aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Another strike against free will…
...and for social influence. Coming in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine this weekend, Duncan J. Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University and the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, discusses his research on how hits - a blockbuster movie, a best-selling book or a superstar artist - are made:
Even if you think most people are tasteless or ignorant, it’s natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow “better,” at least in the democratic sense of a competitive market, than their unsuccessful counterparts, that Norah Jones and Madonna deserve to be as successful as they are if only because “that’s what the market wanted.” What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market “wants” at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history: there is no sense in which it simply “revealsâ€Â� what people wanted all along. In such a world, in fact, the question “Why did X succeed?” may not have any better answer than the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss’s surprise best seller, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,â€Â� who, when asked to explain its success, replied that “it sold well because lots of people bought it.”
