Are digital political influencers opinion leaders?

the role played by people in the flow of digital communication

Abstract

The part played by people in the flow of mass communication is the subtitle of the classic book written by Eliah Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, published in 1955: Personal Influence. In it, the authors give greater density to the concept of opinion leaders in order to understand how messages produced, reproduced, and circulated on a mass scale exert their effects on public opinion through fundamental social mediations. In the era of digital communication, the current almost exclusive concentration of research on structural characteristics, affordances, curation systems, and generative tools has drawn greater attention to what communication does to people, instead of what people do with communication and more specifically to the roles that individuals occupying prominent positions in networks of digital relationships have played in contemporary public debate: the (digital) political influencers. As part of an initial effort of bibliographic organization, this article aims to analyze how the literature dedicated to political influencers defines this social category, especially with regard to its relationship with the classic concept of opinion leadership. The central question is: are we dealing with a new phenomenon, or merely a new version of something long known, catalogued, and theoretically organized?