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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Popularity | 5/6 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popularity | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:50:42.913586+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Information cascades === Popularity is a term widely applicable to the modern era thanks primarily to social networking technology. Being "liked" has been taken to a completely different level on ubiquitous sites such as Facebook. Popularity is a social phenomenon but it can also be ascribed to objects that people interact with. Collective attention is the only way to make something popular, and information cascades play a large role in rapid rises in something's popularity. Rankings for things in popular culture, like movies and music, often do not reflect the public's taste, but rather the taste of the first few buyers because social influence plays a large role in determining what is popular and what is not through an information cascade. Information cascades have strong influence causing individuals to imitate the actions of others, whether or not they are in agreement. For example, when downloading music, people don't decide 100% independently which songs to buy. Often they are influenced by charts depicting which songs are already trending. Since people rely on what those before them do, one can manipulate what becomes popular among the public by manipulating a website's download rankings. Experts paid to predict sales often fail but not because they are bad at their jobs; instead, it is because they cannot control the information cascade that ensues after first exposure by consumers. Music is again, an excellent example. Good songs rarely perform poorly on the charts and poor songs rarely perform very well, but there is tremendous variance that still makes predicting the popularity of any one song very difficult. Experts can determine if a product will sell in the top 50% of related products or not, but it is difficult to be more specific than that. Due to the strong impact that influence plays, this evidence emphasizes the need for marketers. They have a significant opportunity to show their products in the best light, with the most famous people, or being in the media most often. Such constant exposure is a way of gaining more product followers. Marketers can often make the difference between an average product and a popular product. However, since popularity is primarily constructed as a general consensus of a group's attitude towards something, word-of-mouth is a more effective way to attract new attention. Websites and blogs start by recommendations from one friend to another, as they move through social networking services. Eventually, when the fad is large enough, the media catches on to the craze. This spreading by word-of-mouth is the social information cascade that allows something to grow in usage and attention throughout a social group until everyone is telling everyone else about it, at which point it is deemed popular. Individuals also rely on what others say when they know that the information they are given could be completely incorrect. This is known as groupthink. Relying on others to influence one's own decisions is a very powerful social influence, but can have negative impacts.
=== Zipf's law ===
The popularity of many different things can be described by Zipf's powerlaw, which posits that there is a low frequency of very large quantities and a high frequency of low quantities. This illustrates popularity of many different objects. For example, there are few very popular websites, but many websites have small followings. This is the result of interest; as many people use e-mail, it is common for sites like Yahoo! to be accessed by large numbers of people; however, a small subset of people would be interested in a blog on a particular video game. In this situation, only Yahoo! would be deemed a popular site by the public. This can additionally be seen in social networking services such as Facebook. The average number of friends on Facebook is 130, while very few people have large social networks. However, some individuals have more than 5,000 friends. This reflects that very few people can be extremely well-connected, but many people are somewhat connected. The number of friends a person has, has been a way to determine how popular an individual is, so the small number of people who have a high number of friends on social networking services, like Facebook, illustrates how only a few people are deemed popular.