Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

First: Audiences don’t know everything, but they know more than creators do. The most successful artists and entrepreneurs tend to be geniuses. But the paradox is that they are both smarter than their median consumer and dumber than all of their consumers because they don’t know how their consumers live, what they do every day, what annoys them, or what moves them. If familiarity is the key to liking, then people’s familiarities—the ideas, stories, behaviors, and habits with which they are fluent—are the keys to their heart. Loewy had his own theories of beauty, his eggshells and his chrome finishes. But he knew that designing for strangers was, at the beginning, like fumbling through a dark tunnel toward a tiny speck of light. He was obsessed with understanding the people he was designing for. Second: To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.9 At the far reaches of radical thinking, it’s critical for artists and entrepreneurs with wild ideas to heed the pull of familiarity and remember Max Planck’s warning: Even the most brilliant scientific breakthroughs face initial skepticism when they are too far from mainstream thought. Great art and products meet audiences where they are. But the fact that people gravitate to fluency in art and design is no excuse for dumb simplicity. The central insight of MAYA is that people actually prefer complexity—up to the point that they stop understanding something. Many of today’s museu...

If pop music were a global technology, Sweden would be its Silicon Valley. Sweden and Swedish expats are the world’s inexhaustible fount of catchy melodies. Led by Max Martin, the legendary superproducer responsible for dozens of number one singles by the Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift, the small Scandinavian country has been exporting contagious music to the world since ABBA debuted in the 1970s. Why Sweden? The answer involves a mix of policy, history, and the magnetizing effect of talent. First, the Swedish government actively promotes public music education at a time when many countries have no such policy (“I have public music education to thank for everything,” Martin said in 2001). Second, Sweden has a musical culture that promotes major-chord melodies over lyrics, which makes their songs highly exportable to audiences who don’t speak Swedish. Third, since ABBA’s heyday in the 1970s, Sweden has built a national industry dedicated to writing, producing, and selling pop music, which attracts some of the best pop talent in the world—like a gifted Indian American teenager from Austin, Texas. Economists sometimes call this magnetizing effect “agglomeration,” and it’s why similar companies have a tendency to congregate in the same cities.10 When geographers at Uppsala University studied Sweden’s music industry, they said that it followed a model that economist Michael Porter calls “industrial clustering.” The same way that talented entrepreneurs go to San F...

More than an illusive trick, repetition is the God particle of music. Humpback whales, white-handed gibbons, and more than four hundred American species of birds are considered singers, and animal researchers reserve the term “sing” for only specific sounds that repeat at common intervals.

The power of repetition in human music is fractal, appearing at every level. Repetition of rhythm is necessary to build a musical hook. The repetition of hooks is necessary for choruses. Choruses repeat several times in each song, and people often honor their favorite songs by putting them on repeat. As every parent can attest, children love hearing the same songs again and again. But grown-ups aren’t so different. Ninety percent of the time people listen to music, they are listening to a song they’ve already heard.

Occasionally people will hear music on loop even when they don’t want to, for example when a song gets stuck in our heads. This phenomenon is called an “earworm,” and it is an old and global scourge. The English term comes from the German Ohrwurm (literally “ear worm”) while the French call it musique entêtante, or “stubborn music.” Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, one year after Mark Twain published a story in The Atlantic Monthly about young students haunted by an irresistible jingle. This is one cultural affliction that critics cannot blame on technology. The fault is in our brains. Therein resides the real mystery. Earworms are stranger than they appear. If you show a friend one quarter of a Claude Monet painting, she will not spend the next thirty minutes complaining that she cannot stop seeing the other three quarters. (If she does, take her directly to a research hospital.) Why do people get earworms, but not, pardon the imagery, eyeworms—or noseworms or tongueworms, for that matter? Earworms are like a keyhole into music’s manipulation of time...

