Who Influences Whom?: Mass Communication and Social Networks
Who Influences Whom?: Mass Communication and Social Networks
"It's not often that we have an opportunity to hold an author-meets-critics session 50 years after a book's publication." Those remarks by ISERP Director Peter Bearman opened the October 21, 2005 conference Re-Reading Personal Influence: Retrospects and Prospects 50 Years Later. The conference, co-sponsored by ISERP and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, honored the reissuing of Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications by Transaction Publishers. The book, written by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, was originally published in 1955 at Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research.
At the time, the findings reported in Personal Influence made a splash in the world of mass media and communication studies by showing that most people are not directly impacted by messages from the mass media. Instead, they are influenced by a two-step process wherein "opinion leaders" receive messages from the media, which they in turn pass on to others in their personal networks. This was a radical change in thinking about how people make decisions on topics such as which movies to watch, which fashions to wear, which products to buy, and which political opinions and candidates to support.
The conference attracted nearly 200 people-including many of the leading North American and European scholars in communication studies and social network theory-and featured the presentation of 15 new papers on historical perspectives and political and sociological implications of the book. In the concluding address, co-author Elihu Katz graciously acknowledged his colleagues' words and paid tribute to the thoughtful scholarship that has grown out of the book.
Conference speakers lauded the groundbreaking book, criticized its limitations, and used it as a foundation to develop further ideas and research. Susan Douglas (University of Michigan) discussed the little known point that the "people" in the study-and referenced in the book's subtitle-were in fact women, a point not directly treated in the book or in subsequent scholarship. W. Lance Bennett (University of Washington) discussed how changes in communication technology impact the flow of messages that influence consumer, political, and other decisions. The monumental shifts that accompanied the development of radio, television, and computer and internet technology are critical factors in the flow of communication. Duncan Watts (Columbia University) extended the ideas originally presented in the book. He argued that the process is not as simple as the mass media influencing opinion leaders who then influence followers in their social networks. Instead, the flow of communication is more complex, with followers influencing followers and opinion leaders being created only accidentally by this cascading, multi-step process.
At the end of the day, Columbia sociology graduate student Matt Salganik said, "A conference like this gives students an important perspective on the historical context in which a book is written and provides a wonderful variety of views on one work-something we can't get in a course with a single professor." Conference organizer Peter Simonson (University of Pittsburgh) said, "Personal Influence is one of the great books in communication studies, a founding text. Its 50-year anniversary seemed like a perfect time to reread the work and find new ways to talk about and extend its ideas. This was a rare opportunity to hold such a fruitful interdisciplinary and intergenerational gathering."
