contribute, should, in my best of all possible worlds, be extremely rich and complex (cf. Dianna’s comment). If you mapped all of us into a network as comp/rhet students, for instance, we still would not respond to, say, new books in the field in anything like the same vein. That is why it shocks me that the network models reveal populations acting in such mathematical, “psycho-historical” ways. I can only think this is because, although the brain is complex, social situations can be highly stereotyped and call for only a limited range of responses (like the “social following” that would generate a power law curve--and a best-selling book in the field). The same with the corporate setting: expectations of performance are narrowed; people are slotted by function into smaller repertoires of behavior. And, along the lines Mike is pursuing, the passage above recognizes that it matters how people are processing a situation for their threshold to be reached. Objectification might be a function of reifying the social network, forgetting that it is, in fact, a pattern of human activity.