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Key to the suffrage movement’s remarkable turnaround in the 1908-1920 period was a swath of new elite supporters: women with high social standing and powerful, influential men who served prominently among the movement’s most active framers, funders, and facilitators. They provided underwriting, funding, and access to government leaders, legislators, and other important influencers. With their own celebrity-like aura, they also brought mainstream media attention to the suffrage movement as popular writers, publicists, editors, and publishers. This chapter uses the insights of social movement theorists who focus on success to assess the concrete actions of these elites and their media influence. In that final, determinative decade, they enlivened both the stalled state-by-state suffrage campaigns and the long-awaited passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

This chapter explores the motivations for innovation adoption in the past and present. It is built around a discussion of the complicated ways indigenous people incorporated (some) European materials into their material culture through a culturally contingent process of re-definition and negotiation. This fraught process is contrasted with common-sense adoption narratives built around a scaffolding of economic rationalism and superior functionality. The chapter argues against this sort of post hoc ergo propter hoc interpretation, suggesting instead that the choice to adopt an innovation is best understood through the lens of specific social and interpersonal relationships. In order to shift our perspective away from more traditional adoption narratives focused on influential or aggrandizing male elites, the chapter looks at shifting patterns of community and identity linked together by women and children through phatic labor. The role of kin – biological and fictive – is emphasized.

The fourth chapter of Fighting Visibility analyzes interviews with female UFC fighters to consider how they navigate social media in their jobs. Building followers online, engaging with fans, and promoting sponsors as micro-influencers is an undercompensated and often invisible form of labor that leverages a gendered tax on female athletes, particularly those who do not perform the traditional forms of femininity that are more valued in popular culture. Female fighters freely undertake this aspirational labor because they hope the exposure online will convince the UFC to promote them or that their efforts to engage fans will appeal to sponsors. Instead, visibility on social media remains an unwritten and unpaid bullet point on the UFC fighter job description that often fails to deliver the assumed benefits that athletes seek.

This article explores the many parallels – but also discontinuities – between the interpersonal communication medium and research enterprise pursued by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld in Personal Influence (1955) and the social media agenda and associated research enterprise of Facebook and Instagram. The essay begins with a discussion of ‘personal influence’ as the concept was first developed in the 1950s, outlining its historical context and initial limited application. It then shows how key ideas of Personal Influence can be seen as having been applied and embedded in the very fabric of social media itself. Yet Facebook represents a significant departure from both Katz and Lazarsfeld’s research agenda and from the market research and information regime of traditional media. Their audience research work of 1955 was avowedly public and transparent in its commitments. They were providing a market research product for advertising agencies, advertisers and media providers to re-purpose. In contrast, Facebook is private, proprietorial and opaque in its research provision. Facebook combines, under one roof, the roles of market research provider, media provider, and advertising agency. By prioritizing the collection and analysis of individual user profiles, Facebook has created a media enterprise that seamlessly integrates user-generated content, data collection, analysis, strategy, media provision and associated advertising machinery.

This chapter considers what dynamical models might tell about what has and has not been observed. This includes dynamics of opinions and social contacts which are time dependent and fully coupled. It considers Turing instability as a mechanism for generating patchiness in population models with both activator and inhibitory mechanisms as well as homophily. It considers how external events may drive avalanches of activity on peer-to-peer networks and also the possible exploitation of topic/interest-defined subsets of networks. It presents applications of Twitter data analysis in real time situations and to strategic decision-making in marketing.

This chapter provides a critical framework for understanding the symbiotic relationship between hip hop and Dubsmash. Influenced by scholarship in critical race theory, gender studies, and hip hop, this chapter explores how Renegades have forged an inclusive digital community through Dubsmash. This chapter argues that Dubsmash’s culture of giving credit is the nexus from which a shared sense of values grows, one that encourages Dubsmashers to recognize the work of other artists. To demonstrate this, this chapter uses Jalaiah Harmon, the “Original Renegade,” as a case study. Harmon’s origin story from anonymous viral dance creator to full-blown celebrity status demonstrates how hip hop values operate in the Dubsmash community.

This chapter explores how Dubsmash and other music-based apps can become fundamental digital spaces for hip hop artists not only to shape a distinct identity but also to establish their careers, even as the apps also threaten to render these artists invisible in moments of virality that divorce content from creator. By closely reading the digital presence of Renegades TisaKorean, Brooklyn Queen, and Kayla Nicole Jones, this chapter explore how musicians position themselves as both music and dance content creators on Dubsmash to gain a following. The case of TisaKorean—the rapper who introduced the world to the now-iconic dance move the Mop—speaks to the power of going viral in the digital age. Likewise, hip hop artist Brooklyn Queen and comedian and rapper Kayla Nicole Jones have been able to leverage their popularity on Dubsmash, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to cement their music careers.

This chapter reviews the rise of informal transnational networks, like the International Competition Network (ICN), and highlights the highly re-distributive nature of competition policy. It provides the working definitions of legitimacy, effectiveness, and efficiency and suggests that each state more actively assess ICN work products and other support in order to judge the costs and benefits of using them in its own system. It also points out how legitimacy issues are likely to be acute the more states’ economies differ from those of the key ICN influencers. The chapter elaborates the meaning of ICN’s design, which implies that states may not be able to trust their national competition authorities (NCAs) to act in their national interest. It provides a top-to-bottom analysis of the ICN’s working methods and substantive coverage with recommendations for the future of the network.

Drawing on the background developed in the second chapter, this chapter examines specifically online phenomena, scrutinizing the role of influencers, celebrities, and famous people in general. Cultural evolutionists talk about prestige bias in this regard: one can make use of signs of deference, respect, or simply check from whom other people are learning, and choose those individuals as cultural models. This tendency gives us today, in large and opaque networks of cultural transmission—the story goes—the celebrities “famous for being famous,” if not the danger of radical proselytism from charismatic leaders. We will see, however, that experiments and data tell something more nuanced: celebrities’ influence works only in specific conditions and it is far from being a blind force. Recent internet trends, such as the rise of micro-influencers, figures who are expert in their domain, and who can engage in direct relationship with their followers, are consistent with this picture.