I received this article out of the American Journal of Sociology. This particular
             issue starts on page 173 of the July issue of the year 2000. This article caught my
             attention because violence has seemed to be increasing lately in my view and would like to
             read further into the study of how violence is broken down.
             People have wondered and have committed a large amount of effort and time to
             find the reason why and where collective violence breaks out. Analyst have typically
             treated riot events as independent from others, when they are not. People see information
             of one act that can have an affect of future acts of the same nature. one must first
             understand how influences are transmitted, flows, and is received through communication
             process to understand collective violence or riots.
             The first question that the author asks about is the contageousness of the events of
             a riot. She asks whether extremely big riots were more likely to break out than small civil
             disorders where no one was killed or injured, non were arrested, and not a lot of property
             damage was done. The result of the study was that the bigger, more severe riots were
             more prone to being contagious and influential to others. This affect is short-lived and
             The second question that the author researched is that if collective actors are more
             likely than others to imitate. As many have pointed out, connected actors in a social
             system do not all have the same influence on each other and are not all influenced in the
             same way. The differences may be from a number of reasons including characteristics of
             the actor that make them more likely to imitate the action of others. The results of her
             study showed that this does come into play in that there are always more riots in big cities
             than in small cities, but the difference wanes over time because riots in the big cities are
             starting riots in small cities, but the big cities ...