And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [14]
In this single chart, Milgram elegantly documented the essence of herd behavior, what economists call a “bandwagon effect”: the instinctive tendency of the human animal to rely on the actions of others in choosing its own course of action. We get interested in the things we see others getting interested in. Homo sapiens has been jumping on bandwagons, as the expression goes, since long before the vogue for such vehicles in the late nineteenth century (when less popular American politicians would clamor to be seen aboard the bandwagon of a more popular candidate for another office, hence the meaning we have today); since long before, even, the invention of the wheel.
The bandwagon effect is especially pronounced in Internet culture-making, however, because popularity can immediately be factored into how choices are presented to us. If in our nonwired lives we jump on a bandwagon once a day, in our postwired existence we hop whole fleets of them—often without even knowing it. Start, for example, where most of us start online, with Google: when we search for a phrase, Google’s sophisticated engine delivers our results in an order determined (at least in part) by how many searchers before us eventually clicked on the pages in question. Whenever we click on a top-ten Google result, we are jumping on an invisible bandwagon. Similarly with retailers such as Amazon, whose front-page offerings, tailored to each customer, are based on what other customers have bought: another invisible bandwagon. Then there are the countless visible bandwagons, in the form of the ubiquitous lists: most bought, most downloaded, most e-mailed, most linked-to. Even the august New York Times, through its “most e-mailed” list, has turned the news into a popularity contest, whose winners in turn get more attention among Internet readers who have only a limited amount of attention to give. Thus do the attention-rich invariably get richer.
In some cases, our bandwagons—online or off—do us a service, by weeding out extraneous or undesirable information through the “wisdom of crowds” (as a bestselling book by James Surowiecki put it). Moreover, in the case of culture, what is already popular in some respect has more intrinsic value: we read news, or watch television, or listen to music in part so we can have discussions with other people who have done the same. But it is a severe mistake to assume, as the economically minded often do, that the bandwagon effect manages to select for intrinsic worth, or even to give individuals what they actually want. This was demonstrated ingeniously a few years ago in an experiment run by Matthew Salganik, a sociologist who was then at Columbia University. Fourteen thousand participants were invited to join a music network where they could listen to songs, rate them, and, if they wanted, download the songs for free. A fifth of the volunteers—the “independent” group—were left entirely to their own tastes, unable to see what their fellows were downloading. The other four-fifths were split up into eight different networks—the “influence” groups—all of which saw the same songs, but listed in rank order based on how often they had been downloaded in that particular group. The songs were by almost entirely unknown bands, to avoid having songs get popular based on preexisting associations with the band’s name.
What Salganik and his colleagues found was that the “independent” group chose songs that differed significantly from those chosen in the “influence” groups, which in turn differed significantly from one another. In their paper, the sociologists call the eight different networks “worlds,” and they mean this in the philosophical sense of possible worlds: each network began from the same starting point with the same universe of songs, but each of these independent evolutionary environments yielded very different outcomes. A band called 52metro, for example, was #1 in one world but didn’t even rate the top ten in five of the other seven worlds. Similarly, a band called Silent Film topped one chart but