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Historically, word-of-mouth spreading of an idea could be slow being
dependent on face-to-face communication or the technology of
communication extant at the time. Idea spreading by
traveling merchants and friars in the medieval period moved
slowly. Mass mail systems, then the telephone and the telegraph in
the later centuries until the 1990s were faster. Mass advertising using
newspapers and later TV sped up general communication of an
idea/offering by supplementing the word-of-mouth process. Today the
internet with email messaging and social media platforms (plus highly
targetted advertising) has dramatically sped the transfer of ideas and
opinions whether objectively true or false. On social platforms, this
opinion expression is bound up with structural elements such as
'comments' and 'likes/dislikes' mechanisms.

Legitimacy, the source of an opinion/idea lends credence to its worth
or not. The opinion of a Nobel Laureate in physics on the nature of the
universe carries more social legitimacy than that of Everyman in the
street. The clothing choices of a female supermodel have greater
weight than the fashion selections of Everywoman in the street. In
short, some people's opinions have greater social legitimacy than
others. This is the world of opinion-leading and followers, which leads
us to patterns of diffusion.

Patterns of Diffusion: Growth

Opinion feedback drives the spread of an idea across a network from
'no one knows' to (practically) 'everyone knows'. Potentially millions of
individual interactions and millions of individuals' opinions are
involved. Each of the agents involved has their own attributes that
influence both the worth of their opinion, their willingness to adopt a
new idea or offering, and their personal willingness to pass an opinion
at all. Diffusion theorists have sought to model the spread of new ideas
through the population, the most common such model being the
logistics curve.

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