Weekly Short Story: The Snowball Effect by Katherine MacLean

Why do some social and political movements snowball in their growth and effect over the population while others briefly sprout and then wither away?  Katherine MacLean, in her 1952 short story appropriately titled The Snowball Effect...from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 14 (1952)...examined this question, with some implications for our present age...

A newly-hired dean at a university is visiting a sociology professor, skeptical that his department merits the funding that it claims to deserve...after all, the college needs money from businesses and what practical use is sociology, anyway? In response to the dean's questioning, the professor proposes a project: to demonstrate his mathematically-constructed theory of the snowball effect on society, they will arbitrarily take a small women's sewing club tucked away in a small town and start a snowballing movement within it, using the professor's principles.  The dean agrees, very conscious of higher applications (and more money for the university) should the experiment bear fruit.  And does it ever bear fruit...

In our present age of instant social media messages and images multiplied any number of times across the country and the world, the concept of something snowballing has been replaced by another designation: going viral.  Look at the movements Black Lives Matter and Me Too in the last two or three years...and then look at how the Russians under their pseudo-president Putin were able to easily plant false news stories into social media to influence the 2016 presidential election against Clinton and in favor of Trump.  There is one element of today's world that tends to retard the full fruition of a snowball effect, keeping it from taking over the entire society: people nowadays tend to be attention-deficit, holding to whatever happens to be in vogue at the time and then suddenly disposing of it in favor of the next "big thing".  On the other hand, our media sources...while I acknowledge that some actually try to be objective...tend to favor a particular political orientation, inducing people of that same philosophy to tune in to reinforce their already held views instead of actually learning the facts and trying to see things from the other side's perspective...this trend I believe contributes to the snowball effect.  Now the question is: can all of this be set up mathematically to the point where someone with the inside knowledge of the snowball effect can, behind the scenes, anonymously manipulate the world to make it to their own liking?  Don't you get the feeling at times that this is precisely what is going on now?  I know of someone who has already expressed exactly this sentiment to me...

The Snowball Effect is now in public domain...you can read it online via Gutenberg through the following link: [link]...