Mark, am I representing you correctly?

[koganbot]

Tom's been posting on both his Tumblrs about "opinion leaders," his questions seeming to be: to what extent are there such creatures; do those outfits who claim to have the special ability to identify opinion leaders actually know what they're doing; and where these creatures have apparently been identified, is there any special value in trying to influence them in particular (influencing the influential, as it were)? I've been posting on the comment threads, and Dave chimed in on his own Tumblr.

I may or may not swoop into the subject from my own angle, but first I have a question for dubdobdee:

Tom entitles one of his posts "Now I know why Mark S hated the word so much." I replied with this:

Except "influence" as you've been using it here and in Blackbeard is exactly how Mark thinks it should be used, to reference actual power in the world. What Mark was objecting to was the unearned authority of "The [New Band] cite a range of influences from the Velvet Underground to the Fall," or "[Supposedly Valuable Rock Critic] has influenced everybody from Chuck Eddy to Tom Ewing." So what you guys are (and Mark is) trying to understand is who has power and what actual influence/resistance it engenders etc., whereas what Mark is objecting to is the attempt to borrow power by invocation and proxy.

So Mark, is this a good representation of your ideas?

(I'm referring back to a convo that occurred in many places including here and here.)

Of course, the syndrome that Tom is criticizing goes "We can give you access to power by giving you access to opinion leaders" as if the mechanism of influence needed no explaining beyond this.

Other posts in Tom's series:

http://blackbeardblog.tumblr.com/post/85530795/mmmm-nodes

http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/85722965/finding-the-first-mouth

http://blackbeardblog.tumblr.com/post/85248557/conversation-is-nomadic

I'm considering "Conversation is nomadic" to be relevant to the discussion of opinion leaders because certain nomads carry other people with them on their journeys - e.g. the fellow whose blog I'm linking to.

Comments

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I am under the impression that Mark's objections are broader than that: that when someone says a band is influenced by the Velvet Underground, there is a very wide range of meanings that could carry, many different things that "influence" could mean, and that the writer shouldn't choose one wide and muddy word when they could say just what they mean. For instance, don't say "the Ramones were influenced by the Velvet Underground", say "the Ramones picked up the idea of a pretty pop tune overlaid with a godawful racket from the Velvet Underground".

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Been reading this, not sure I have anything to add, except that it made me ponder my own usage of word "influence" - it turns out I don't like to use it very much, because it makes the discussion about creative/authorial intent. And I usually don't know anything about the creative/authorial intent, or can't be bothered to find out. XD; Like, if I read an interview with dude X saying "act Y's work Z was part of the conversation happening in my head when I made W" that would be one thing, but I wouldn't feel comfortable writing "X was influenced by Y" if what's happening is "W sounds quite a lot like Z". And when other people write "influence" it makes me wonder if they're not making that unsupported leap.

I mean, I suppose you could say X was unconsciously influenced by Y, like if there were transitiveness or they randomly heard it on the radio (how would you know, again?), but you could also have parallel paths of discovery in which case Y has nothing to do with X. Which would actually make for an interesting piece if you could draw the logical link between the two. But to me influence has to be acknowledged by the party in question to be a useful concept. And even then it is usually not useful, because musicians are inarticulate.