Every time you pass along a piece of information in a social network—online or offline—its ultimate popularity depends on whether your audience decides to tell other people, their audience, about it. You face a simple question: “Is this news right for my audience?” Then your audience applies the same calculation to determine if they should pass it along to their friends: “Is this right for my audience?” And their audience, the audience of your audience, makes the same judgment before telling an entirely separate group of people: “Is this right for my audience?” With each step, the news travels
Every time you pass along a piece of information in a social network—online or offline—its ultimate popularity depends on whether your audience decides to tell other people, their audience, about it. You face a simple question: “Is this news right for my audience?” Then your audience applies the same calculation to determine if they should pass it along to their friends: “Is this right for my audience?” And their audience, the audience of your audience, makes the same judgment before telling an entirely separate group of people: “Is this right for my audience?” With each step, the news travels further from its original source. “To make popular content, it’s not enough to know your friends or your followers,” said Jure Leskovec, a computer scientist who studies online behavior at Stanford University. “It’s about knowing the friends of your friends and the followers of your followers. For something to go big, it has to be interesting to those beyond your immediate audience—the audience of your audience.” If we share information with the people we’re connected to, another way to ask the question, Why do people share what they share? is to ask, What connects people? Among the most established and consistent principles in the organization of humans is an idea called “homophily.” It’s a funny-looking word that communicates a simple idea: You are like the people around you—your friends, your spouse, your online networks, and your office relationships. There is a related idea, “pr...
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The power of women seeing Wonder Woman and crying
