{"id":50391,"date":"2012-08-10T10:44:59","date_gmt":"2012-08-10T15:44:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=50391"},"modified":"2012-08-09T16:42:14","modified_gmt":"2012-08-09T21:42:14","slug":"charting-the-climb-what-makes-a-trend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/08\/10\/charting-the-climb-what-makes-a-trend\/","title":{"rendered":"Charting the Climb: What Makes a Trend?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Isabella was the second most popular name for baby girls last year.\u00a0 She had been number one for two years but was edged out by Sohpia.\u00a0 Twenty-five years ago Isabella was not in the top thousand.<\/p>\n

How does popularity happen?\u00a0 Gabriel Rossman\u2019s new book\u00a0Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation\u00a0<\/em>offers two models.*\u00a0\u00a0 People\u2019s decisions — what to name the baby, what songs to put on your station\u2019s playlist (if you\u2019re a programmer), what movie to go see, what style of pants to buy — \u00a0can be affected by others in the same position.\u00a0 Popularity can spread seemingly on its own, affected only by the consumers themselves communicating with one another person-to-person by word of mouth.\u00a0 But our decisions can also be influenced by people outside those consumer networks \u2013 the corporations or people produce and promote the stuff they want us to pay attention to.<\/p>\n

These outside \u201cexogenous\u201d forces tend to exert themselves suddenly, as when a movie studio releases its big movie on a specified date, often after a big advertising campaign.\u00a0 The film does huge business in its opening week or two but adds much smaller amounts to its total box office receipts in the following weeks.\u00a0\u00a0 The graph of this kind of popularity is a concave curve.\u00a0 Here, for example, is the first\u00a0 \u201cTwilight\u201d movie.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Most movies are like that, but not all.\u00a0 A few build their popularity by word of mouth.\u00a0 The studio may do some advertising, but only after the film shows signs of having legs (\u201cThe surprise hit of the year!\u201d).\u00a0 The flow of information about the film is mostly from viewer to viewer, not from the outside.<\/p>\n

This diffusion path is \u201cendogenous\u201d; it branches out among the people who are making the choices.\u00a0 The rise in popularity starts slowly \u2013 person #1 tells a few friends, then each of those people tells a few friends.\u00a0 As a proportion of the entire population, each person has a relatively small number of friends.\u00a0 But at some point, the growth can accelerate rapidly.\u00a0 Suppose each person has five friends.\u00a0 At the first stage, only six people are involved (1 + 5); stage two adds another 25, and stage three another 125, and so on.\u00a0 The movie \u201ccatches on.\u201d<\/p>\n

The endogenous process is like contagion, which is why the term \u201cviral\u201d is so appropriate for what can happen on the Internet with videos or viruses.\u00a0\u00a0 The graph of endogenous popularity growth has a different shape, an S-curve, like this one for \u201cMy Big Fat Greek Wedding.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By looking at the shape of a curve, tracing how rapidly an idea or behavior spreads, you can make a much better guess as to whether you\u2019re seeing exogenous or endogenous forces.\u00a0 (I\u2019ve thought that the title of Gabriel\u2019s book might equally be\u00a0Charting the Climb: What Graphs of Diffusion Tell Us About Who\u2019s Picking the Hits<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

But what about names, names like Isabella?\u00a0 With consumer items\u00a0 \u2013 movies, songs, clothing, etc. \u2013 the manufacturers and sellers, for reasons of self-interest, try hard to exert their exogenous influence on our decisions.\u00a0 Nobody makes money from baby names, but even those can be subject to exogenous effects, though the outside influence is usually unintentional and brings no economic benefit.\u00a0 For example, from 1931 to 1933, the first name Roosevelt jumped more than 100 places in rank.<\/p>\n

When the Census Bureau announced that the top names for 2011 were Jacob and Isabella, some people suspected the influence of an exogenous factor — \u201cTwilight.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve made the same assumption in saying (here<\/a>) that the popularity of Madison as a girl\u2019s name — almost unknown till the mid-1980s but in the top ten for the last 15 years — has a similar cause: the movie \u201cSplash\u201d (an idea first suggested to me by my brother).\u00a0 I speculated that the teenage girls who saw the film in 1985 remembered Madison a few years later when they started having babies.<\/p>\n

Are these estimates of movie influence correct? We can make a better guess at the impact of the movies (and, in the case of\u00a0Twilight,\u00a0<\/em>books) by looking at the shape of the graphs for the names.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Isabella was on the rise well before\u00a0Twilight<\/em>, and the gradual slope of the curve certainly suggests an endogenous contagion.\u00a0 It\u2019s possible that Isabella\u2019s popularity was about to level off\u00a0 but then got a boost in 2005 with the first book.\u00a0 And it\u2019s possible the same thing happened in 2008 with the first movie. I doubt it, but there is no way to tell.<\/p>\n

The curve for Madison seems a bit steeper, and it does begin just after \u201cSplash,\u201d which opened in 1984.\u00a0\u00a0 Because of the scale of the graph, it\u2019s hard to see the proportionately large changes in the early years.\u00a0 There were zero Madisons in 1983, fewer than 50 the next year, but nearly 300 in 1985.\u00a0 And more than double that the next year.\u00a0 Still, the curve is not concave.\u00a0 So it seems that while an exogenous force was responsible for Madison first emerging from the depths, her popularity then followed the endogenous pattern.\u00a0 More and more people heard the name and thought it was cool.\u00a0 Even so, her rise is slightly steeper than Isabella\u2019s, as you can see in this graph with Madison moved by six years so as to match up with Isabella.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Maybe the droplets of \u201cSplash\u201d were touching new parents even years after the movie had left the theaters.<\/p>\n

————————<\/p>\n

* Gabriel posted a short version about these processes when he pinch hit for Megan McCardle at the Atlantic (here<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. Isabella was the second most popular name for baby girls last year.\u00a0 She had been number one for two years but was edged out by Sohpia.\u00a0 Twenty-five years ago Isabella was not in the top thousand. How does popularity happen?\u00a0 Gabriel Rossman\u2019s new book\u00a0Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,15,23384,129,23703,343],"class_list":["post-50391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-culture","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-media","tag-marketing","tag-tvmovies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50391"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50403,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50391\/revisions\/50403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}