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6. SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION 149

interactive electronic networking people link together in widely dis-
persed locals, exchange information, share new ideas, and transact any
number of pursuits. Virtual networking provides a flexible means for cre-
ating diffusion structures to serve given purposes, expanding their mem-
bership, extending them geographically, and disbanding them when they
have outlived their usefulness.
Although structural interconnectedness provides potential diffusion
paths, psychosocial factors largely determine the fate of what diffuses
through those paths. In other words, it is the transactions that occur within
social relationships rather than the ties, themselves, that explain adoptive
behavior. The course of diffusion is best understood by considering the
interactions among psychosocial determinants of adoptive behavior, the
properties of innovations that facilitate or impede adoption, and the net-
work structures that provide the social pathways of influence. Sociostruc-
tural and psychological determinants of adoptive behavior should, there-
fore, be treated as complementary factors in an integrated comprehensive
theory of social diffusion, rather than be cast as rival theories of diffusion.

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