Year: 2008

You can’t get a better example, or at least ‘more classic example,’ of video sociology than William H. Whyte’s ‘The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.’

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2GfOhFZkY8]

Understanding media and technology through the lens of politics is always fascinating, but in class we talked about the Lincoln/Douglas (seven hours! a break for dinner! liquor on sale!) and Nixon/Kennedy Debates and it was very fun. (Read this, which goes into a little detail about how people on the radio thought that Nixon had won, but people who watched it on television got to see Tricky Dick drown in flopsweat.)

Anyway,  Krugman had an interesting op-ed, which gets at the money and media. About Hillary’ town hall meeting, broadcast on the Hallmark Channel in comparison to the will i am Obama video:

The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to “who knows how many” Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the “Yes We Can” Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)

(Hillary was, in fact, cut off mid-sentence for the regularly scheduled programming, A Season of Miracles.)

Sociologist Duncan Watts has done a series of experiments to offer a long overdue challenge Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Jonathan Berry and Ed Keller’s The Influentials. The long-held romantic notion that some charismatic cultural alphas spread ideas, and the men in grey flannel just need to get their products in their hands–the ‘Law of the Few’–is back in play. A nice article discusses this in more detail, a long section, towards the end of the piece:

Watts wanted to find out whether the success of a hot trend was reproducible. For example, we know that Madonna became a breakout star in 1983. But if you rewound the world back to 1982, would Madonna break out again? To find out, Watts built a world populated with real live music fans picking real music, then hit rewind, over and over again. Working with two colleagues, Watts designed an online music-downloading service. They filled it with 48 songs by new, unknown, and unsigned bands. Then they recruited roughly 14,000 people to log in. Some were asked to rank the songs based on their own personal preference, without regard to what other people thought. They were picking songs purely on each song’s merit. But the other participants were put into eight groups that had “social influence”: Each could see how other members of the group were ranking the songs.

Watts predicted that word of mouth would take over. And sure enough, that’s what happened. In the merit group, the songs were ranked mostly equitably, with a small handful of songs drifting slightly lower or higher in popularity. But in the social worlds, as participants reacted to one another’s opinions, huge waves took shape. A small, elite bunch of songs became enormously popular, rising above the pack, while another cluster fell into relative obscurity.

But here’s the thing: In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs–and the bottom ones–were completely different. For example, the song “Lockdown,” by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song’s success seemed to be due to merit. “In general, the ‘best’ songs never do very badly, and the ‘worst’ songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible,” he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. Yet who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

I always try to get a few interesting ideas out there on the first day of class to pique interest, and generate early discussion. For 101, I’m stuck on doing horoscopes and conspiracy theories. I’m not sure what I’m going to do for my first day in Urban (last year’s ‘Subways and Situationists’ as two perspectives on cities–looking at the differences between Tokyo’s and the U.S.’s address system as well–worked as an orienting logic for first day discussion).

I think that I’m going to have two little stories for my new Media, Technology, and Sociology class: The first is the narrative framework and viewing options (online, ipod, on-demand) for HBOs new series ‘In Treatment,’ and the second is the ramifications of the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, which ties financial aid to colleges assisting in industry anti-piracy efforts. A section of the bill–which looks to be going up for debate in February–is called “Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention,” and it states:

Each eligible institution participating in any program under this title shall to the extent practicable […] (2) develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.

If interested, read more here and here. I’m also thinking of using David Lynch’s faux-iPhone commercial, and Mike Wesch’s video essay.