Social Theory

#Reviewing The Hype Machine

#Reviewing The Hype Machine

Aral’s seminal book provides two fundamental arguments: first, social media promised and still promises economic, political, and social uplift for people; it can also cause perils, such as external election influence, financial manipulation, privacy issues, spreading of fake news, and so forth. The author also argues that left unchecked, social media can bring disharmony and destruction to a country's economic, political, and social structures. Therefore, he opines that to fully utilise the potential of social media platforms and avoid their drawbacks, there needs to be a rigorous scientific understanding of social media and knowledge of its nuances to eradicate the unscientific hysteria around social media.

Social Choice: A Personal Theory of Power in Preferences, Choices, and Strategy

Social Choice: A Personal Theory of Power in Preferences, Choices, and Strategy

There are many sources of power, but this essay focuses on choice-theoretic research and social choice in particular. Social choice concerns the process by which individual preferences are aggregated into collective choices through group decision processes such as voting. I hope to convince the reader that strategists ought to be thinking about social choice and its implications for the complexity of attaining stable agreement. It is by pondering the nature of social choice that we truly understand why the strategist is a “hero.”