A quick, probably unrelated to my previous post comment that I was just thinking of.
Social Networking Sites. In particular, Twitter; a site which by it's own language encourages you to "follow" your friends and be "followed" in turn. The act of following suggests that someone has influence over you or that you have influence over them. In a sense, this is true. Once you've started to develop a Twitter network, assuming that you read updates and your followers do the same, exposure to the other's ideas can potentially have an influence on each other's thoughts and actions. But there's no specific quality of the network that causes this. You could have a lot of followers because you write exquisite poetry, because they were people you met on the train, or because you're someone famous.
As time progresses, the media becomes less important than the potential of connections and ideas it represents as a network. CNN now creates news stories out of Twitter tweets; this adds to the vitality of the network, not because of the structure that Twitter provides, but because more people want to develop connections with that node (in this case, individual) and incorporate it into their network.
What Twitter also represents is the strength of the imagined community. As the network widens, the individual node connections become less important than the whole. Twitter isn't giving any one of Stephen Colbert's million + "followers" a legitimate connection with him. Colbert is not even legitimately a node in the network; he follows zero people, and likely maintains the account through a hired intern. The network being created is that oriented around the product of Stephen Colbert and the million other nodes in the network who influence each other in their discussions of that product.
The term Social Networking Site is a misnomer. Twitter is a physical network in the sense that it facilitates communication between the nodes of preexisting social networks, but it does not establish these networks. Even strangers who are brought together by the power of twitter are not brought together because of what Twitter is, but rather what it does. Following a person's tweets in and of itself does not define power relationships within the network (as some celebrities seem to think), as the person with the most followers becomes a symbol of the network rather than the biggest node.
Anyway, I don't know if that made sense, but it just came to mind randomly when I was out walking before, so I wanted to get it out.
Hi Sam. Although I like your hunch that since celebrities with a million plus followers don't follow people, they are not real nodes. However, I think celebrities are a bit of the exceptions on twitter. Even so, the importance of being a node is your power to disseminate information out to many people. Even if a bit of information is one way, you are still spreading it. Remember that a lot of what is passed on on twitter are links to information, not just what some celeb is eating for lunch. Also, consider those who are important local nodes and pass on the info. The power of the retweet is actually quite huge, in my opinion. For example, the State Department does not follow many regular people. But when they are followed and retweeted by a fairly important local node, say in Africa, the information being produce by the department reaches a whole new group of people.
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