S-tech is the social sciences: Economics, Sociology: Electronics don't buy things. People buy things. Start with 2 key concepts:
Community: "The word is often used to refer to a group that is organized around common values and social cohesion within a shared geographical location." Or, we might add, shared virtual location.
Network effect: "In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people.
The classic example is the telephone. The more people own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner."
And the more people on a given network, the harder it is for a competitor to survive. Here, the phone system is not a great example anymore, because there are now legal requirements to support interconnection across networks.
