Mark, am I representing you correctly?

[koganbot]

Tom's been posting on both his Tumblrs about "opinion leaders," his questions seeming to be: to what extent are there such creatures; do those outfits who claim to have the special ability to identify opinion leaders actually know what they're doing; and where these creatures have apparently been identified, is there any special value in trying to

Comments

[martinskidmore]

I am under the impression that Mark's objections are broader than that: that when someone says a band is influenced by the Velvet Underground, there is a very wide range of meanings that could carry, many different things that "influence" could mean, and that the writer shouldn't choose one wide and muddy word when they could say just what they mean. For instance, don't say "the Ramones were influenced by the Velvet Underground", say "the Ramones picked up the idea of a pretty pop tune overlaid with a godawful racket from the Velvet Underground".

[koganbot]

But there's nothing wrong with using vague, broad terms when vagueness and broadness are called for. Must you always elaborate on what you mean? Can't you leave that for the reader?

"She heard from him," "They threatened the town," etc. These don't say what what she heard or which medium he used (phone, courier, fax?); nor do they tell us the nature of the threat or the name of the town. Perhaps the writer doesn't know and this is all a subject for further research. Or perhaps getting more specific may carry its own distractions. ("Oh, he used a courier? How could he afford to use a courier?" - when really all that's important at this moment is to know that he got in touch with her.) Or in the Stooges' lines "She wants somethin', she wants somethin', tonight/She wants somethin', she wants somethin', all right/But I can't help, ’cause I'm not right (and it's always this way)." Well, what does she want? SHE DOESN'T KNOW!

[dubdobdee]

"what do you mean when you say yr you're influenced by the ramones?"
"I DON'T KNOW!"

this is an interesting exchange, obviously (because unlikely), but it needs the follow-up to make it interesting

[dubdobdee]

frank and martin are both somewhat correct -- it was a multivalent complaint, about sloppy usage as well as unjustified claims

[dubdobdee]

(deleted comment is pre-corrected version of the above)

[koganbot]

Yes, but aren't these invocations at least sometimes interesting, even when not elaborated upon? Would you necessarily want people to stop naively invoking the gods on their behalf? It's true that most people aren't fessing up to the fact that these are invocations, but then again, most people aren't very self-analytical.

Perhaps the envoy who serves two masters is secretly trying to become his own man.

Can there, someday - after you've written your book and mastered Kuhn, of course (or not) - be a Mark Sinker Anatomy Of Influence to supersede the flawed Bloomian Anxiety of same?

[petronia]

Been reading this, not sure I have anything to add, except that it made me ponder my own usage of word "influence" - it turns out I don't like to use it very much, because it makes the discussion about creative/authorial intent. And I usually don't know anything about the creative/authorial intent, or can't be bothered to find out. XD; Like, if I read an interview with dude X saying "act Y's work Z was part of the conversation happening in my head when I made W" that would be one thing, but I wouldn't feel comfortable writing "X was influenced by Y" if what's happening is "W sounds quite a lot like Z". And when other people write "influence" it makes me wonder if they're not making that unsupported leap.

I mean, I suppose you could say X was unconsciously influenced by Y, like if there were transitiveness or they randomly heard it on the radio (how would you know, again?), but you could also have parallel paths of discovery in which case Y has nothing to do with X. Which would actually make for an interesting piece if you could