Editing Popularity (section)

=== 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.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Zaman|first1=Tauhid|last2=Fox|first2=Emily B.|author2-link=Emily B. Fox|last3=Bradlow|first3=Eric T.|date=September 2014|title=A Bayesian approach for predicting the popularity of tweets|journal=The Annals of Applied Statistics|language=en|volume=8|issue=3|pages=1583–1611|doi=10.1214/14-AOAS741|issn=1932-6157|doi-access=free|arxiv=1304.6777}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|date=1886 |editor1=James Silk Buckingham |editor2=John Sterling |editor3=Frederick Denison Maurice |editor4=Henry Stebbing |editor5=Charles Wentworth Dilke |editor6=Thomas Kibble Hervey |editor7=William Hepworth Dixon |editor8=Norman Maccoll |editor9=Vernon Horace Rendall |editor10=John Middleton Murry|journal=The Athenaeum: Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Music, and the Drama |page=27}}{{page needed|reason=This actually needs a specific date. There were two journals published that year and while page 27 appears in both, neither jumps out as being the correct edition.|date=February 2020}}</ref> 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.<ref name="Cornell">{{cite web|url = https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2011/11/13/information-cascade-in-music/ |publisher= Cornell University|date = 13 November 2011|title= Information Cascade in Music |website = Networks: Course blog for INFO 2040/CS 2850/Econ 2040/SOC 2090}}</ref> 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.<ref name="Salganik">Salganik, J. (2006). Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in and Artificial Cultural Market. ''Science'', 311, 854–856.</ref>

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 marketing|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.<ref name="Leskovec">Leskovec, J., Singh, A., and Kleinberg, J. Patterns of Influence in a Recommendation Network.</ref>

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.<ref name="Anderson">Anderson, L. and Holt, C. (1997). Information cascades in the laboratory ''The American Economic Review'', 87, 847–863.</ref>