. Followers and subscribers being examples. There’s no way to know whether followers/subscribers have read.

This might mean that social systems artificially lump different kinds of users into the category “lurker” simply because there’s little to distinguish different habits of passive consumption and participation.

Then there’s the fact, too, that audiences (passive included) are motivation and incentive for influencers like pundits, critics, and experts.

A symbiotic relationship can also exist among those who identify through influencers they follow. Users who seek status may believe they gain status by @naming, @replying, and retweeting pundits, for example. Pundits need status-seekers not only for their audience growth but as incentive to sustain their punditry.

This all gets interesting when you consider that in many ways, conversational media populations grow on the basis of mutually beneficial dynamics and tacit or explicit relationships between different kinds of user types. It really does take all types to make a community work — I don’t think we yet understand the pairs and groupings that produce different kinds of social content and activity.

“Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large cascades of influence are driven not by influentials but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals.”

There’s no arguing with this in network terms, in audience behavior terms, in sociological or cultural terms.

However, that systems reproduction or social network effects, which might produce these results, is not the only possible explanation and certainly not an adequately causal explanation from social perspectives.

That is, if user behavior is viewed from a user centric perspective.

To wit, there are some psychological explanations that might be worth mapping to your research. They would involve the motivation some “easily influenced” individuals may have in associating with celebrity, in identifying with mentors, experts, and leaders, in being seen in their company, and in being seen communicating about, to, or through them (e.g. @replies, retweets).

These effects can be covered by communication-theoretical arguments. And they may have implications for an approach to building or populating social networks organically.

For example, incentives for expert presence and visibility, constraints on communication, channeling of audiences topically or culturally, and other social architectural approaches may be just as valuable in “growing” an online culture as the influential/influenced pairing recommended here. (And frankly, would amount to the same thing but explained differently).

cheers,
adrian

Regards – TO’B
MotiveQuest LLC