Page 159 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

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other. Specifying the channels of influence through which innovations are
dispersed provides greater understanding of the diffusion process than
simply plotting the rate of adoptions over time.
There is no single social network in a community that serves all pur-
poses. Different innovations engage different networks. For example,
birth control practices and agricultural innovations diffuse through quite
different networks within the same community (Marshall, 1971). To com-
plicate matters further, the social networks that come into play in initial
phases of diffusion may differ from those that spread the innovation in
subsequent phases (Coleman, Katz, & Menzel, 1966). Adoption rates are
better predicted from the network that subserves a particular innovation
than from a more general communication network. This is not to say that
there is no generality to the diffusion function of network structures. If a
particular social structure subserves varied activities, it can help to spread
the adoption of innovations in each of those activities.
People with many social ties are more apt to adopt innovations than
those who have few ties to others (Rogers & Kincaid, 1981). Adoption
rates increase as more and more people in one’s personal network adopt
an innovation. The effects of social connectedness on adoptive behavior
may be mediated through several processes. Multilinked relations can
foster adoption of innovations because they convey more factual informa-
tion, they mobilize stronger social influences, or it may be that people
with close ties are more receptive to new ideas than those who are socially
estranged. Moreover, in social transactions, people see their associates
adopt innovations as well as talk about them. Multiple modeling alone
can increase adoptive behavior (Bandura, 1986; Perry & Bussey, 1979).
If innovations are highly conspicuous, they can be adopted directly
without requiring interaction among adopters. Television is being increas-
ingly used to forge large single-link structures, in which many people are
linked directly to the media source, but they may have little or no direct
relations with each other. For example, television evangelists attract loyal
followers who adopt the transmitted precepts as guides for how to
behave in situations involving moral, social, and political issues. Al-
though they share a common bond to the media source, most members of
an electronic community may never see each other. Political power struc-
tures are similarly being transformed by the creation of new constituen-
cies tied to a single media source, but with little interconnectedness. Mass
marketing techniques, using computer identification and mass mailings,
create special-interest constituencies that bypass traditional political orga-
nizations in the exercise of political influence.
The evolving information technologies will increasingly serve as a
vehicle for building social networks. Online transactions transcend the
barriers of time and space (Hiltz & Turoff, 1978; Wellman, 1997). Through