Online social dynamics based on human endeavours exhibit prominent complexity in the emergence of new features embodied in the appearance of collective social values. The vast amount of empirical data collected at various websites provides a unique opportunity for the quantitative study of the underlying social dynamics in full analogy with complex systems in the physics laboratory.

Here, we briefly describe the extent of these analogies and indicate the methods from other science disciplines that the physics theory can incorporate in order to provide an adequate description of human entities and principles of their self-organisation. We demonstrate the approach on two examples using empirical data regarding knowledge-creation processes in online chats and questions-and-answers. Specifically, we describe the self-organised criticality as the acting mechanism in the social knowledge-sharing dynamics and demonstrate the emergence of the hyperbolic geometry of the co-evolving networks that underlie these stochastic processes.

B. Tadic, Self-organised criticality and emergent hyperbolic networks: blueprint for complexity in social dynamics, European Journal of Physics 40 (2019) 024002