“People like new and surprising melodies,” said Elizabeth Margulis, a musicologist at the University of Arkansas Music Cognition Lab. “But when we feel like we can accurately make tiny predictions about how a song is going to go, it feels really good.” It takes no effort to recall a catchy tune; the melody is self-remembering.

since the affliction is universal, timeless, and self-inflicted, it must say something about our internal circuitry. An earworm is a cognitive quarrel. The automatic mind craves repetition that the aware brain finds annoying. As we saw in previous chapters, perhaps the unconscious self wants more repetition—wants more of the old, wants more of the familiar—than the conscious self thinks is “good.”

In 1991, Billboard ditched this patchy honor system and started collecting point-of-sale data from cash registers. “This was revolutionary,” explained Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard’s director of charts. “We were finally able to see which records were actually selling.” Around the same time, the company started monitoring radio airplay through Nielsen. The Hot 100 become a lot more honest in the span of a few months. This had two major implications. First, hip-hop surged in the rankings while old-fashioned rock slowly began to fade. (Perhaps an industry dominated by white guys hadn’t paid enough attention to the music interests of minorities.)13 On June 22, 1991, the week after Billboard updated its chart methodology, Niggaz4life by N.W.A. beat Out of Time by R.E.M., marking the first time a rap group had the most popular album in the country. A recent study of the last fifty years in U.S. pop music named the 1991 ascension of rap “the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts.” In markets where popularity matters, information is marketing. When music listeners learned how popular hip-hop really was, it made hip-hop even more popular.14 Something else happened to American music preferences: They got a lot more repetitive. Without the music labels manipulating the charts, Billboard was a more perfect mirror of American tastes, and the reflection in the mirror said: Just play the hits! The ten songs that have spent the most time...

how do you get people hooked without making them habituated? Let’s return to our poor mouse. Rather than play B notes to the little guy forever, scientists can play several B notes in a row and then, just as he’s about to figure out the pattern, hit him with a new sound—C! The C note will startle the mouse, too. But more important, the introduction of a new note will make the mouse forget a little bit about the B. This is called “dishabituation.” The single serving of C preserves the potency of the B stimulus. Eventually, the mouse will become habituated to both the B and the C. But that’s okay. Scientists can further slow the habituation process by introducing a third note—D!15 To scare a mouse for the longest period of time with the fewest notes, scientists have found success with variations on the following sequence: BBBBC–BBBC–BBC–BC–D Huron’s research has found that this sequence of repetition and variation reflects global music patterns—from European sonatas to Inuit throat singing to American rock. “Across the world, music is consistent with early repetition,” he said. “The idea is to be repetitive up to the point where people might pull their hair out, and then change things subtly. From a composer’s perspective, to make something simple and beautiful, you could think, ‘What’s the minimal amount of material I can compose to entertain my audience for the longest period of time?’” I’m particularly drawn to the final snippet of the sequence, which is this: BBC–BC–D Th...

Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read). Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. Fi...

U.S. political rhetoric might be getting more musical over time. In the 1850s, most presidential addresses were delivered with college-level rhetoric when judged by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, a method developed for the U.S. Navy in the 1970s to ensure the simplicity of military instruction manuals. But since the 1940s, presidential addresses have been more like a sixth-grader’s level. It’s tempting to see this trend as the dumbing down of the American audience. But the United States is considerably better educated than it was in the 1800s. The increased simplicity of political rhetoric is really a sign that political speeches aim to reach a broader audience and so are emulating other populist forms of mass entertainment, like music. In the early republic, when only white men could vote, “presidents could assume that they were speaking to audiences made up mostly of men like themselves: educated, civic-minded landowners,” said Jeff Shesol, a historian and former speechwriter for Bill Clinton. But as voting rights expanded, presidential appeals broadened. The major shift toward simpler presidential speeches happened around 1920, which coincides with at least four positive developments: the Seventeenth Amendment allowing direct election of senators in 1913; the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote in 1920; the movement to make public education mandatory in the 1920s; and the spread of radio, which passed 50 percent penetration among U.S. households by...

Musical language is mercenary. It cares about winning an attention war, and truth can be left bleeding on the field. People trust beautiful words, even when they’re wrong.

“To write a line that people use, make your idea break in twos.”

By turning arguments into spoken music—and making poetry out of policy—antimetabole and its cousins can make important and complicated ideas go down easily. But they can also wave a magic wand over frivolous and dubious ideas, turning something questionable into something catchy.

it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.

