Bridges, brokers, and bottlenecks – betweenness centrality

In the popular children's game Telephone, one player starts by whispering a message to another, who then whispers that message to another, and so on. At the end, the last player recites the message out loud. Typically, the final message bears no resemblance to the original. So, a message that began as "follow the funky flow" might end up as "if every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn't have hotdogs". Every time a message passes from person to person, it has the possibility of changing, possibly because it was misheard, or possibly because it was deliberately changed. In more complex social networks, such as organizations and social movements, the individuals who connect different parts of the network have the greatest ability to filter, amplify, and alter information. Such individuals...