In its introduction, Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular traces the genealogy of Johannes Brahms' lullaby, "Wiegenlied." Thompson's research found that "Wiegenlied" borrowed so enthusiastically from Alexander Baumann's Austrian folk song "'S' is Anderscht" it amounted to a "veiled but identifiable parody." The dissemination of Brahms' piece begins in the home of a friend for whom he wrote the song in 1868 before it is performed publicly in Vienna in 1869. Since German immigration to the United States peaked in the 1870s, 80s and 90s, seeing 4.5 million Germans flee to the New World in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, Brahms' lullaby served many families as a tether adjoining their old and new lives. Parents sang it to their children, who in turn sang it to their children, and so on into the present.
Herein lies Thompson's most fundamental thesis statement about how things become popular: A proper concoction of familiarity and novelty. Consumers' recognition of familiarity and novelty is expressed through characteristics to which Thompson time and again refers back: Neophilia, a propensity for discovery that which is novel; and Neophobia, a repulsion to that which is too new. According to Thompson, "The best hit makers are gifted... architects of familiar surprises."
Yet the equation for hit making requires a complement: Distribution. Some might call it marketing, advertising, selling, syndicating, circulating, etc. Early in How Things Become Popular, Thompson cites Instagram's acceleration from the latest photo sharing app built in Silicon Valley to a global phenomenon. Before Instagram hit the App Store, its founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger (mysteriously not identified by name in the book) gave early versions of the app to a number of luminaries and influencers in the San Francisco tech scene, who in turn promoted the platform to their substantial and trusting audiences, providing significant initial distributive momentum in Instagram's nascence. This early dissemination is what Thompson offers as that element which played the primary part in distinguishing Instagram from myriad other similar photo-sharing apps that were produced in the late-oughts and early-2010s.
Claude Monet; Pierre-Auguste Renoir; Edgar Degas; Paul Cézanne; Édouard Manet; Camillo Pissarro; Alfred Sisley. By reputation, these seven 19th-century impressionists comprise the most famous of their ilk, and indeed, quantitatively, their works are the most commonly reproduced and occupy more pages of more art history books than any other impressionists. Thompson points to one of their contemporaries, a fellow artist and collector named Gustave Caillebotte. Having a particular affection for the works of these seven artists he had amassed an impressive menage of their original pieces. In his will, Caillebotte had decreed that his collection must hang at the Musée du Luxembourg, a demand that outraged the museum's curators and benefactors. The ensuing argument over whether or not to hang what the elitist wing of Paris' art world deemed "filth" was a public one and a long one. After several years of the fight a selection of the Caillebotte collection was finally presented in the museum, representing France's first display of impressionist works.
The free press kicked up by the fracas generated such public interest in the eventual opening of the collection that "the public flooded" the museum. The works, therefore, of Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Manet, Pissarro, and Sisley were immediately and enthusiastically canonized by a great many members of the public. Such an introductory event, as Thompson elucidates many times, is a crucial characteristic in the lifecycle of any successful public offering, be it a social network, a song, a design for a train, or a painting.
Caillebotte, as mentioned, was not only an art collector but a painter himself. His work is, objectively, excellent. But unlike many of his contemporaries, particularly those whose eternal fame he sealed by including them in his donated collection, he was neither prolific nor dedicated to the craft of self-promotion. Indeed he did not include any work of his own in the collection he donated to the Musée du Luxembourg, and therefore denied himself the opportunity for long lasting fame. But would his paintings have been adopted by the public the way those of his peers had been?
Likely. Yes. If they got introduced to the public as though they were painted by a master, as though they were paintings that the experts believed the public ought to know, recognize, and adore. This hypothesis was borne out by a Cornell professor named James Cutting in an experiment he conducted with students in 1994. He first presented a selection of students with a series of images wherein a famous painting and an obscure (in terms of familiarity not content) painting were set side-by-side. When asked which painting they preferred students chose the famous painting six out of 10 times. With another set of students, Cutting spent a semester exposing them primarily to obscure paintings in order to develop an environment in which his students understood the paintings to be general considered good, famous, painted by masters. The final step in the experiment was to recreate the side-by-side comparison and see if students would prefer paintings by Artist XYZ to those by Monet and Cézanne, and lo and behold, the results were precisely reversed.
