Web-Based Social Movements: Mathematical Model of Mobilization

Abstract

At the current stage of research I am seeking to develop mathematical model, with which widely discussed peculiarities of SMO, intensively recruiting new members in World Wide Web, could be brought together, and recorded for further explanation. The paper starts with listing such peculiarities, as they were already explored by previous researchers. Then, assuming that web-based SMOs do have something in common, namely because Internet is main communication channel for them, the following section applies the notion of informational cascade to announced scientific problem. The concept of informational cascade, together with social identification, is the very bridge which can glue peculiarities of web- communication with the level of reality-based protest activity. In the beginning of mobilization of the movement, the more Internet-users are informed, the more people join the movement. But why the cascade – and recruitment of new members – slows down after? From the mathematical point of view, graph theory explains it in a best way. Internet is a net and cascade is also a net, since one and the same person can theoretically get one and the same information from different sources, in our case: from more than one node of the net. The denser the net is, the more pressure exerts on the information flows. To show such dependence, system dynamic approach, namely the notion of feedback loop, can be used. That is how we get a model with two variables: density and number of members. Then we simply add the third one – level of protest activity. At the last step we have a system with three moderated variables and three equations. Many statements here are based on preparatory part of my dissertation research, despite similar ones can be probably found in existing literature.