The Social Organism
A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life
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Narrated by:
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Oliver Luckett
About this listen
"A must-read for business leaders and anyone who wants to understand all the implications of a social world." (Bob Iger, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company)
From tech visionaries Oliver Luckett and Michael J. Casey, a groundbreaking, must-listen theory of social media - how it works, how it's changing human life, and how we can master it for good and for profit.
In barely a decade, social media has positioned itself at the center of 21st century life. The combined power of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine have helped topple dictators and turned anonymous teenagers into celebrities overnight. In the social media age, ideas spread and morph through shared hashtags, photos, and videos, and the most compelling and emotive ones can transform public opinion in mere days and weeks, even attitudes and priorities that had persisted for decades.
How did this happen? The scope and pace of these changes have left traditional businesses - and their old-guard marketing gatekeepers - bewildered. We simply do not comprehend social media's form, function, and possibilities. It's time we did.
In The Social Organism, Luckett and Casey offer a revolutionary theory: social networks - to an astonishing degree - mimic the rules and functions of biological life. In sharing and replicating packets of information known as memes, the world's social media users are facilitating an evolutionary process just like the transfer of genetic information in living things. Memes are the basic building blocks of our culture, our social DNA. To master social media - and to make online content that impacts the world - you must start with the Social Organism.
With the scope and ambition of The Second Machine Age and James Gleick's The Information, The Social Organism is an indispensable guide for business leaders, marketing professionals, and anyone serious about understanding our digital world - a guide not just to social media, but to human life today and where it is headed next.
©2016 Oliver Luckett and Michael J. Casey (P)2016 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"The Social Organism's exploration of social media goes far beyond a recipe for clicks and 'likes' and presents a deeply convincing theory of how life is changing in the digital age, and how you can use social media not only to transform your business but to help change the world." (Arianna Huffington, cofounder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post)
"As individuals, we are the authors of our own thoughts. But, social media has triggered emergence. The sum of our public thoughts has become greater than the whole - a new life has manifested. The Social Organism brings context and perspective to this, our hyperconnected ecosystem." (Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter, Medium, and Jelly)
"Social media is the most obvious recent way that human life is being forever changed by technology. This book's brilliant unifying metaphor, the Social Organism (which is the converse of my mentor Marvin Minsky's book Society of Mind) illuminates how the ground is shifting beneath our feet." (Ray Kurzweil, inventor, author, and futurist)
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Disruptive Marketing
- What Growth Hackers, Data Punks, and Other Hybrid Thinkers Can Teach Us About Navigating the New Normal
- By: Geoffrey Colon
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Colon
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Now that 75 percent of screen time is spent on connected devices, digital strategies have moved front and center of most marketing plans. But what if that's not enough? What if most people ignore company messages? What if consumer engagement never goes further than the "like" button? A sobering reality is hitting marketers. Technology hasn't just reshaped mass media, it's altering behavior as well. And getting through to customers will take some radical rethinking.
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Needed. Valuable. Welcome contribution.
- By Oliver Nielsen on 04-26-17
By: Geoffrey Colon
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Twitter and Tear Gas
- The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
- By: Zeynep Tufekci
- Narrated by: Carly Robins
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today's social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests - how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.
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Insightful but frustrating
- By James on 03-11-18
By: Zeynep Tufekci
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Algorithms of Oppression
- How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
- By: Safiya Umoja Noble
- Narrated by: Shayna Small
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Run a Google search for “black girls” - what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls”, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities.
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Read this book. Tell everyone you know about it.
- By Joshua Daniel-Wariya on 06-06-19
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Becoming Facebook
- The 10 Challenges That Defined the Company That's Disrupting the World
- By: Mike Hoefflinger
- Narrated by: Nicholas Techosky
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Facebook's founding is legend: In a Harvard dorm, wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg invented a new way to connect with friends...and the rest is history. But for the people who actually molded this great idea into a game-changing $300 billion company, the experience was far more tumultuous and uncertain than we might expect. Mike Hoefflinger was one of those Facebook insiders.
