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koganbotLatest 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,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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
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
Re: Further restaurant metaphor untangling:
Date: 2007-10-04 04:13 pm (UTC)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.)