David Singh Grewal, an Eliot Fellow in the Social Sciences at Harvard University, is author of the book Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, in which he explores, among other topics, the relationship between language, networks, and globalization.
In the wake of the recent quorum we ran on this very subject, David has agreed to guest blog here. We are pleased to have him.
How Networking Influences What We Speak
A Guest Post by David Grewal
Anyone who’s read the Nobellist Thomas Schelling‘s classic The Strategy of Conflict will remember his example of Grand Central Station.
Schelling asked what he called an “unscientific sample of respondents” where they would go to meet a lost friend in New York City, without having specified a place in advance and without any way to communicate. A large majority said they’d go to wait at the clock tower in the middle of Grand Central Station — and they added overwhelmingly that they’d do so at exactly twelve noon. Schelling used this and similar examples to illustrate the logic of what he called “tacit coordination” — the way in which we rely on even entirely arbitrary conventions to coordinate our activities with others in the absence of explicit prior agreement.
Schelling’s work got me thinking about other examples of tacit coordination. I began to wonder whether the same logic of meeting up with a lost friend by choosing a prominent landmark couldn’t explain a lot of what we now call “globalization,” especially if you think about what economists call “network effects.”
Take a more complex version of figuring out a rendezvous point without having specified the details in advance: the problem of global linguistic coordination, which was the subject of a recent Freakonomics quorum.
If you picked two people at random off the face of the earth and asked them to pick one language in which to communicate with someone they knew nothing about, which language would each person choose? The language they’d pick would depend on a series of “reciprocal expectations” — best guesses not just about which language you suppose the other person speaks but which language he thinks you suppose he will speak — which depends, in turn, on which one you think he thinks you suppose he will speak. And so on, until your head swims.
In today’s globalizing world, the probability is increasing that two random people would choose English for their best chance at unplanned linguistic coordination. And this isn’t merely a thought experiment: it’s being played out, with more information among the parties, in the decisions of hundreds of millions of people now learning English as a second language.
Is what’s true of English true of other “standards” — other social conventions that enable coordination among diverse groups of people? Think about a measurement system. Sure, some people will claim that the metric system is intrinsically better than the Imperial because it’s easier to calculate in a decimal system.
But Britain didn’t switch from Imperial to metric just because the latter is base ten. It did so because of what economists call “network effects.” The value of any given coordinating standard — like a measurement system or a language — is worth more when more other people use it. And Britain’s neighbors and largest trading partners generally do. There are “economies of scale” to being part of the larger network.
Globalization has introduced a new coordination game among literally billions of people. With apologies to Thomas Friedman, the world isn’t flat. But it is networked — and we’re all heading to Grand Central Station after one fashion or another.
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I very much agree but I miss one point: If a critical mass of people starts to coordinate on a different standard….standards can change. 1.3 billion Chinese is quite a lot and if China would exert pressure on its neighbors and some other countries depending on China (think of some African countries for a start) a critical mass might be reached at some future date.
I think one needs to be careful to distinguish between “fashion” and “network effects” (even though it might be difficult to separate one from the other sometimes).
Soccer is ever more popular because more people from soccer playing countries are migrating to the last bastion that soccer hasn’t “conquered” (i.e. the USA). This to me is a spreading “fashion”, there is no real benefit to me playing or following soccer just because others are (not that my self-esteem is taking a hit because I play basketball).
However, wearing clothes that are “in style” do help me increase my self-esteem because I am sure (most) others will approve of what I wear. So, the more people wear a certain style, the greater the network effect.
All of this raises a question: why do many photo sharing sites force you to register before you can see photo links sent to you by your friends?
One would assume that making it easier for me to see my friend’s photos (without the hassle or fear of registering) will draw me to their site if I ever needed to share my own photos.
I wonder if what David said is also true about speech patterns. While growing up in India, I was taught to pronounce words phonetically, with the correct intonation and everything. I never heard or used the kinds of speech fillers and anomalies that currently plague our language – the ubiquitous ‘ahs’ and ‘ums’.
With the advent of cable TV and largely puerile (speech-wise, at least) shows such as ‘Friends’, many Indians took to peppering their speeches with untold amounts of ‘likeyaknows’ and ‘o-my-gawds’, playing a tacit co-ordinating game with American teenagers half a world away, most of them completely fooled into thinking that it was somehow cool.
Now of course, teenagers the world over have these speech impediments; all subconsciously semi-programmed into aligning with something they will come to regret at an interview or Toastmaster’s meeting ten years hence.
You call it Network effect. I call it, for lack of a better term, the ‘Friends’ effect.
Another application of this that entered my mind would be where or how would you track someone down in cyberspace, that you had a brief interaction with in the real world? Would you Google their name, or post a “Missed Connection” on Craigslist? Or maybe email TheirName@yahoo, msn and gmail? What if you didn’t know their name? What is the virtual “clock tower at Grand Central station”?
@ Andy
The first place I would search (if I had their name) would be MySpace or Facebook. If I didn’t know their name I could still use the sites to search certain networks (for example, if I knew they were a student at Cornell).
Excellent post. Mr. (Dr.?) Grewal’s work is a welcome corrective to the drivel that largely poses for analysis on the topic of globalisation.
Culture and age need to be included in this discussion, as well as the availability/popularity
of alternate communication technology (cellphones in general and cellphones w/internet access). Here in Taipei where the norm is for college students to have cellphones, their default ‘what I will do if I can’t find anyone’ is to call or text message. Case in point: Last night I took 14 students out to a restaurant (the university pays!) which most didn’t know. My default mode (I’m 51) in an outing involving so many people using public buses is to arrange a meeting place in case we get separated. When I started to explain the merits of meeting at point A (suggested by some students) vs point B, one student in great exasperation said “We’ll just call if we get lost”. None of them had my phone number, but they had each others…
Of related interest: we could have taken the air conditioned subway or the public bus(at rush hour on a hot & humid day from a bus stop on a busy, polluted road). The price difference was maybe 15 US cents (insignificant to them). They automatically wanted to take the bus — probably because they didn’t have important details like the address of the restaurant and needed to peer out of the windows to locate it).
I think that this is an execrise in fractions and the objective is to find the lowest common denominator. I travel alot and when i meet people and want a greater insight into other countries I ask how much coca-cola is. Innocuous enough, since people generally don’t dislike it – it’s a major factor in determining the cost of living all over the world. in china it’s 35 u.s. cents for a bottle and in england it’s usually around 2 dollars. I think that my case is the most practical application of this phenomena.