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mainly a tribute to the success of FB
- By Anonymous User on 10-07-18
By: Mike Hoefflinger
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Breakpoint
- Why the Web Will Implode, Search Will Be Obsolete, and Everything Else You Need to Know About Technology Is in Your Brain
- By: Jeff Stibel
- Narrated by: Robert David Grant
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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We are living in a world in which cows send texts to farmers when they're in heat, where the most valuable real estate in New York City houses computers, not people, and some of humanity's greatest works are created by crowds, not individuals. We are in the midst of a networking revolution - set to transform the way we access the world's information and the way we connect with one another. Studying biological systems is perhaps the best way to understand such networks, and nature has a lesson for us if we care to listen: Bigger is rarely better in the long run.
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Meh
- By Customer on 12-07-14
By: Jeff Stibel
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System Error
- Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
- By: Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, Jeremy M. Weinstein
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In no more than the blink of an eye, a naïve optimism about technology’s liberating potential has given way to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. System Error exposes the root of our current predicament - how big tech’s relentless focus on optimization is driving a future that reinforces discrimination, erodes privacy, displaces workers, and pollutes the information we get- and outlines steps we can take to change course, renew our democracy, and save ourselves.
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Excellent on tech. Weak on political speech.
- By Kindle Customer on 11-05-21
By: Rob Reich, and others
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The Formula
- How Algorithms Solve all our Problems…and Create More
- By: Luke Dormehl
- Narrated by: Daniel Weyman
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A fascinating guided tour of the complex, fast-moving, and influential world of algorithms - what they are, why they’re such powerful predictors of human behavior, and where they’re headed next. Algorithms exert an extraordinary level of influence on our everyday lives - from dating websites and financial trading floors, through to online retailing and internet searches - Google's search algorithm is now a more closely guarded commercial secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola.
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Not about algorithms. Not an original book.
- By Landon Rordam on 12-02-14
By: Luke Dormehl
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Resilience
- Why Things Bounce Back
- By: Andrew Zolli, Ann Marie Healy
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Katrina. Haiti. BP. Fukushima. The Great Recession. Those are just a few of the catastrophic disruptions the world has endured in recent years. As we try to respond to such crises, key questions arise: What causes one system to break under great stress and another to rebound? How much change can a complex system absorb while still retaining its purpose and function? What characteristics make it adaptive to change? Provocative and eye-opening, Resilience sheds light on the nature of change.
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Totally Misleading Title
- By Doug on 07-18-12
By: Andrew Zolli, and others
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World Without Mind
- The Existential Threat of Big Tech
- By: Franklin Foer
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Franklin Foer reveals the existential threat posed by big tech, and in his brilliant polemic gives us the toolkit to fight their pervasive influence. Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon, socialize on Facebook, turn to Apple for entertainment, and rely on Google for information.
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5-Star Book with a 1-Star Title
- By David Larson on 09-18-17
By: Franklin Foer
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Machine, Platform, Crowd
- Harnessing Our Digital Future
- By: Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Second Machine Age, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson predicted some of the far-reaching effects of digital technologies on our lives and businesses. Now they’ve written a guide to help listeners make the most of our collective future. Machine | Platform | Crowd outlines the opportunities and challenges inherent in the science fiction technologies that have come to life in recent years, like self-driving cars and 3D printers, online platforms for renting outfits and scheduling workouts, or crowd-sourced medical research and financial instruments.
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Both How AND Why for Techies
- By Dan Collins on 08-11-17
By: Erik Brynjolfsson, and others
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The Future of the Professions
- How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
- By: Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others to work as they did in the 20th century.
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I Hope It's Not All True
- By John on 05-01-16
By: Richard Susskind, and others
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AI Superpowers
- China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
- By: Kai-Fu Lee
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In AI Superpowers, Kai-fu Lee argues powerfully that because of these unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected. Indeed, as the US-Sino AI competition begins to heat up, Lee urges the US and China to both accept and to embrace the great responsibilities that come with significant technological power.
