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I have just finished reading the book "Why Societies Need Dissent" by University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, and I would like to recommend it to people on the SOCNET discussion list.  Sunstein talks extensively about information cascades (a term I first came across in Duncan Watts's "Six Degrees") and about a variant he calls "reputational cascades."  The idea is that a consensus on some issue can spread rapidly through a network, stifling dissent, and thus depriving society of potentially useful information and arguments.

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Alan Reifman, Ph. D.,  Associate Professor
Dept of Human Dev't and Family Studies
College of Human Sciences
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409-1162
(806) 742-3000
http://www.hs.ttu.edu/hdfs/Faculty/reifman.htm

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