Why did Cutting's students, and why do people more generally, prefer those images which they see most frequently? According to 1960s psychologist Robert Zajonc that which is most familiar is most preferable. Zajonc tested this idea by showing subjects nonsense words and random shapes and asked them to elect their favorites. The results produced what has come to be known as the "mere exposure effect," a rather straightforward - obvious? - assertion that most people prefer images that are familiar as compared to images that are novel.
This is not to suggest that good promotion can ingratiate the masses to junk, though. There are quantifiable thresholds that delineate that which is acceptable to audiences and that which is likely to fail in the court of public opinion. HitPredictor and SoundOut are digital platforms that record labels and radio stations utilize to measure songs' respective capacities for becoming hits. The two platforms are, ostensibly anyhow, surveys. Groups of participants listen to songs and give them ratings. A little rating means that the listener did not think the song was catchy while a high rating means the opposite. In the case of HitPredictor the ratings can reach into the 100s for exceptionally pleasing songs. But the results of these surveys do not, in fact, bear our the reality that the higher a score the greater the likelihood of a song becoming a hit. Rather, so long as a song is rated above 65.00, it has the maximum opportunity to become a hit, pursuant to proper marketing. That is, an aggressively and well-marketed song that scores a 70 will outperform a poorly marketed song that scores a 105. The most prominent expression of this principle in the real world was delivered via the dissemination of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" in the 1955. Thompson examines this poignant episode in the history of popular culture and predilections in the chapter Rock and Roll and Randomness, and by proxy I examine it in my summary of the chapter, but for the moment it can be distilled into a brief tale wherein the song was initially released to little fanfare in 1954 before serendipitously finding its way into the opening sequence of a popular film the following year, and thus entering the distribution vehicle that would disseminate it rapidly and successfully worldwide.
Entwined with the success of "Rock Around the Clock" is the success of the movie, Blackboard Jungle, that carried it to the masses. While the film was neither an Academy Award winner nor a box office blockbuster, having been the 13th most popular theatrical release of 1955, but it nevertheless reached a critical mass of a critical audience, teenagers, and instantly became the anthem of a generation. How much of the song's success was due not exclusively to its own musical merits but to the fact that lots of teenagers liked Blackboard Jungle and, by association, "Rock Around the Clock"? While there is no quantitative answer to that question, the positive associative properties of being associated with a popular movie present another important psychological phenomenon: "Fluency."
Fluency describes the ease with which an idea can be understood. The easier the idea is to understood, the more fluent we can say it is. Conversely, the more challenging an idea's understanding, the greatest its disfluency. Departing from Thompson for a moment to use an example from my own life, I am a lifelong, die-hard Buffalo Bills fan. The story as to why a child born in Manhattan in 1984 became neither a Giants nor Jets fan is a story of fluency. It was January 27, 1991, the Bills and Giants were playing in the Super Bowl. It was the first game I, a six-year old boy could fully understand and I had to root for someone. My favorite color was red, I liked buffaloes, the Bills' head coach, Marv Levy, had a kindness about him that reminded me of my grandpa Sidney. The positive connectivity between my favorite color and the Bills, my affection for buffaloes and the Bills, my love of my grandfather and the Bills, all lent fluency to my adoption of them as my favorite team.
Thompson concludes the previous chapter, The Power of Exposure, with a complication: Though the chapter had been spent substantiating the theory that people are attracted to the familiar, new things (new paintings, new songs, new cars, hair products and bottled water brands) continue to appear. How, then, might one square fluency with something like adventure or fascination. That is, does a golden ratio exist between familiarity and newness? For the answer, welcome to our story, Raymond Loewy.
"Planned obsolescence," the process by which a business offers products designed to become obsolete, owes its proliferation to 1920s business figures like Alfred Sloan, the CEO of General Motors. Between 1915 and 1924, the Model T Ford was only available in black. But in the wake of the Great War manufacturing technology enabled automakers to mass produce new product variants with a new efficiency, thus arming marketers and advertisers with the artillery with which to create a groundswell of repeat costumers. "It was an age of new things," as Thompson put it, "a birth of American neophilia." But as fortune would have it, the coming marketing revolution would give its thanks to a British manufacturer.