To Tolstoy, art is feelings; the transmission of feelings; a communications protocol written in the language of feelings. Everybody knows that letters are just shapes, that serifs are pointless, and that the spaces between words are mere emptiness. But books still produce tears and adrenaline. When people read, they hear voices and see images in their head. This production is total synesthesia and something close to madness. A great book is a hallucinated IMAX film for one. The author had a feeling, which he turned into words, and the reader gets a feeling from those words—maybe it’s the same feeling; maybe it’s not. As Peter Mendelsund wrote in What We See When We Read, a book is a coproduction. A reader both performs the book and attends the performance.

The specific beats of Campbell’s arc aren’t as important as its three primary ingredients: inspiration, relatability, and suspense. First, a hero must inspire, which means the story must begin with a flawed character whose journey leads to both victory (Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee succeed in seeing the One Ring destroyed . . .) and salvation (. . . Frodo finds his courage, and Sam’s loyalty repeatedly saves their lives). Second, it must be relatable, since audiences want to imagine themselves as heroes. That means the heroes cannot be invincible or obnoxiously eager to achieve invincibility. They have to struggle with their destiny (one does not simply walk into Mordor, after all) before accepting its charge. Third, Campbell’s formula comes with prepackaged suspense. The road to glory is pockmarked with small defeats that keep audiences anxious and alert. Ultimately, what the hero’s journey provides is the threat of chaotic suspense grounded in empathy. A familiar character who faces no obstacles is boring, and an incomprehensible character is confusing no matter what the challenges are. But a character plucked from the natural world to go on a supernatural adventure that leads through struggles to transcendence opens a door just big enough for the audience to step inside and feel the hero’s glory as their own.

Joseph Campbell was not, strictly speaking, a scientist. He was a mythologist, proposing a recipe for fables and deriving its ingredients. His philosophy of stories is basically deductive—top-down. But Vincent Bruzzese is a scientist, and his theory of stories is inductive—bottom-up. Bruzzese studied millions of survey answers from thousands of people watching thousands of movies. It turned out that Campbell was right. There are rules to successful storytelling in popular films. The typical audience member couldn’t tell you explicitly what those rules are, but collectively audiences have been telling moviemakers for decades. Bruzzese’s grand theory will look familiar to readers of the first three chapters of this book: Most people love original storytelling, provided that the narrative arc traces the stories we know and the stories that we want to tell ourselves.

Bruzzese’s first significant breakthrough was in the suspense genre. Bruzzese saw that audiences respond to scary movies with a predictability that would please Hari Seldon. “Horror might be the easiest genre to break down,” he told me. “Horror movies are either a haunting or a killer. A haunting movie has either a ghost or demon. The demon is either randomly targeting the lead actors or summoned by the leads.” These subtle distinctions can have a big effect on audience reactions. “One of the main factors with a horror film is that the audience wants to put themselves in the situation, to internalize the characters’ fears,” he said. “But if the lead actors summon a demon, many audiences say they weren’t so scared, because they personally would never summon a demon.” These distinctions also have predictable box office implications. Random ambient terror befits a horror film. But when the killer has a known motive, it tends to be seen as a thriller, which is less of a lure for teenagers. Relatability is key to horror, but it’s not the only element. Another is power. “In a movie where a demon is targeting people, like Jason in Friday the 13th or Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the story is built around a simple question: Can anybody stop him?” Bruzzese said. “That’s why the trailers for these films often include a triumphant shot of the killer. Whether people realize it or not, the killer is the hero.” Another genre that yields to simple classification is the apo...

Deep down, these apocalypse movies are all traditional family dramas about the challenges of fatherhood.

Readers “significantly preferred” spoiled stories over unspoiled stories, the researchers concluded. “A novel that can be truly ‘spoiled’ by the summary of its plot is a novel that was already spoiled by that plot,” the New Yorker book critic James Wood wrote. For once, the social scientists and the art critics are in unison.

