Frank Furedi’s apocalypse now

by | Mar 27, 2008 | Conflict and security

Frank Furedi on Spiked earlier this year:

From global warming to obesity, bird flu to terrorism: 2007 was the year when the threat of an apocalypse became an everyday, even banal public issue. It was a year of ceaseless alarmist warnings about an ever-expanding number of calamities facing the planet…

One consequence of Western societies’ obsessive preoccupation with the apocalypse-to-come is that less and less creative energy is devoted to confronting the all too important problems that exist in the here and now. Take the global credit crunch unleashed by the sub-prime home loan crisis this year for instance.

Oh, give us a break.  You just know that if this article were being written in December 2006 rather than December 2007, the first paragraph would probably have read: “From global warming to obesity, bird flu to looming financial meltdown…”.  

Contagious memes

by | Mar 27, 2008 | Influence and networks

From Edge, via Mapping Strategy:

It is customary to think about fashions in things like clothes or music as spreading in a social network. But it turns out that all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow through social networks, and this process obeys certain rules we are seeking to discover. We’ve been investigating the spread of obesity through a network, the spread of smoking cessation through a network, the spread of happiness through a network, the spread of loneliness through a network, the spread of altruism through a network. And we have been thinking about these kinds of things while also keeping an eye on the fact that networks do not just arise from nothing or for nothing. Very interesting rules determine their structure.