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Compelled to listen at 2x speed
- By LEE on 09-26-18
By: Kai-Fu Lee
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Technically Wrong
- Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
- By: Sara Wachter-Boettcher
- Narrated by: Andrea Emmes
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Buying groceries, tracking our health, finding a date: whatever we want to do, odds are that we can now do it online. But few of us ask how all these digital products are designed, or why. It's time we change that. Many of the services we rely on are full of oversights, biases, and downright ethical nightmares. Chatbots that harass women. Signup forms that fail anyone who's not straight. Social media sites that send peppy messages about dead relatives. Algorithms that put more black people behind bars.
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Pretty good but not complete
- By Casey on 10-29-17
What listeners say about The Social Organism
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Julia Moore
- 08-04-17
Why mass communication really is viral
Michael and Oliver make the biology model a perfect framework for understanding social networks. If you are in marketing, communications, brand building or community development this is a must read.
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- Joshua
- 01-19-17
Good but definitely biased...
I enjoyed the concept of this book, and completely agree with his examples and comparisons to biology, but the author presses an agenda, mostly unnecessarily, throughout the book. The only thing I appreciated about that, though, was the fact that you knew his personal beliefs but he still went down the road of advocating for free speech through social channels even though most with his same political bent seem to push for silencing the opposition. Good book overall, gets a little heavy (maybe just me) with some of the biology occasionally, but all good stuff...
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1 person found this helpful
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- wgsa001
- 01-04-17
It becomes something else
If you could sum up The Social Organism in three words, what would they be?
Touted as and (for the most part) written as a comparison between the functioning Social (Internet) Marketing and Living organisms. And, solely from that perspective, it is 3 Stars, but could be better.. The author is American by birth but now lives in Northern Europe. Throughout the book there are references to American political viewpoints which are unnecessary and cloud the stated purpose of the book. Take out the political interjections and the book would easily be 4 to 4.5 Stars.
What other book might you compare The Social Organism to and why?
None that I've ever read.
What about Oliver Luckett’s performance did you like?
The detailed manner in which he explains the similarities.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Yes, but negatively, every political reference. If i wanted to read about agentized politics i would have purchased a book on that subject.
Any additional comments?
Author is clearly intelligent, highly educated and experienced.
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-27-17
Great read if looking to gain further insight into social media from a liberal sociopolitical perspective
Let me first start off by saying I am extremely liberal and hail from an uber conservative evangelist family. Context in mind, I can fully see how someone not sharing my particular viewpoint and the viewpoint of the author's, could be so turned off by the content that they find it unreadable.
I loved the author's insights and his correlation of his scientific/biology background to social media but also felt that it seemed a little too agenda-y.
I mean, I work in the marketing/PR/content development industries and some aspects made me cringe a bit at how the author really just seemed to be pushing some agenda more so than creating useful and insightful content.
Don't get me wrong--it was very insightful, and I found much of what was heard very useful for the purpose of storing in my metacognitive database on the subject -- but I would liken the experience to that of being wined and dined by [insert philosophical icon crush] only to come out on the bad end of a walk of shame after a one night stand to find that they were nothing more than a narcissistic corporate mouth-piece only interested in harnessing your attention to further their own self-promotion.
Pce.
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- Robert Lazar
- 10-25-17
I fully recommend this book
I am a marketer, social media specialist snd also a personal development coach and trainer.
This book confirmed me some information and also gave me a deepee understanding of how our world, dociety and humanity works.
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- Travis Haglin
- 12-09-16
Social Media is a living organism.
Enjoyed the comparison of communication and biological evolution. Intriguing read (listen). To keep an organism alive it needs to be feed and allowed to grow with little constraint, direction yes, constraint no. A must read
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-11-17
Best book I have read in a while
Such a great book learned a lot does a great job explaining and helping to understand social media and life in general in biological terms!
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- Anonymous User
- 06-03-19
Fantastic read
Not only well written, but well read by the Luckett. The combination of biology and media theory is a well rounded and unique approach to bolstering an understanding of how we think, feel, and share with the world.
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- Andrew Donegan
- 06-28-17
very interesting perspective
Very interesting perspective wish his political opinions were kept to himself and not regurgitated throughout the book. with that being said I still loved it
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- Anonymous User
- 11-21-21
Pseudo intellectual
All it is throughout literally the entire book are comparisons of social media to Biological systems and token feel good uses of social media peppered through the book. It won’t really teach you anything
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