In the social sciences there is this attitude that talk and persuasion are “soft” whereas power structures and institutions are “hard”. The implication being that the former is frivolous to the march of history, while the latter are everything. I think this is misguided for a few reasons. For one thing, human beings engage in a lot of talk — it would be strange to have a theory of human nature in which it was just a sideshow. But the big thing is that it seems to me that talk and the structures of human social systems are inseparable; talk is a crucial component of the structures and the structures as they exist influence how we talk and what we talk about.

In a way, talk across generations is how the structures are formed in the first place. Something like the US federal system or the Japanese constitutional system were initially put in place by means of mass persuasion, and continue to persist in part because the citizens of those systems continue to be convinced of their legitimacy. However, once in place for a while, serious structural inertia sets in — which in turn influences people’s expectations by informing, for example, their status quo biases. Most proposals and initiatives will take this status quo as a given; moreover, even if one wanted to overturn the status quo it would be impossible to do individually, it has structure in the sense that it is very large and has a particular form, and its size makes it impossible for an individual to topple. It is, as Searle would put it, “ontologically subjective but epistemologically objective”; these structures don’t exist the way a mountain does, but they won’t go away just because one individual decides they don’t believe in their existence. But if everyone did, they would.

However, a pure structuralist might believe that old structures can only be topped by people with structures of their own behind them, even if looser ones such as those favored by insurgencies. But the 2011 mass uprisings should have shown us that talk and persuasion can lead to, at minimum, an instability that weakens the foundations of the old structures. Here again the talk is inextricably linked to structural matters too — in 2011 the mass adoption of digital, Internet-connected devices, during the Civil Rights movement, the mass adoption of television. But both structural changes mentioned here did nothing but magnify the reach of a given individual’s talk — if persuasion does not matter, then these structural concerns should not matter, either.

In the marketplace, talk drives product adoption. People hear about new things through their friends’ talk or through advertising (professional persuasion) and try them out. They talk to their friends about it. For some subset of these products, the talk diffuses out across the whole social system, and mass product adoption follows it. Most of the time, most people then find that they didn’t need this new product after all; this negative talk spreads and confirms what people were already feeling or influences their preferences against the product. Preferences and adoption thus vacillate with talk, but there are long term, structural implications of this dynamic. Some subset of products that get mass adopted stay that way in the long run, and then become a staple of the household for the next generation of products to take for granted. And not just products — the mass adoption of the car made it possible for sprawling cities like Los Angeles to take the form that they currently have; thus “soft” talk indirectly shapes the hard, physical form of a city.

Talk spreads information as well as influence, and both of these have structural implications. I have tried to argue, with my words, that social scientists ought to take talk more seriously when investigating how human social systems work. What I don’t think they should do is reduce talk to simply being another structural variable — talk is indeed soft, but it is also inextricably bound to the hard, the structural.