Audiences need an element of safe predictability in order for the feelings to hit with their full weight. Compelling stories, as one cliché goes, are “emotional roller coasters.” But the joy of a roller coaster isn’t the imminent threat of death. It’s the tension between “This thing will make me think I’ll die” and “I know exactly where I’ll disembark alive.”

Directors like George Lucas are “semiotically nourished authors working for a culture of instinctive semioticians,” the late and great writer Umberto Eco once wrote. That is, Star Wars is not a single movie, nor a lonely cliché floating in ether. It is “movies,” the gathering of hundreds of clichés from several genres, celebrating a reunion in outer space. A story that alludes to just one story is derivative. A story that alludes to nothing in cinema or literature is incomprehensible. Star Wars traces the thin overlap between never-before-seen and aha-I’ve-seen-this-before. It is an original because it is a bundle of never-before-bundled allusions.

scientists gradually realized that common illnesses like cholera were probably at the root of many vampire outbreaks. Epidemiology was advancing into the shadows of superstition and, like a beam of sunlight in so many movies, killing the undead for good. It’s tempting to say that the belief in vampires was downright silly. But the truth is that vampires were a perfectly coherent story. Vampirism accounted for every observable detail surrounding death. It explained why families got sick at the same time, why friends died after friends, and why the buried dead looked the way they looked. It’s not coincidence that, for many centuries, these myths stalked villages separated by tens of thousands of miles. The walking-dead theory of disease answered a mystery with a narrative that had meaning, suspense, and agency. It explained the chaos of life with a spectacular tale. It empowered villagers by telling them that everybody had the capacity to fight evil—with potions, garlic, prayers, chastity, stakes, swords, and fire (and, if all else failed, sanguinary brandy). Vampires were the perfect story. A great narrative catches listeners in its slipstream. Every chapter in this book has started the same way—with a story. I’m daydreaming about Monet’s water lilies in an impressionist exhibit . . . Raymond Loewy designs the 1950s . . . George Lucas writes the most commercially successful metamyth of all time. It is the convention of this book’s genre to build chapters like narrative Troj...

A 2015 study of Spotify data pinpointed the precise year that listeners stop listening to new artists: thirty-three. Political opinions seem to crystallize around the same time.

there’s another group that fights quietly against gender equality in movies. It’s us—the audiences. Moviegoers hold men and women to a double standard in movies, where if women act too much like men—or if men act too much like women—test audiences complain, and producers adhere to old stereotypes rather than fight them.

Mean and powerful men are badass; mean and powerful women are bitchy.

It is easier for a young person to learn a social norm than for a middle-aged adult to change his or her mind.

Bigots are made, not born. But deep compassion also requires teaching, and a great story can be a persuasive lesson.

many of us suffer from ideological “burn-in”—the unfortunate imprinting of biases from stories and exposure. Liberals cocoon themselves in left-leaning websites, and people who get their information from Twitter can design a news stream that perfectly suits their prior opinions. Intelligent formulas govern Facebook, Pandora, Netflix, and other media, which tailor the universe of options to fit a person’s prior preferences and the favorites of her in-group. This hunt for fluency and familiarity is natural, but it leaves people open to a host of dangerous biases. The power of the press is not only to report and render judgment on important issues, but also to determine which issues are worthy of coverage in the first place. That decision of emphasis has its own consequences. In the press, familiar falsehoods can be seen as positive facts, even if they’re often presented as myths. In one study of myth-busting news, old and young participants read several dubious assertions, such as, “Shark cartilage is good for arthritis.” (It is not.) Immediately after, most participants correctly identified the untrue statements as myths. But several days later, researchers checked back with their subjects and found that older adults were significantly more likely to say: Yes, shark cartilage really does help arthritis! The brute force of repetition had familiarized the connection between shark cartilage and arthritis, and older participants, with worse explicit memory, failed to separate f...

“It’s useful to think of attention as a budget that chooses to buy certain pieces of information,” says Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at New York University. “Fluency implies that information comes at a very low cost, often because it is already familiar to us in some similar form. Disfluency occurs when information is costly—perhaps it takes a lot of effort to understand a concept, or a name is unfamiliar and therefore difficult to say.”

