The Hype Machine

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED

In this brilliant smart-thinking book about the power and influence of social media, Professor Sinan Aral shows how ‘hyper-socialization’ has profoundly changed us.

Why does fake news spread faster than the truth?

Do products and ideas become popular because they are good or because they are rated highly online?

How does influence actually work and what does it mean to be influential?

Which strategies and tactics can help businesses survive and thrive in the New Social Age?

Human beings have always been a social species. We’ve been communicating and cooperating with one another since the dawn of time. But today, something is different. Over the last decade, we’ve doused the fire of human interaction with high octane gasoline. We’ve created technologies that massively amplify the ways in which we interact with one another, automated by machine intelligence that is designed to inform, stimulate and entertain us. Together these technologies constitute what Sinan Aral calls the ‘Hype Machine’. Digital platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter are injecting the influence of peers into our daily decisions, driving the products we buy, how we vote and even who we love.

Packed with original research conducted by Aral and his team, The Hype Machine describes the impact of social media on statecraft, politics, voting, business and public health, and shows us how to adapt our society to the hyper-socialized state the Hype Machine has wrought.

This is a fascinating book that provides counterintuitive and surprising answers to some of the most hotly debated topics of our connected, digital era, as it impacts society.

About the author

Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management at MIT, where he is a Professor of IT & Marketing, Chair of the Marketing Department, Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and where he co-leads MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. He is currently a general partner at Manifest Capital and on the Advisory Board of the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science in London. Sinan’s research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award and a Fulbright Scholarship. In 2014, he was named one of the World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40.