Re-reading Personal Influence in an age of social media

ABSTRACT

This article explores the many parallels – but also discontinuities – between the interpersonal communication medium and research enterprise pursued by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld in Personal Influence (1955) and the social media agenda and associated research enterprise of Facebook and Instagram. The essay begins with a discussion of ‘personal influence’ as the concept was first developed in the 1950s, outlining its historical context and initial limited application. It then shows how key ideas of Personal Influence can be seen as having been applied and embedded in the very fabric of social media itself. Yet Facebook represents a significant departure from both Katz and Lazarsfeld’s research agenda and from the market research and information regime of traditional media. Their audience research work of 1955 was avowedly public and transparent in its commitments. They were providing a market research product for advertising agencies, advertisers and media providers to re-purpose. In contrast, Facebook is private, proprietorial and opaque in its research provision. Facebook combines, under one roof, the roles of market research provider, media provider, and advertising agency. By prioritizing the collection and analysis of individual user profiles, Facebook has created a media enterprise that seamlessly integrates user-generated content, data collection, analysis, strategy, media provision and associated advertising machinery.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• Personal Influence
• Paul Lazarsfeld
• influencers
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Elihu Katz has recently issued a guarded repudiation of core concepts of Personal Influence: that of ‘two step flow of communication’ where communication is mediated by an informal group(s) and ‘opinion leaders’. In his work with Yonatan Fialkoff (2017), he has urged their ‘retirement’. The two-step model was inaccurate as ‘it involves more than two steps; it takes a network’; while the ‘opinion leader’ was an inaccurate fit for the ‘everyday influentials’ characterizing interpersonal group dynamics. Ironically, at the precise moment that the vocabulary of the influencer was being repurposed to create a whole new cadre of micro-celebrities Katz and Fialkoff were wanting to ‘retire’ the very concepts that were being hardwired into social media’s very operations.

2. Katz and Fialkoff (2017, 87) mistakenly counterpose the relation between traditional media and personal influence as one of ‘competition’ rather than ‘interconnection’. This is more likely an expression of the subsequent uptake of Personal Influence which tended to counterpose the communication and media of distinct rather than interconnected worlds.

3. One important gateway is to other media content – in particular news and information media – which are simultaneously displaced from their central place in monitoring our social worlds. Ironically, social media now provides an aggregator role – offering a guide to the news but also a substitution for that news. For Katz and Lazarsfeld, informal groups made media and our social worlds accessible and legible; since the arrival of Facebook the news and information media have a vastly reduced role as an optional source of news and information about the world.

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Tom O’Regan

Tom O'Regan was a key figure in the development of cultural and media studies in Australia. His positions included Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The University of Queensland (2004-20), Director of the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy (1999-2002, Griffith University), and Director of the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication (1996-8, Murdoch University). He was Australia's UNESCO Professor of Communication from 2001 to 2003, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2002. He co-founded the media and cultural studies journal Continuum and edited it from 1987 to 1995