If there is a dark side to fluency, might there be a bright side to its opposite, disfluency? Alter’s work suggests there might be. In one of his studies, he printed a simple, easy-to-read question: “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?” Many respondents said two. But when the question was printed in a harder-to-read font, respondents were 35 percent more likely to recognize that it was Noah, not Moses, who built the ark. The less legible font made people more careful readers.

Disfluency is like a subtle alarm, piercing the calm of automatic processing, summoning a higher level of attention. There is a dark side to fluency—for both makers and consumers. When creative people are too familiar with their own projects, it hurts their ability to evaluate them. For writers like me, the implication is quite clear: Being too familiar with my own writing makes it impossible to be an assiduous judge of its quality. I am my own best editor only when I take enough time away from my work to read it with fresh perspective. But the deepest seduction is for audiences. Rhyming aphorisms are alluring, and antimetabole is enchanting; it’s ravishing to read an essay that explores an idea you’ve already decided is correct, and a great narrative that upholds your theory of the world feels good to share with friends. These are all stalks branching from the same root, the easy fluency with which most people want to process the world. It falls to consumers and audiences to separate the vampire stories from the science. It is precisely because great narratives seduce us that the best stories deserve the greatest skepticism.

choices, economics, and marketing are always shaping tastes. But what if you could study popularity in a market without any of those things—in a store with infinite options, universal prices, and no advertising? For example, imagine a national clothing outlet that carried every size and design of shirts, pants, and shoes. But this national chain had no labels or ads to promote one style over another. Every possible article of clothing simply existed, and they were all the same price. This chain would be a social scientist’s dream. Researchers could use it to study why certain fashions rise and fall without trying to control for the brutal power of advertising and distribution. In fact, such a marketplace exists. It’s the marketplace for first names.

The weird thing about first names is that, even though they’re free and infinite, they follow the same hot-and-cold “hype cycle” of many other products that do have finite choices, diverse prices, and lots of advertising. Just like clothes, first names are a fashion. Some names are cool today (Emily) while some once popular names now sound out-of-date (Ethel), even though the names Emily and Ethel are as Emilyish and Ethelian as they’ve always been. Nothing about the quality of the names has changed—just their popularity.

For hundreds of years, first names were more like traditions than fashions. Parents would select names from a small pool of options and often recycle the same ones across generations. Between 1150 and 1550, practically every English male monarch was named Henry (eight of them), Edward (six), or Richard (three). Between 1550 and 1800, William, John, and Thomas accounted for half of all English men’s names. Half of England’s women went by Elizabeth, Mary, or Anne.

quite suddenly, in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the list of most popular names embarked on a period of accelerating turnover, in both Europe and the United States. Girls’ names, in particular, cycle in and out of popularity faster than summer dress styles.

as people moved from one-family settlements to cities, the ties between nuclear families and extended family networks weakened. The melting pot of denser cities put a new emphasis on individualism. On a small family farm, having a familial name made you a part of the family, but in the city a name set you apart from other cultures, ethnicities, and classes. This period of change didn’t just erase a batch of old names and replace them with a fresh batch. It forever changed the way people thought about names as identities, creating a virtue around newness where formerly none had existed.

Birth of Western civilization is the moment Odysseus identified himself to the cyclops and suffered for his hubris. The good and bad of individualism.

Fashion is governed by a neophilic rule with a neophobic catch: New is good and old is bad (but very old is good again). There is a theoretical benchmark for how fashionable attitudes are shaped by the passage of time called Laver’s law, named after its originator, James Laver, a British fashion historian. It goes like this: Indecent: 10 years before its time Shameless: 5 years before its time Outré (Daring): 1 year before its time Smart: Current fashion Dowdy: 1 year after its time Hideous: 10 years after its time Ridiculous: 20 years after its time Amusing: 30 years after its time Quaint: 50 years after its time Charming: 70 years after its time Romantic: 100 years after its time Beautiful: 150 years after its time

the larger lesson of Laver’s law is that there is no such thing as universal and timeless good taste in clothes, names, music, or perhaps anything. There are only present tastes, past tastes, and slightly ahead-of-the-present tastes. Like financial investing, fashion is a matter of both taste and timing. It doesn’t profit, in either profession, to have the correct opinion too late or to be prescient long before the market is ready to agree with you.

