I've recently read the above titled paper authored by Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman. The paper explores the activity on a network under a set of update rules designed to simulate opinion formation. Opinions are either black or white (in the model, colouring the nodes in a graph either black or white). Opinions are updated by a function which takes in to account the colour of neighbouring nodes.
While this paper has some interesting theoretical points and results, I think that the assumptions which link it to opinion formation in the real world are very weak. Firstly, an opinion is not really defined. This is a problem common in the literature. Is an opinion a linguistic construct? Is it a belief that requires no articulation or resultant action? In the written world, especially the blogosphere, it is trivial to pick up some snippet of text and regurgitate it with little or no consideration or analysis - is that a person's opinion? Secondly, I'm not convinced that the influence of other's on my opinion can be modeled in such a direct manner - by examining the opinions of my neighbours and updating my opinion. However, I think it would be simple to update the model with more complexity (e.g. factors that captured a notion of trust, or alignment which would impact the potential to influence).
The paper is certainly worth a read, but the search for a theory of opinion goes on...
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