Cultural diffusion

Long before there were media of mass communication, ideas and practices found ways to traverse vast distances. One would think that broadcasting and the internet would have superseded the interpersonal networks that are implicit here, but they have not; the media, new and old, have a share in the flow of influence, but they are only part of the process, even today. Diffusion research seeks to follow innovations as they spread, within and between social structures, over time and space. Focused on the flow of influence, diffusion research unravels the mix of formal advocacy, informal persuasion, identification, imitation, contagion, resistance, withdrawal, and the like. Thus, the study of diffusion amounts to observing the microdynamics-the “retailing,” so to speak-of this more or less voluntary form of social and cultural change that is based on communication-in contrast, say, to simultaneous invention, evolutionary change, or change imposed by fiat or by force. Interest in how ideas and things travel, and how they aggregate, is integral to most

of the social sciences and the humanities, and to some of the natural sciences as well. Early anthropology and cultural history, for example, tried to trace the progress of civilization (monotheism, alphabet, etc.) from its supposed origin in the “fertile crescent.” Anthropologists and geographers found interest in the spatial distribution of certain “traits” and in the direction of their movement. Rural sociologists have had a longstanding interest in the diffusion and adoption of new farm practices, and in the role of agricultural extension agencies in their promotion; for a while, they joined with anthropologists in fostering “modernization” overseas. Historians of religion have been fascinated by the rapid diffusion of Christianity and Islam in the old days, and nowadays in the spread of Mormonism and new-age doctrines. Linguists are interested in the geography of speech. Students of fashion, folklore, literature, art, and archeology have investigated the diffusion of style, while social scientists have tracked the diffusion of technical change, and lately of social movements. Social psychologists have long nurtured a passion for ostensibly unstructured forms of “collective behavior” that include news, rumor, gossip, crowds, moral panics,

audiences, and public opinion. And, of course, epidemiologists of the flu or of HIV and other infectious diseases are continually occupied with the dynamics of their spread, and with the success of attempts to combat them. Meaning much the same thing, marketing researchers now speak of computer-driven word-of-mouth as “viral marketing.” Even terrorist organizations seem to imitate each other’s changing tactics. Several of the classics of sociology have tried to generalize across these domains.

Gabriel Tarde (1969 [1890]) went farthest, perhaps, in his Laws of Imitation, arguing (against his contemporary, Emile Durkheim), that sociology could ill afford to overlook invention and influence as the pathways of social change. In the same spirit, Georg Simmel (1957 [1904]) saw emulation as the engine of change whereby the symbolic striving for upward mobility led each social class to emulate the class above, thus constraining the upper classes to seek ever new ways to differentiate themselves. Thorstein Veblen’s (1899) “conspicuous consumption” is obviously related. In rebuttal, Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1941) rejected the idea of “trickle-down” diffusion in favor of a theory of exchange whereby the lower classes export “raw materials” such as cotton or folksongs to be processed and re-exported by the upper classes. Sorokin dwelled on the agents of diffusion such as missionaries, troubadours, traveling salesmen, and the like, on the routes they charted, and on their salesmanship, so to speak, all as part of his larger interest in social and cultural mobility. Innis (1951) studied the tension between media of space (papyrus, printing) and media of time (pyramids, canonic texts), and between custodians of existing knowledge and their challengers. Multiple editions of Everett Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovations (1994) over a forty-year period catalog the increase in diffusion studies, as if to illustrate the “S-curve” that has come to characterize the trajectory of innovations that “take off.” Gladwell’s (2000) The Tipping Point has popularized the field, as have “small world” studies such as Milgram’s (Travers and Milgram 1969), and, even earlier, Pool and Gurevitch (Gurevitch 1961). These classics, it should be noted, are flawed by an over-emphasis on “successful” innovations to the neglect of innovations that fail (cf. Mosse 1975; Strang and Soule 1998). In spite of the seeming centrality of these concerns, it comes as a surprise that

serious sociological studies of diffusion have been so sparse and so sporadic. While anthropologists, archeologists, and linguists may have continued uninterrupted, sociologists, geographers, and others seem to have abandoned the subject between the 1940s and the 1970s. This may be because Durkheim’s macro sociological emphasis prevailed over Tarde’s, or more likely because the prospect of media influence prevailed over the interpersonal. A still better explanation, however, is that the postwar surge of empirical sociology had not yet forged the tools to cope with the social networks that channel the flow of interpersonal influence. For example, it took some twenty years for Paul Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University to progress from rediscovery of the mediating role of interpersonal influence in the mass communications of change (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944) to the incorporation of fullblown social networks in the design of its research (Coleman et al. 1966). Methodologically, this amounted to a wedding of sociometry and survey research, made possible by the ever-increasing capacity of the high-speed computer to track the person-toperson transmission of information and influence. Diffusion research is now riding high on the coattails of the explosion of computational research in the social sciences (Watts 2003).