What is influence, what is a roadmap, what is a story?
On timing, the Fates, the LA metro and Emma Grede.
There have been a handful of seemingly unrelated, but very much-related-to-me cultural moments in the last few weeks that have me thinking about how influence operates in our lives.
They’ve shown me that influence isn’t fixed, and everything that’s wrapped into influence, like the power or the lesson, will bend to the time it’s in. AND, most importantly, the reaction of the influenced will bend even further.
Two examples:
The LA Metro influencer: LA Metro's social team has been building a following for a while now, but more recently, a handful of influencers have been documenting their journeys on the Metro, often spending time dispelling common myths of why people think the Metro sucks. The content is arriving at the exact moment the city needs a little influencer sheen as rebuilds and expands for LA28. Shoutout to THREE new stations opening on the D line May 8th!
Read No Bad Day’s write up on this!
Emma Grede's "career killer" circuit: Emma Grede, co-founder of Skims and Good American, has been making the rounds for her new book Start With Yourself and in several interviews has doubled down on calling WFH culture "career suicide." She is, as we all know, not the first person to say this. But, the timing of this book tour along with: how delicate/terrible/frustrating the job market is right now, coming off a run where remote work ruled, AI™, AND the fact that she is a Black woman, her comments are sparking a different level of discourse than say, an entry-level manager saying that to their new hire
Both of these examples lean heavily on 1) societal infrastructure and 2) timing. It’s like in Hercules, when the Fates told Hades that “the planets will align ever so nicely” so that his destiny to rule could be fulfilled. LA Metrofluencers and Emma Grede are the Hadeses in these examples, and I don’t believe they’d be punching above their weight if these moments of influence happened even a few months ago.
I want to use Emma as an example of the point I think I’m trying to make. Emma’s advice about remote work came from !her career, which means !her advice is also !her story and !her roadmap. I think story, roadmap, and influence are different.
A story is someone telling you what happened to them. Very “back in my day” energy. You can take it or leave it, it doesn’t really matter because all you really have to do as the receiver is smile and nob.
A roadmap is tactical advice, usually from someone with credentials or experience, who you’re more likely to listen to because there’s something actionable attached and the person delivering it has some authority.
Influence, to me, fits somewhere in between the story and the roadmap. It has the ability to change behavior but doesn’t always announce itself as advice, which leads to more opinions™ because people can’t really tell how they’re supposed to ingest whatever you’re saying to them. We can dismiss a story our parents tell us. We know to listen when an expert is telling us what to do. But someone on the internet? A soundbite on a career podcast? You didn't go looking for that person, they just showed up on your timeline with an opinion that sounds like it couuuuuuld be about you, but you’re not sure.
I think there are a lot of instances on the internet where people are telling their story, but the audience is hearing a roadmap. And the gap between those two things is where the mud happens.
Nothing is new under the scroll
A few older studies that tie into this:
In 1944, a sociologist named Paul Lazarsfeld got funding from a magazine company to study how women made decisions. The magazine sent Lazarsfeld and a team to Decatur, Illinois where they interviewed 800 women about what they bought, what they wore, which movies they saw.
The finding was that people didn’t get their opinions from media directly, rather from someone in their life who consumed more media and passed it along. Katz and Lazarsfeld called this person an “opinion leader.”
A year later, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl published a paper in Psychiatry about what happens when that closeness is simulated. They studied the relationship people formed with TV hosts and radio personalities and called it a parasocial interaction: you feel like you know someone, but the relationship only goes one direction.
A 2023 study out of Cornell asked people to share their last 20 Facebook posts, then had separate groups of viewers look at those posts and answer questions about what the original poster was like as a person. The viewers' perceptions consistently differed from how the original posters saw themselves. People viewing the posts were constructing a version of the person from fragments, and the lead researcher, Qi Wang, described it as "outsourced meaning-making" where the audience takes isolated pieces of content and assembles them into a coherent identity that the original poster never intended.
Clearly, everything we’re doing now we’ve done before. Social proof and parasocial relationships are some of the oldest patterns in how people make decisions, but the roles have collapsed to the point where the opinion leader and TV host and neighbor and mentor are presented as one and we haven’t figured out how to sort what we need from them.
They do everything, and we react to all of it!
IM SAT
Ahh, I see.