Cyber world as a social system

Abstract

The increasing applying of information and communication technology is transforming the society into an unknown ground of the continuously evolving cyber world. This challenges the actors of the society and has increased complexity. The purpose of this chapter is to form a hypothesis about how to identify patterns i.e., emergent phenomena about the cyber world for developing security in the society. The cyber world is considered as a complex adaptive system. A system modelling approach to complex adaptive systems is briefly outlined and a social system model of a society is introduced as a content analysis method to complex adaptive systems. The model is populated with a small set of empirical data to have a preliminary view on the content analysis of the cyber world. The results of the content analysis are patterns, i.e., emergent phenomena of the cyber world. They can be utilized for focusing the more detailed analysis of the cyber world on the most significant issues from the security planning and implementation point of view.