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Influence Ripples + Tipping Points

Thursday, January 31, 2008 | 12:30 PM

in Markets | Psychology/Sentiment | Web/Tech | Weblogs

I was doing some prep work for my panel appearance on next week's MoneyTech conference, when I came across David Armano (Critical Mass) and his neat illustration below.

He created this after reading Clive Thompson's "Un-Tipping Point."

David's supposition? While the Tipping point may be an overstatement, there are many different levels of influencers -- A-listers, Mainstream Media, ordinary bloggers -- but each can influence the other, as well as the general public.

Add to that George Soros' theory of Reflexivity:

(1) Reflexivity is best observed under special conditions where investor bias grows and spreads throughout the investment arena. Examples of factors that may give rise to this bias include (a) equity leveraging or (b) the trend-following habits of speculators.

(2) Reflexivity appears intermittently since it is most likely to be revealed under certain conditions; i.e., the equilibrium process's character is best considered in terms of probabilities.

(3) Investors' observation of and participation in the capital markets may at times influence valuations AND fundamental conditions or outcomes.

Back to David Armano: he visualizes the MSM/Blogosphere/Social Network Universe as shown below. I don't know how to visualize this (4th dimension? different color dotted lines?) but if we were to add Market Reflexivity into the illustration, we would then see another layer of how the market (5? or 1A, 2A, 3A, etc) influences the various parties (1, 2, 3, 4), and how they in term feedback into the market.

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Visual Thinking