Cascade Elements
Availability cascades occur in a society via public discourse (e.g. the public sphere and the news media) or over social networks—sets of linked actors in one or more of several roles. These actors process incoming information to form their private beliefs according to various rules, both rational and semi-rational. The semi-rational rules include the heuristics, in particular the availability heuristic. The actors then behave and express their public beliefs according to self-interest, which might cause their publicly expressed beliefs to deviate from their privately held beliefs. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell defines three significant roles: connectors, mavens ("information specialists"), and salesmen ("persuaders"). Kuran and Sunstein emphasize the role of availability entrepreneurs, agents willing to invest resources into promoting a belief in order to derive some personal benefit. Other availability entrepreneurs with opposing interests may wage availability counter-campaigns. Other key roles include journalists and politicians, both of which are subject to economic and reputational pressures, the former in competition in the media, the latter for political status. As resources (e.g. attention and money) are limited, beliefs compete with one another in the "availability market". A given incident and subsequent availability campaign may succeed in raising the availability of one issue at the expense of other issues.
Read more about this topic: Availability Cascade
Famous quotes containing the words cascade and/or elements:
““End of tomorrow.
Don’t try to start the car or look deeper
Into the eternal wimpling of the sky: luster
On luster, transparency floated onto the topmost layer
Until the whole thing overflows like a silver
Wedding cake or Christmas tree, in a cascade of tears.””
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)