Social dynamics

Social dynamics means the ability of a society to react to inner and outer changes and also deals with its regulation mechanisms. It builds upon systemics. Sociologists, ethnologists, economists, social psychologists, criminologists, anthropologists and biologists are utilizing it in their studies of systems and behavior.

An example: Modern societies rely on technology to invent and promote new technology. The problem with backpropagation is that it can complicate the system, make it dynamic hence hard to control.

Society and culture are things that we are emotionally bound to and have no immediate alternative for. Some people want to bring new life into this deserted field by appling mathematics to sociology: On a certain level, life and societies are nothing more than systems dealing with culture respectivly genes. Therefore we can try to describe social systems by signals which become modified by transmission functions. Some examples follow.

If a society is small, its individuums can come to a fine consensus in a short time, that means that its amplitude error is small and its frequency bandwidth is high. But its absolute amplitude is small, so this society is still dependant from the big amplitude of nature, from the forces of nature. A big society can overcome hunger, disease and poverty, but its political media are hogs; high but lagged and distorted output signal.

More advanced examples introduce feedback, e.g. the cyclus between economic boom and recession, whose resonance frequency is mostly ~2-5 years. The strength of a resonance is measured by the parameter Q (for quality). Calculations become simplified by signal theory.

External links:

http://139.142.203.66/pub/www/Journal/vol3/iss2/art4/
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~read/connectionism_preface2.html
http://www.clubofrome.org/docs/limits.rtf : "We must also keep in mind the presence of social delays--the delays necessary to allow society to absorb or to prepare for a change. Most delays, physical or social reduce the stability of the world system and increase the likelihood of the overshoot mode."

/Talk