The state of communication section describes the fundamentally altered modes of social communication fostered by the Internet. The interconnected, social, rapid, and public exchange of information detailed here underlies the power of social data mining. Now more than ever before, information can go viral, a phrase first cited as early as 2004.

By changing the manner in which we connect with each other, the Internet changed the way we interact—communication is now bi-directional and many-to-many. Networks are now self-organized, and information travels along every dimension, varying systematically depending on direction and purpose. This new economy with ideas as currency has impacted nearly every person. More than ever, people rely on context and information before making decisions or purchases, and by extension, more and more on peer effects and interactions rather than centralized sources.

The traditional modes of communication are represented mainly by radio and television, which are isotropic and one-to-many. It took 38 years for radio broadcasters and 13 years for television to reach an audience of 50 million, but the Internet did it in just four years (Gallup).

Not only has the nature of communication changed, but also its scale. There were 50 pages on the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1993. Today, the full impact and scope of the WWW is difficult to measure, but we can get a rough sense of its size: the Indexed Web contains at least 1.7 billion pages as of February 2014 (World Wide Web size). The WWW is the largest, most widely used source of information, with nearly 2.4 billion users (Wikipedia). 70 percent of these users use it daily to both contribute and receive information in order to learn about the world around them and to influence that same world—constantly organizing information around pieces that reflect their desires.

In today's connected world, many of us are members of at least one, if not more, social networking service. The influence and reach of social media enterprises such as Facebook is staggering. Facebook has 1.11 billion monthly active users and 751 million monthly active users of their mobile products (Facebook key facts). Twitter has more than 200 million (Twitter blog) active users. As communication tools, they offer a global reach to huge multinational audiences, delivering messages almost instantaneously.

Connectedness and social media have altered the way we organize our communications. Today we have dramatically more friends and more friends of friends, and we can communicate with these higher order connections faster and more frequently than ever before. It is difficult to ignore the abundance of mimicry (that is, copying or reposting) and repeated social interactions in our social networks. This mimicry is a result of virtual social interactions organized into reaffirming or oppositional feedback loops. We self-organize these interactions via (often preferential) attachments that form organic, shifting networks. There is little question of whether or not social media has already impacted your life and changed the manner in which you communicate. Our beliefs and perceptions of reality, as well as the choices we make, are largely conditioned by our neighbors in virtual and physical networks. When we need to make a decision, we seek out for opinions of others—more and more of those opinions are provided by virtual networks.

Information bounce is the resonance of content within and between social networks often powered by social media such as customer reviews, forums, blogs, microblogs, and other user-generated content. This notion represents a significant change when compared to how information has traveled throughout history; individuals no longer need to exclusively rely on close ties within their physical social networks. Social media has both made our close ties closer and the number of weak ties exponentially greater. Beyond our denser and larger social networks is a general eagerness to incorporate information from other networks with similar interests and desires. The increased access to networks of various types has, in fact, conditioned us to seek even more information; after all, ignoring available information would constitute irrational behavior.

These fundamental changes to the nature and scope of communication are crucial due to the importance of ideas in today's economic and social interactions. Today, and in the future, ideas will be of central importance, especially those ideas that bounce and go viral. Ideas that go viral are those that resonate and spur on social movements, which may have political and social purposes or reshape businesses and allow companies such as Nike and Apple to produce outsized returns on capital. This book introduces readers to the tools necessary to measure ideas and opinions derived from social data at scale. Along the way, we'll describe strategies for dealing with Big Data.