Scientology angst on the web: An example of the tipping point in action

Recently I have noticed that there has been growing angst on the web towards scientologists. At the moment I am reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and it’s a fairly interesting read. Have a look at these articles that have been floating around on Digg:

Staff training manual for scientologists

Anonymous second address to scientologists

Anonymous hackers take on the Church of Scientology

Ex-scientologist message board

The Fishman Affidavit: [Listed in digg as Scientology teachings claim Jesus Christ was a pedophile]

David Miscavige’s Neice speaks out against Scientology!

Scientology OT Summit 2007 DVD Leaked on The Pirate Bay

Operation Snow White: Scientology vs The US Government

I could go on and on. Between them these articles have over 25000+ diggs. So why the sudden angst with the Church of Scientology? In trying to make sense of this I went to google trends. Have a look at this below:

Notice near the “F” the scientology search is beginning to spike after a few lean years. Google trends is showing an emerging trend here which I think can be explained by the interest in Digg and Reddit (there are just as many rants on scientology there as well). Here we see the tipping point in action. So who was the ‘Maven’ or ‘Salesperson’ who tipped the story. I really think it was syndicated news. Consider doing a scientology search of google news. The recent hacking and war declared by ‘Anonymous‘. But, you can’t ignore the attention it got on Reddit and Digg. A group declaring war on the Scientologists has gotten the attention of the world and all of a sudden all this stuff about them has appeared in social media.

If you search through Digg and Reddit for most popular you will see what I mean. This is power of the tipping point. How a few people can take a few small actions and create such a big fuss. There is a model I studied in the final year of my Bachelor’s degree called the ‘Viable Systems Model‘. One of the underlying concepts is this idea is that complexity (or variety) can be managed by requisite complexity. That is, you can manage complexity so long as you have the power to manage it with a smaller ‘viable’ unit. This is a horrible oversimplification of the model but it proves my point! When something like this springs up on social media sites you have this knock-on effect and all of sudden the few people who started this have attracted the attention of ‘diggers’ and reddit users to the extent that a spike in traffic has been generated.

Whilst I am against the concepts of Scientology as I consider myself a Christan you have to wonder if such attention grabbing tactics are balanced. As I said over 25000 Diggs is an awful lot and I stopped at page 3! Such influence shows me that the media sites on the internet are open to biases and the whims of people. On the other hand it shows us just how powerful social media can be. Do yourself a favour search for Scientology on Google and note the fourth listing and the news. The power of the tipping point in action!

Powered by MightyAdsense

Subscribe to lukehoughton.com