Parents tend to pick similarly popular names for their older and younger children. A couple that picks a unique name for its first baby is much more likely to pick a similarly unique name for its next child.

Taste for popularity is a powerful idea in culture. A straightforward example could be seen in music’s biggest stars. Some people like Taylor Swift because she’s popular. Some people like Taylor Swift and don’t really pay attention to her popularity. And some people look for things to dislike about Taylor Swift because her popularity sends the equivalent of a warning that she might be fake, dreck, or both. All three groups can agree on what a Taylor Swift song sounds like. Yet something outside the actual sound of the music—Swift’s status as a star—can send a range of signals, from pure appeal to deep skepticism.

Individually, these parents are just picking names they like. Collectively, their choices create a fashion.

Manipulating popularity can work. But consumers are not infinitely clueless. There is a limit to how much you can trick people into liking something.

raising awareness that something is popular might have unintended negative consequences. In the paper “The Paradox of Publicity,” researchers Balazs Kovacs and Amanda J. Sharkey compared more than thirty-eight thousand book reviews on Goodreads.com. They found that titles that won prestigious awards got worse reviews than books that were merely nominated for the same awards. In a perfect social-influence world, this would make no sense. If an authority figure tells you a book is good, you ought to internalize the advice and adore the book. But the real world is more complex than that, and there are several intuitive reasons why a book award might lead to worse ratings. Prizes naturally raise expectations, and heightened expectations often go unmet. What’s more, prestigious prizes attract a larger and more diverse audience, and this broad composition will include people who have no taste for the book’s genre or style and are reading it only for the award sticker. These readers will dependably leave worse reviews. Meanwhile, a book that’s merely nominated for the same prize might not attract the same motley coalition of readers, so its ratings won’t suffer so much. But the researchers’ most interesting explanation is that prizewinners attract lower ratings because of a backlash among the book’s readers. “Consistent with work in the area of fads and fashion, we found that growth in audience size, or popularity, can itself be seen as distasteful or a reason to give a lower eva...

Why my favorite works are often four star reviews on Amazon, while a few which are really niche have five star reviews. But for more popular works, it's likely four stars. Different for goods with more "objective" quality dimensions, like kitchen tools.

TV executives glommed onto fake laughter in the early years of TV comedies because research showed that laugh tracks made people laugh. It initially seemed that hearing other people laugh counted nearly as much as a joke’s actual humor. But the history of the laugh track is not a simple story about social influence. It is a history of an invention that created a trend, a trend that triggered a backlash, and a backlash that created a new mainstream. It is, in other words, a story about fashion.

In 2010, two researchers proposed what might be the closest thing that sociology has to a universal theory of humor. It’s called “Benign Violation Theory.” Peter McGraw, now the director of the Humor Research Lab, and Caleb Warren, now an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Arizona, proposed that nearly all jokes are violations of norms or expectations that don’t threaten violence or emotional distress.

Communication, once a simple custom that did not change for millennia, is now so fraught with new choices that it is becoming something more like a fashion, where preferences in how we talk to each other, what technology we use, even what “talking” means, are constantly changing. MySpace and Facebook helped to make it acceptable to post private friend-to-friend messages publicly. Instagram created a massive social network strictly around images. Snapchat Stories allow anybody to create mini-movies about their lives for their friends to watch. None of these protocols are much like talking on the phone, and yet they all feel, to their millions of users, quite naturally like talking, and sometimes even superior.

Communication-as-a-fashion is one reason why today’s marketers are so embarrassingly bad in their attempts to glom onto the newest memes and strategies. The fashion changes by the time they get out the message.

The teenager emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, thanks to the confluence of three trends in education, economics, and technology. High schools gave young people a place to build a separate culture outside the watchful eye of family. Rapid growth gave them income, either earned or taken from their parents. Cars (and, later, another mobile technology) gave them independence.