Social Network Blog - r5

Interpersonal communication creates a critical mass of adopters
According to Rogers opinion leadership is “the degree to which an individual is able to influence informally other individual’s attitudes or overt behavior in a desired way with relative frequency.” He follows up by saying they are also very important in for diffusion purposes. I do not necessarily agree with Burt when he says that opinion leaders conform more closely to a system’s norms than do their followers. I think in many cases a person achieves greater media exposure, more cosmopoliteness, greater contact, a higher social status for being more deviant or displaying some characteristic that goes against the norm- thus making them popular vs. just a regular. Is the critical mass the same as Gladwell’s Tipping Point?
A tv show- that I doubt many of you have seen- but my sisters are obsessed with is One Tree Hill. The character Mouth on that show is a part of the popular crowd, but is also a dork- and I think Burt would classify him as an opinion leader based on his position, but I don’t think he has much say in anything, he serves primarily as a facilitator.
From Burt’s article- Can an opinion leaders be an opinion broker too? I think the leaders start the trend and the brokers spread it more, both agreeably important, but not one in the same. Opinion leader is based on network position- but I’m not sure I’d agree- the title leader to me screams “top” or “head” and Burt argues that it is in fact not the person who leads a group but the people at the edge of things- then why not call them the opinion edgers- which in my opinion is much more fitting. Another example: the movie “Mean Girls;” Regina George would be, in my opinion, the opinion leader, where as Lindsay Lohan would be the broker who is able to spread the word to other networks (same with Drew Barrymore’s character in “Never Been Kissed.”) I think of the opinion leader as more of the tipping point person who the majority of the talk is somehow generated by/from. Who is a good example of a polymorphic opinion leader?

Tepperman: Deviance as a search process
If the strategy is unsystematic or inefficient it may cost too much and thus not reach completion. Thus strategy plays a major role in conducting a deviant search in order to maintain one’s own secrecy. He says that choice of strategy will determine those who will be successful deviants- that through psychological, intellectual, and other cultural-esq components we will be able to establish patterns- this makes me think of the brutishly handsome men from “Boondock Saints,” and their success’ as social deviants. What types of patterns do we know of that make deviance go unnoticed. The reading talks about the importance of the secrecy of the search- but it is human nature to tell secrets isn’t it? I can guarantee that we have all told or been told secrets before- if they are a secret then why do we need to share them? As well as the importance of intermediaries and knowing what/who is sought after.
What too does Tepperman mean when he says “the deviant need to develop out of casually formed network connections, including people who both provide the hardware and approve its use.”