How Carol Darr was just a tiny bit off (just a bit!)
Someone in class, and more than a few others on their blogs, questioned the effectiveness of the "influentials" if, as they are described by Carol Darr and some other ipdi-related folks, they all live here in Washington, D.C., or are concentrated in other metro areas and state capitals. Yeah, we're a transient society in this area, but we can't be moving around that much that our opinions can be expected to account for the dissemination of what I yesterday called the second part of the two-step flow of information.
It was a valid point, questioning how influentials are supposed to influence people when they're all hanging out in the same places themselves. Darr had a reasonable answer--that while we all belong to the DC community, we also have other communities of varying sizes among which we are the go-to folks for political information. The answer got about 60 percent of the puzzle right.
Back in the day, when they were first trying to figure out the role of these opinion leaders and followers, media researchers had one qualifying trait for the opinion leaders: They watched more media than the rest. They didn't necessarily live in major metro areas, and they weren't even necessarily that much more interested in politics than the rest of the population. They just happened to be the members of their sewing group, baseball team, bridge night who had the most insights to share about politics. The other members of the group would automatically turn to these folks with questions about politics, and eventually what these people thought filtered down to the rest of the population.
And that's the part I think Darr got a little bit wrong: It's not that opinion leaders are made and then set forth to filter through the rest of the population. It's that every single group, every single community, no matter how small, has home-grown opinion leaders. They may be leaders on which makeup to buy, on which cars to buy, on how to dress or on how to vote, but every group to which you belong has that one person to whom the rest of the group turns when it comes to making a decision.
One of the studies I read earlier this year, Elihu Katz's 1956 "Two-step flow of communication: an up-to-date report on an hypothesis," made an especially interesting point: that even in the same group of people, leaders and followers may switch roles when it comes to different subjects. Katz's piece, in which he addresses the four major Columbia studies to have been published so far, is actually really interesting and chock-full of details on the relationship between opinion leaders and their followers. It's arguably a more interesting a read than "The Influentials," but don't let Ed Keller hear me saying that...
It was a valid point, questioning how influentials are supposed to influence people when they're all hanging out in the same places themselves. Darr had a reasonable answer--that while we all belong to the DC community, we also have other communities of varying sizes among which we are the go-to folks for political information. The answer got about 60 percent of the puzzle right.
Back in the day, when they were first trying to figure out the role of these opinion leaders and followers, media researchers had one qualifying trait for the opinion leaders: They watched more media than the rest. They didn't necessarily live in major metro areas, and they weren't even necessarily that much more interested in politics than the rest of the population. They just happened to be the members of their sewing group, baseball team, bridge night who had the most insights to share about politics. The other members of the group would automatically turn to these folks with questions about politics, and eventually what these people thought filtered down to the rest of the population.
And that's the part I think Darr got a little bit wrong: It's not that opinion leaders are made and then set forth to filter through the rest of the population. It's that every single group, every single community, no matter how small, has home-grown opinion leaders. They may be leaders on which makeup to buy, on which cars to buy, on how to dress or on how to vote, but every group to which you belong has that one person to whom the rest of the group turns when it comes to making a decision.
One of the studies I read earlier this year, Elihu Katz's 1956 "Two-step flow of communication: an up-to-date report on an hypothesis," made an especially interesting point: that even in the same group of people, leaders and followers may switch roles when it comes to different subjects. Katz's piece, in which he addresses the four major Columbia studies to have been published so far, is actually really interesting and chock-full of details on the relationship between opinion leaders and their followers. It's arguably a more interesting a read than "The Influentials," but don't let Ed Keller hear me saying that...
posted by politiae at 7:59 PM
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