Comments on: Innovation and Networks of Influence

By: Robin Grant

Robin Grant — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:55:36 +0000

Hey David

Thanks for popping by. You can blame the link on me in the edit, rather than Chris in the writing.

I wanted to link to something that represented the "normal discussions" about influence - and your blog post is pretty representative of that I think, and most importantly pretty easily read and understood by the layperson (which is why I didn't link to this article from May 2006 for example, even though it basically says the same thing, or any one of countless others).

It wasn't meant to mean anything more or less than that...

By: david cushman

david cushman — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:53:02 +0000

Dude you link to my 'usual discussions' of what influence is as if context isn't included in my thinking. Mark and I share much common ground. Maybe take a look at a little more of my work?

By: Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:02:24 +0000

Thanks for the review, Chris. One of the reasons the games engage me is how, in debriefing, people are so often surprised to hear how other people have experienced them. On the face it, these games can seem silly and certainly simple… and then we start to realise that one humans play them, they become complex.

And then there's the temptation to move from seeing them as simple, to weaving more and more complicated explanations for what happened as if there is a perfect description of what's going on. When there isn't. And that's my beef with those blobby diagrams – they render what is rich and complex as merely complicated. As such, they are often profoundly misleading!

By: Chinese Whispers: Interesting thoughts on Influence/Context going on over at We Are Social… « Define the Space

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:24:54 +0000

[...] involved in an interesting discussion over at We Are Social about Innovation and Network [...]

By: Chris Applegate

Chris Applegate — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:30:53 +0000

Joe – your mention of Chinese Whispers is quite apt, as one of the games played was basically that, except it was gestures we had replicate, not words. Two of the three gestures got altered, but the most memorable and pervasive (a slap on one's own bottom) stayed throughout. It was even possible that the two that got altered – they became kissing gestures – did so to fit in with the bottom-slapping. Not sure how much you can draw from one example but whether the more plastic aspects of a message get bent to align with the more concrete ones could be an interesting line of enquiry.

By: Joe Fry

Joe Fry — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:53:30 +0000

This is definitely an important notion; that influence relies on context. Both innovation and influence are inextricably linked to context in many ways, and this context is influenced and arguably formed by interaction, behaviour, language, culture etc.

"It doesn’t account for two-way conversation (or the lack of it), nor can it help explain where and when a message gets altered, or any other form of change that a lack of centralised control can bring about."

This is also a really interesting notion - a concept I refer to as 'chinese whispers' when applied to creative processes and the social development of advertising work / creativity. A decentralised form will always result in bounded processes where messages with a certain degree of plasticity become distorted or altered to make sense in local worlds (eg in different departments of an advertising agency, in different online conversations covering overlapping topics), whilst retaining a degree of concreteness; retaining some kind of universally applicable meaning or value.

In this way, influence, innovation and creativity might appear in different ways and to varying degrees in different 'contexts' or different perspectives of the same or different networks, and are judged and valued subjectively as such.