Hitachi Kyoto University Laboratory, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.
Hitachi Kyoto University Laboratory, Center for Exploratory Research, Research & Development Group, Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, Japan.
PLoS One. 2024 Aug 7;19(8):e0307401. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0307401. eCollection 2024.
Social isolation and fragmentation represent global challenges, with the former stemming from a lack of interaction and the latter from exclusive mobs-both rooted in communication issues. Addressing these challenges, the philosophical realm introduces the concept of the "mixbiotic society." In this framework, individuals with diverse freedoms and values mix together in physical proximity with diverse mingling, recognizing their respective "fundamental incapacities" and uniting in solidarity. This study aims to provide novel measures to balance freedom and solidarity, specifically the intermediate between isolation and mobbing, within a mixbiotic society. To achieve this, we introduce simplified measures to evaluate dynamic communication patterns. These measures complement traditional social network analysis of static structures and conventional entropy-based assessments of dynamic patterns. Our specific hypothesis posits that the measures corresponding to four distinct phases are established by representing communication patterns as multidimensional vectors. These measures include the mean of Euclidean distance to quantify "mobism" for fragmentation, the relative distance change for "atomism" indicating isolation, and a composite measure derived from multiplying the mean and variance of cosine similarity for "mixism," reflecting the well-going state of a mixbiotic society. Additionally, nearly negligible measures correspond to "nihilism." Through the evaluation of seven real-society datasets (high school, primary school, workplace, village, conference, online community, and email), we demonstrate the utility of the "mixism" measure in assessing freedom and solidarity in society. These measures can be employed to typify communities on a radar chart and a communication trajectory graph. The superiority of the measures lies in their ability to evaluate dynamic patterns, ease of calculation, and easily interpretable meanings compared to conventional analyses. As a future development, alongside additional validation using diverse datasets, the mixbiotic society measures will be employed to analyze social issues and applied in the fields of digital democracy and platform cooperativism.
社会隔离和碎片化是全球性的挑战，前者源于缺乏互动，后者源于排他性的群体——两者都源于沟通问题。为了解决这些挑战，哲学领域引入了“混合共生社会”的概念。在这个框架中，具有不同自由和价值观的个体在物理上接近，混合在一起，认识到各自的“基本无能”，并团结一致。本研究旨在提供新的措施来平衡自由和团结，特别是在混合共生社会中，介于隔离和群体之间的平衡。为了实现这一目标，我们引入了简化的措施来评估动态沟通模式。这些措施补充了传统的静态结构社会网络分析和基于传统熵的动态模式评估。我们的具体假设是，通过将沟通模式表示为多维向量，可以建立对应于四个不同阶段的简化措施。这些措施包括欧几里得距离的平均值，以量化碎片化的“群体行为”；相对距离变化，用于表示隔离的“原子化”；以及源自余弦相似性的平均值和方差相乘的复合措施，反映了混合共生社会的良好运行状态。此外，几乎可以忽略不计的措施对应于“虚无主义”。通过对七个真实社会数据集（高中、小学、工作场所、村庄、会议、在线社区和电子邮件）的评估，我们展示了“混合主义”措施在评估社会中的自由和团结方面的效用。这些措施可用于在雷达图和沟通轨迹图上对社区进行分类。与传统分析相比，这些措施的优势在于能够评估动态模式、易于计算以及具有易于解释的含义。作为未来的发展方向，除了使用更多样化的数据集进行额外验证外，混合共生社会措施将被用于分析社会问题，并应用于数字民主和平台合作主义领域。
