices.
Self-Organisation in Digital Spaces
Social media platforms can be viewed as self-organising systems, much like ant colonies. Content, behaviours, and social dynamics on these platforms emerge from distributed interactions, with no central authority orchestrating the process. Rather than being governed by top-down control, these systems operate based on recursive feedback loops: individuals engage with content, and that engagement shapes the visibility of that content, which in turn influences further engagement.
These loops of interaction and reinforcement create emergent structures within digital spaces. As in ant colonies, where the colony's behaviour emerges from the collective following of pheromone trails, the behaviour of a social network emerges from the collective interactions with social signals like "likes."
The Emergent Collective Cognition of Social Networks
As with the way pheromone networks guide collective action in ant colonies, social media "like" networks guide collective cognition in human groups. These networks of symbolic interaction help establish shared cultural norms, preferences, and values. In much the same way that ants follow pheromone trails to collectively solve problems, human social networks follow the emergent patterns of “likes” to collectively navigate the complex terrain of public opinion, trends, and social influence.
Conclusion: From Chemical Cues to Symbolic Systems
The comparison between pheromones in ants and "likes" on social media underscores the fractal nature of organisation across different systems. Whether in biological systems or cultural ones, the same general principles of feedback, bias, and emergent coherence apply. Just as pheromonal networks guide the coordinated behaviour of ant colonies, symbolic networks like “likes” guide the collective behaviour of human societies.
In both cases, the system is self-organising: individuals do not need explicit instructions; their actions are influenced by the signals and cues in their environment, and those signals evolve through collective interaction. Whether these signals are chemical or symbolic, they facilitate the coordination of action, the reinforcement of social values, and the navigation of a shared and ever-changing landscape of meaning.
No comments:
Post a Comment