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The rules extend even to characters.
On the surface, these characters aren’t alike and certainly don’t live in the same fictional world. But in all cases, the hero is the synthesis of his friends. The thinking Spock and the feeling McCoy are two halves of Captain Kirk. The brilliant Hermione and the sensitive Ron balance out Harry Potter. Luke Skywalker combines Han’s bravery and Leia’s conscience. In all stories, the hero is the average of his friends, and the hero’s journey is a challenge to unite these ingredients in victory—Might and Right.
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
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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.
There may be sensitive periods for taste as well. Most children are born hating the flavor of broccoli. Scientists believe the vegetable evolved to produce a foul-tasting compound called goitrin so that animals wouldn’t eat it into extinction. But one 1990 study found that it was possible to make young children fall in love with the bitter taste of broccoli—by serving it over and over again, with more pleasant foods. The good news is that getting your child to like broccoli is possible through repeat exposure. The bad news is that familiarizing broccoli is an expensive chore for parents,
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By the time adults reach their early thirties, most of them stop seeking out new music entirely. A 2015 study of Spotify data pinpointed the precise year that listeners stop listening to new artists: thirty-three.
After this critical breakup scene, the two characters go back to their lives, their friends, or their families. If the lead male character sleeps with somebody else during this break, the audience will ultimately forgive him when he reconciles with the lead actress, Bruzzese said. But if the female lead sleeps with somebody during this temporary breakup? Even the women in the audience will stop rooting for her.
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 familiarity—“That statement feels right”—from fact—“The statement is correct.”
Hosting debates on issues of settled science, like evolution, repeatedly exposes people to arguments that aren’t true, even if they’re debunked. The mere repetition of a phrase or idea, even one labeled false, might confuse many people in the long run, because it is so easy to conflate familiarity with truth.
But Alter’s work suggests that hard-to-read fonts create just the right amount of brow-furrowing deliberation for people to see the trick within these trick questions. Disfluency is like a subtle alarm, piercing the calm of automatic processing, summoning a higher level of attention.
The tricky thing about studying popularity and why people like what they like is that at least three inextricable factors are always getting in the way: choices, economics, and marketing.
The uptick in first name turnover started in England and spread through the Western Hemisphere in the middle of the nineteenth century, Stanley Lieberson finds in his marvelous book on names, A Matter of Taste.
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
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In Dr. Robert Cialdini’s classic book on persuasion, Influence, he defines the principle of social proof as “the greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.”
“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.
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 evaluation,” the authors concluded.
At one point, he was so powerful, and his work so private, that he was called the “Hollywood Sphinx.” His name was Charles Douglass, and he invented the laugh track.
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.
“If you look at the most universal forms of laughter shared across species, when rats laugh or when dogs laugh, it’s often in response to aggressive forms of play, like chasing or tickling,” Warren told me (and, yes, rats can laugh). “Chasing and tickling are both the threat of an attack, but without an actual attack.” By this theory, a good comedian chases with impropriety and tickles with wordplay, but does not deeply wound the audience’s social mores.
But people laugh mostly when they sense that the violation is benign or safe. And what makes something seem benign or safe? When lots of other people are laughing with you.
But what is coolness, anyway? In sociology, it is sometimes defined as a positive rebellion. It means breaking away from an illegitimate mainstream in a legitimate way.
This is the sort of explanation that drives Watts truly bonkers. He bemoans the many analysts, trend spotters, and journalists who claim to understand exactly why some things succeed, but only after their success is obvious to everybody. He would have us beware those who claim they can predict the future but offer only retrospective proof of their powers.42
“When journalists see products succeed, they always want to explain the inevitability of the success,” Watts said. “They ask, ‘What were the characteristics of the successful thing?’ and then they decide that all these characteristics must be very special.43 Or they try to find patient zero, the person who started the trend, because they decide he must be very special.” This sort of thinking creates a worthless gospel of success, Watts says.
“Dual-sided uncertainty”: Screenwriters and producers don’t know what viewers want to watch in two years. Viewers don’t know what movies are coming out in two years, nor do they have perfect information about what they want to see. And yet Hollywood is in the business of predicting what audiences want many years in the future, even though most people couldn’t even say for sure, even if you asked them.
The rise of a global crowd encourages studios to produce visual Rosetta Stones, single stories interpretable for many tongues.
Viral spread isn’t the only way that a piece of content can reach a large population, the researchers said. There is another mechanism, called “broadcast diffusion”—many people getting information from one source.
But the truer observation is that the article didn’t go viral in any meaningful sense of the word. It reached a lot of people who read the recipe section of a large international newspaper, and a few of them talked about it.
Much of what outsiders call virality is really a function of what one might call “dark broadcasters”—people or companies distributing information to many viewers at once, but whose influence isn’t always visible to people outside of the network.
In the final analysis, this was perhaps the key mechanism in the Fifty Shades phenomenon. Like a viral video, it was propelled by a combination of traditional broadcasters (the Today show and the New York Times), dark broadcasters (the massive fanfic cluster and Facebook groups), and ordinary sharing (readers talking to readers). Millions of people were exhilarated, maddened, and puzzled by the book, but there are thousands of books that exhilarate, madden, and puzzle. None of them sell one hundred million copies. What separated Fifty Shades is that its notoriety became a distinct product;
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“To make popular content, it’s not enough to know your friends or your followers,” said Jure Leskovec, a computer scientist who studies online behavior at Stanford University. “It’s about knowing the friends of your friends and the followers of your followers. For something to go big, it has to be interesting to those beyond your immediate audience—the audience of your audience.”
