influence,network,and public opinion formation
public opinion formation
INTRODUCTION
In the 1940’s and 50’s, Paul Lazarsfeld, Elihu Katz, and colleagues (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet 1968) formulated a breakthrough theory of public opinion formation that sought to reconcile the role of media influence with the growing realization that in a variety of decision-making scenarios, ranging from political to personal, individuals may be influenced more by exposure to each other than to the
media. According to their theory, illustrated schematically in figure 1, a small minority of opinion leaders act as intermediaries between the mass media and the majority of society. Because information, and thereby influence “flows” from the media through opinion leaders to their respective followers, Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) called their model the “two-step flow” of communication, in contrast with the then paradigmatic one-step, or “hypodermic,” model which treated individuals as atomized objects of media influence (Bineham 1988).
In the decades after the introduction of the two-step flow, the idea of opinion leaders, or influentials as they are also called (Merton 1968), came to occupy a central place in the literatures of the diffusion of innovations (Coleman, Katz and Menzel 1966; Rogers 1995; Valente 1995), communications research (Weimann 1994), and marketing (Chan
