Six years have already passed, since the concept social media floated to the surface when O’Reilly first coined the term Web 2.0. After six years social media is still considered to be an ambiguous concept that is understood in different ways by different people. A small selection of the buzzwords that are often used to describe social media are: user generated content, online sharing, online collaboration, transparency, social software, emergent software. I would like to take a new approach to describe social media, namely by using ant colonies as a metaphor for social media.

Ants aren’t smart, ant colonies are.

Individual ants have meager intelligence. They are just simple agents with limited memory that are only capable of performing simple actions. Although they do not have the capability to grasp the bigger picture they have been able to organize highways and build elaborate nests. So what is that makes them so intelligent? The answer is swarm Intelligence. The basic idea of this concept is to exploit the emergent collective intelligence of groups of less-intelligent individuals that simply act in terms of particular local rules.

#1 Social media take away: Global brain

The strength of social media lies in the sum of the individual online behaviors.  Online social interactions may trigger new interpretations and new discoveries that individuals by themselves would not have been able to generate due to the limited amount of information they have; cognitive limitations or the limited amount of time they have to make decisions. In this way, social media are the communication channels that facilitate dense interactions and knowledge transmissions between individuals that give rise to the emergence of higher-level intelligence (global brain).

Self-organization

Ant colonies have no central control structure that dictates ants to do things in a certain way. So what enables them to fulfill task like finding the shortest path to a food source? The secret to this is having countless interactions between individual ants in the form of smelling and touching each other. For example:

Two ants leave the nest at the same time but take different paths to a food source. Both ants mark their trail with pheromone. The ant that took the shorter path will return first and this trail will be marked with twice as much pheromone (from the nest to the food and back). The nest mates will be attracted to the shorter path because of its higher concentration of pheromone. The more ants that take that route, the more pheromone will be laid down, which will further amplify the attractiveness of the shorter trail. In this way they collectively develop a complex network of trails, connecting the nest in the most efficient way to the different food sources.

#2 Social media take away: structure of connected thoughts

Social media enables individuals to leave a seed of an idea, which may attract other users to build upon and modify this initial concept. Whether or not the idea will be further developed, will be based on self-selection: a promising idea tends to attract the attention of individuals, who reinforce it by revising and advancing –laying a trail – and all these activities then persuade others to contribute. In this way an elaborate structure of connected thoughts is build on the individualistic motivations rather than on a central power that dictates what should be and should not be done.

Flexibility

Individual ants specialize in certain tasks, but are still very flexible in the allocation of work. The rule is: the ant will perform the task for which it is specialized unless it perceives an important need to perform another function.

#3: Social media take away: lack of imposed structure

Social media users shift easily between roles from being merely a content consumer, to becoming a creator of content to being a community member. This is possible because social media lack imposed structure, which means that the structure is not predefine but emerges over time. For example: Nupedia, the forerunner of Wikipedia, had a tightly structured content-creation process that only allowed academics. This idea failed and was relaunched again under the name Wikipedia. However, this time the concept was based on a free-for-all encyclopedia, in which users were not merely content consumers, but they could also add, delete and edit the information. There were no predefined categories of articles. These emerged over time and were created by the users.

To summarize, social media are the communciation channels that merge individual knowledge by facilitating interactions and knowledge transmissions between individuals. These interactions may trigger new interpretations and new discoveries which enhance the emergent collective intelligence. The interaction roles are not predefined and may easily shift.