In short, similarity in social networks goes both ways. My network looks more like me and I look more like my network. Vincent Forrest intuitively understands both sides of this convergence. His best buttons are, by his own admission, the ones that draw the tightest circle. People want to share the messages that strike them as the most personal. But he’s also learned from his audience. He discovered that Etsy buyers like arch pop culture references and unabashedly nerdy grammar jokes. So over time, he made more buttons blending pop culture with jokes about reading and syntax. He built his own
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Remember Watts’s and Leskovec’s rules for popularity: Ideas spread most reliably when they piggyback off an existing network of closely connected and interested people. In other words, if you’re trying to attract groups, find common points of origin.
The most important element in a global cascade isn’t magically viral elements or mystical influencers. Rather it is about finding a group of people who are easily influenced. It turns the influencer question on its head.
People have all day to talk about what makes them ordinary. It turns out that they want to share what makes them weird.
People were more forthright about the bad stuff in their lives when they thought they were addressing one person. When they thought they were addressing a larger group, they airbrushed their stories for dazzling happiness.
Publicly, people often talk about issues. Privately, they talk about schedules. Publicly, they deploy strategic emotions. Privately, they tend to share small troubles. Publicly, they want to be interesting. Privately, they want to be understood.
Several publishers passed on the first Harry Potter volume. Nigel Newton, the chief executive at Bloomsbury, bought the manuscript for a few thousand pounds only when his eight-year-old daughter insisted, with some prescience, that it was “so much better than anything else.”
To know if a show will be a hit, NBC administers a series of national surveys. If 40 percent of respondents say they are aware of a new show, and 40 percent of that 40 percent say they want to watch it, and 20 percent of that 16 percent say they are passionate about the new show, NBC can confidently predict that the program will be a hit. This is the 40-40-20 test, and it works. One of the last shows to pass this threshold, The Blacklist, debuted on NBC as one of the ten most popular shows on television.
In 2000, there were 125 original scripted series and fewer than three hundred unscripted cable series, or “reality shows.” By 2015, there were four hundred original scripted series and nearly one thousand original reality series—an across-the-board tripling.
“The key to success for us is to find an authentic original voice and characters so compelling that the audience wants to wear their skin,” she said.
But the difference between baseball and business is that baseball has what Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos cleverly called “a truncated outcome distribution.” Home runs can only be so big. In a letter to shareholders, he wrote: When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.
Originating in late 1800s medicine, the word “tabloid” first referred to a small tablet of drugs. It soon became a catchall for a smaller, compressed form of anything, including journalism and newspapers.
Surveys measure present feelings and behavior (Are you a registered Republican?). Polls forecast future election results (Will you vote for the Republican in next year’s election?).
There are three themes here worth unpacking specifically: the twentieth-century shift of news from text alone to text, sound, and video; the evolution of news discovery from individual publishers to platforms aggregating many publishers; and the rise of personal networks replacing the news curation once performed by editors and journalists. There is really one company that sits at the center of all these trends and is, today, the most important source of news and information in the world. That company is Facebook.
There is what people want to read. And then, there is what people actually read. Mosseri told me that one of the most important things Facebook studies is this gap—and how to close it. The News Feed must appeal to the behavioral self, by displaying stories that readers reliably click, like, and share. But it should also appeal to the aspirational self, by showing stories that readers want to see even if they don’t interact with them.
I went to Chartbeat to talk about attention. Instead, we talked about feedback. In the second half of the twentieth century, an air force pilot and military strategist named John Boyd devised a decision-making model that he called OODA. The acronym stood for Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action. It described a strategic approach in which information was constantly funneled back to the decision maker to construct a new theory of attack.
But I’ve come to see that there is a separate wisdom in Lucas’s throwaway comment. The paradox of scale is that the biggest hits are often designed for a small, well-defined group of people. Star Wars was for children of a magical age—old enough to appreciate movies and young enough to love medieval histrionics in space without irony or embarrassment. Facebook was initially designed to appeal to the friends of Harvard undergrads, not to connect the whole world. Vince Forrest found that his bestselling buttons have the most amusingly strange and specific messages. Johannes Brahms wrote his
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Coming after several massively successful LPs, Kid A was Radiohead’s fourth album. In this manner, I thought, Kid A’s success seemed to fit within a broader pattern. Led Zeppelin’s unnamed fourth album is its mythic masterpiece. Born to Run was Bruce Springsteen’s third studio album, Sgt. Pepper was the Beatles’ eighth, Thriller was Michael Jackson’s sixth, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was Kanye West’s fifth, and Lemonade was Beyoncé’s sixth. I thought of Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, Seinfeld’s fourth through seventh seasons, Stanley Kubrick’s eighth feature film, Virginia
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In 2014, the top 1 percent of bands and solo artists earned 77 percent of all revenue from recorded music, and the ten bestselling tracks commanded 82 percent more of the market than they did in the previous decade.
If I had to capture this metatheme in a sentence, this is the one I would choose: Technology changes faster than people do.
