Prompted by Tom's comment yesterday, have been pondering this simple description of what our interventions - the social objects we create for our consumers etc - actually do:
They distort the existing social systems that shape our individual behaviours (e.g. by creating new connections between people, by amplifying/fuelling certain existing connections so that folk see each other's behaviour more clearly and frequently or by seeding new behaviours within these systems).
Like this but also like this (and all stops between).
Just as this flag thing did (when we copied it from Latin America?)