The Wall Street Journal this week wrote about a "new generation of hidden influencers ... taking root online." They're key users of social networking sites like Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, Newsvine, and others, and (says the Journal) they're "shaping what we read, watch and buy."
Is this the venerable two-step flow with a cyber twist? A new kind of agenda-setting? Or are other mass communication theories at play?
Read the journal article, "The Wizards of Buzz", and see what you think?
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After reading the article, I'd think there's a mix of two-step flow as well as agenda setting at work. Yet the line between media and consumer has blurred, so everything is much more difficult to categorize and decipher. If consumers are determining what's popular to look at - and are pointing consumers (or viewers) to specific sites - but big media companies like Conde Nast control the sites people post on, who is who? Have the consumers fed into the media and thus become part of the media themselves?
Thanks, Mairin. Interesting questions. There's even a word -- prosumer (a combination of producer and consumer) -- that expresses, to some extent, this hybrid role. It hasn't been used strictly or even primarily in terms of media, though it certainly seems to apply. (I hadn't heard of the word before your comment started me poking around, though it was coined by Alvin Toffler back in 1979.) Wikipedia has a good article on it with some more leads.
My poking around also turned up an interesting paper "Conceptualizing the dynamics between users and businesses in the media and entertainment domain," from a Dutch research group. It looks at "the gap between theoretical notions about users of media and
technology and actual use practices that can be found in the online media and entertainment
domain."
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