The superheroes social network

The power of social networks should not be underestimated. Researchers from Spain and Argentina have discovered that the characters in one of the most successful comic book series of all time, Marvel Comics (the home of X-Men, Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk, amongst many others), are prone to the same rules of social organisation as human beings.

By “social organisation” they mean the same patterns of interconnectedness between people that enable funny videos to become viral marketing phenomena online and which have been popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his ever-relevant book The Tipping Point. These rules of social organisation suggest amongst other things that we are all prone to “small world” phenomena, where any other person in the world is just six steps away within our social networks, and that these networks are scale free – no matter how big or how small our social communities, the same rules apply.

With regards to Marvel, researchers found these affects were in place quite “randomly” across all the thousands of different comics Marvel have released since the 1930s, written as they are by thousands of different authors and drawn by thousands of different illustrators. Somehow, out of unplanned narrative chaos, order has arisen – the same order and pattern of relationships as displayed by real human beings both in everyday life and in digital social networks like Myspace and Facebook. To quote the article in this month’s Nature:

Not only is the Marvel Universe a so-called ‘small world’, where just about any character can be linked to any other by just a few ‘degrees of separation’ (or friends-of-friends), but it is also a so-called scale-free world, where the distribution of links has a characteristic form that includes a few very highly connected individuals, who are particularly good networkers.

The Marvel Universe, like our own societies, is unplanned: it has grown from the work of many comic-book storywriters who have made no attempt to engineer any overall social network. It seems that this joint effort guided them not towards a random network, as might have been expected, but towards one that (somewhat) mirrors reality. The same thing seems to have happened in classical mythology.

This order-from-chaos makes an interesting point of comparison with DC Comics (the home of Batman and Superman) who have long taken the opposite approach: trying to organise their fictional universe both temporally and spatially into an organised whole, that’s caused more complexities of astrophysical dimensions than the collected works of Stephen Hawking. The DC “multiverse” works on what is in essence a theory of parallel universes: characters can exist simultaneously in different worlds and times and relationships with one another, and each multiplicity is documented. This leads to occasional points of crisis where the overlap of storylines and events in the different publications all become too head-spinning and have to be knitted together in one major storyline that, in effect, “reboots” the DC universe – starting the whole narrative of every character from a new fixed point, before spinning off towards chaos again. This approach is incredibly both incredibly clever (does even Proust have as complex a relationship with time as this?) and incredibly complex (could even Thomas Pynchon think up a temporal-spatial trip as big as this?).

The organic, evolutionary approach of Marvel feels intuitively more “right” somehow – by not attempting to be canonical in their approach, they’ve let their characters and narratives grow into “real” structures which, albeit unconsciously, mirror our own world – no matter how fantastic the adventures of the X-Men.

Why is this relevant? Well, I think it tells us a little bit about why readers can have an enduring love for their favourite fictional characters, and a lot about how we should start to think about new opportunities for publishing.

If the lives, however fantastic, of Wolverine or the Incredible Hulk are randomly obeying the same laws as our everyday lives, then you can see where some of the identification with those characters is coming from: they might have claws embedded in their flesh or incredible strength (and a rather nifty green skin-tone), but on a very important level, they are prone to the same unspoke social constraints as us.

There is much thinking in the publishing world about how to face up to the digital frontier of social networks and ways we might translate the fictions we already work with, and might work with in the future into digital content. This study of Marvel suggests we should be aware that the social relationships between fictional characters and between readers and those characters might need us to be quite clear about how social structures in both fiction and reality work to make the most of these opportunities.

This could affect the way we structure anything from a Facebook application to a collective fiction endeavour, meaning we don’t necessarily need to fully engineer a social structure, but enabling it to create itself.

By working out how best to facilitate fictional social networks, it might be that whole new universes like Marvels, enduring now for over 70 years, could spring into being.