Rules Of The Game #18: The Social Butterfly Effect

[koganbot]

Latest column, in which fame is shown to create greater fame:

The Rules Of The Game #18: The Social Butterfly Effect

The point I make at the end in regard to the Dolls and the Stooges is clear to me but I'm not sure it's clear on the page - that the Dolls' and Stooges' subsequent canonization is somewhat self-perpetuating in just the way that popularity is self-perpetuating (not that the Dolls and the Stooges don't deserve it).

Also, I call "inherent appeal" and "underlying appeal" imaginary; this was a shortcut for saying that the appeal is relative and contingent, which actually is a very different and much better point that I didn't have space to go into. That something is social doesn't mean that it's imaginary, and setting "inherent" in opposition to the social simply removes a perfectly good word - "inherent" - from the language. So I wish I hadn't taken the shortcut or used the word "imaginary," given that I tend to chide other people who say such things. (Note to self: regain self-esteem by finding someone to chide for this.)

A question I'd have asked if there'd been more space: Do you suppose the results would have been as extreme if the tested population had been adults rather than teenagers? If it had been children under ten rather than teenagers? I'm sure Watts and co. would have found the same general syndrome, but my guess is that it's strongest among teenagers, especially males, who are self-conscious and self-doubting and self-dramatizing in their responses to anything, even when ensconced in the privacy of their own minds.

As I recall, when the Watts experiment was first reported in Science in early 2006, poptimists linked to some dipshit (in the Guardian?) who claimed that it explained Ashlee Simpson's reaching number one while Sir Paul McCartney languished lower in the charts.

In any event, what use would you put to Watts et al.'s findings? One thing they underscore for me is that received ideas tend to stay received, but my guess is that this conservativism is mitigated by the fact that ideas don't always reinforce each other (e.g., the idea that Beethoven is unquestionably great is a popular idea, but so is the idea that we should question something's being called unquestionably great). And the findings also tell me that there must be other people of the quality of Shakespeare and Timbaland but who didn't make it, who didn't benefit from the cascading popularity and canonization but who nonetheless produced equally good work (though maybe not in the same quantity, if they lacked the fame to support themselves), so maybe we could go out and find them.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

An interesting experiment! I vaguely remember reading something that mentioned it (almost certainly on poptimists).

A possible extension: Social Group X (let's say 'emo kids' for an easy label) sees a (possibly fictional) breakdown of downloads from the other groups, with each group being assigned a particular label? Would the fact that RnB kids (or Swedish/well-off/one-legged/sporty kids, whoever) apparently liked the track deter the emos from listening, even if the track was called I Hate My Life by a band called My Biological Misanthropy? Not sure how practical this experiment would be to carry out.

[koganbot]

I'm sure you're right, that people would be deterred by the "wrong" people liking something and be inticed by the "right" people. In his book, after giving the restaurant example, Watts goes on to say, "Even where we explicitly eschew the majority, we are rarely behaving as atomistic individuals or as pure contrarians. Rather, we typically have in mind some minority group of actors whom we do wish to emulate."

[koganbot]

inticed = enticed

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I know I would avoid the restaurant with the racous hen party inside.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

*raucous* arrgh it's been a long day....

[koganbot]

Hen w/ racous is considered a delicacy in Indonesia.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah restaurants is a bad example in many ways because I think for a lot of people the choice would be on a bell curve, i.e. you might look for somewhere which was QUITE busy, not empty or packed. Partly because you're also factoring in how long it might take you to get served, how overwhelming the atmosphere is, even assuming no hen parties.

Whereas you might choose the busy bar over the quite busy one, or the big party over the medium one, depending on what kind of person you were or what you were looking for from a bar or party. (I used to work with people who would ALWAYS choose a rammed pub over one with the chance of a table, because of the 'atmosphere' - but they wouldn't do this in restaurants I'm sure.)

So with music is there an imagined 'crowd' involved - it would be really interesting to see if for some kinds of music there was a limiter effect, a level of downloads at which point something is simply too popular.

Further restaurant metaphor untangling:

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

The hen party will directly affect your enjoyment of the restaurant, but downloading a track is a very individual experience so technically it shouldn't matter who else is listening. Things change when the consumption of music becomes social, i.e. going to gigs or clubs - my enjoyment of the lovely bosh at X Central was utterly spoiled by the horrid crowd who have seemingly latched onto minimal techno :( but my enjoyment of hitherto unfathomable Scooter was massively enhanced by the awesome crowd at that Club FT. This seems like an obvious point, but I wonder if this experiment's methodology (viz isolated downloads) is focusing on the admittedly increasing personal consumption of music (mp3 players) and missing a big chunk of the social environment (gigs/clubs/going over to your mates' houses/back seats of the bus) which is by no means on the wane?

Re: Further restaurant metaphor untangling:

[koganbot]

Well, one point they make in the Science piece is that they believe that they are actually underestimating the effect of social influence:

Our experiment is clearly unlike real cultural markets in a number of respects. For example, we expect that social influence in the real world - where marketing, product placement, critical acclaim, and media attention all play important roles - is far stronger than in our experiment. We also suspect that the effects of social influence were further diminished by the relatively small number of songs, and by our requirements (which aided control) that subjects could participate only once and could not share opinions. Although these differences limit the immediate relevance of our experiment to real-world cultural markets, our findings nevertheless suggest that social influence exerts an important but counterintuitive effect on cultural market formation, generating collective behavior that is reminiscent of (but not identical to) "information cascades" in sequences of individuals making binary choices.

So what they're showing is that even when social influence is limited, it has an enormous effect, leading towards extreme results and limited predictability. Any of the other social effects we factor in will just increase the unpredictability.

One potential lesson from this experiment might be, "It's best to go with the tried and true even though you know it won't always work," and this is where some of the conditions you're bringing up might act as a counterweight. The point being that the untried have a shot, but which of the untried do well is also unpredictable, owing to social influence, but when something does do well it will seem to explode out of nowhere. (He mentions Harry Potter in his NY Times piece; it had been turned down by eight publishers.)