In 1929, Sigmund Gestetner, a British mimeograph manufacturer, tapped Loewy, who'd spent his previous six years in New York as a fashion illustrator for Condé Naste and Wanamaker, to redesign their product. Tasked with completing the redesign in 72 hours Loewy offered something so impressive to the company that they kept him on retainer for the rest of his career. The new Model 66 Gestetner Duplicating Machine marked a pivotal moment in Loewy's life, but it would be six more years before his career, and the movement eventually termed "industrial design" that he chauffeured, would find a foothold.
In 1934, Sears, Roebuck and Co., a leviathan alongside Montgomery Ward & Co. in the mail-order catalog and department store businesses, contracted Loewy to redesign one of their most popular offerings, the Coldspot refrigerator. Loewy's design was so appealing that it quadrupled Sears' annual sales from 60,000 fridges to 275,000.
The now-famous fridge is considered the first instance of Art Deco design, and its popularity encouraged a slew of enterprises and businesses to solicit Loewy's work, which synthesized his abilities as an artist, marketer, and engineer, including Pennsylvania Railroad; Lucky Strike; Studebaker; Air Force One; NASA; The US Postal Service.
Loewy and his firm's contributions to the aesthetic of 1950s and '60s America was indelible and far-reaching. So too was his marketing philosophy, encapsulated by the elegant acronym of Loewy's own creation, MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.
Finding the sweet spot at the most widely appealing intersection of advanced and acceptable (or new and familiar) is a pursuit that scientists, marketers, artists and musicians alike have undertaken in various ways and means through the ages. One such investigation into this intersection involved Spanish researchers concluding that, from a sample of 464,411 popular recordings from all over the world between 1955 and 2010, musical development did not rely on more (or less) complicated compositions, but predominantly on new instrumentation. In popular music, audiences prefer modern instruments to satisfy their desires for newness (more advanced properties) coupled with familiar melodic structures to satisfy their desires for familiarity (what would be deemed "acceptable" by Loewy's MAYA principle).
Researchers from Harvard and Northeastern, led by Harvard Business School professor Dr. Karim Lakhani, presented 150 research proposals, ranging from old hat to radical in scope, to 142 world-class scientists and asked them to rate them. Those proposals that were rated most poorly were those that were most radical, followed quite closely by those that were least adventurous. Those proposals that could be categorized as "slightly new" received the best scores. Thompson links the results of this experiment to the phenomenon of the "high-concept pitch," which sells a new idea by likening it to an existing one, citing, as examples, how the founders of Airbnb sold their idea to investors as "eBay for homes," and, subsequently, Uber and Lyft got described as "Airbnb for cars."
Thompson highlights ESPN's hiring of John Skipper as a poignant moment during which popular media proved out Loewy's MAYA rule. Skipper suggested that ESPN significantly trim the fat on its sports offerings and focus on their flagship program, SportsCenter. By doing so, Skipper hypothesized, ESPN would maximize the likelihood that a viewer would see a clip about a team or news story in which they were interested. The numbers just a few years later supported Skipper's theory as ESPN's near-relentless commitment to serving up a repetitive news cycle reestablished them as the leader in sports media on television. And as smartphones proliferated globally ESPN was able to transpose the ceaseless news cycle onto the emerging medium by utilizing push notifications to remain ever in their audience's attention.
Reinforcing the efficacy of offering audiences that which is familiar in order to retain their attention, Matt Ogle, a Spotify engineer relayed the tale of how the Discover Weekly feature matured. Upon its initial public release Discover Weekly delivered 30 songs to Spotify subscribers, songs which each user has never streamed previously. During an update push a bug was accidentally introduced which placed songs that users had indeed streamed previously into the Discover Weekly playlists. The Spotify development team moved quickly to fix the bug, restoring the feature to one which only delivered brand new songs to eat subscriber. The result of the bug fix was a surprise: Engagement went down. It turns out that Spotify users engaged more with the feature when the weekly playlist included a song that was familiar to them. Thus, the Discover Weekly feature had, over time, landed at the ideal intersection of novel (advanced) and familiar (acceptable).
Savan Kotecha had been trying to break into the music industry as a songwriter for years. He knew the precise number of rejection letters he'd received: One hundred and sixty. His first lucky break came when a New York music executive sold him to go to Sweden. Just as Wall Street represents what economist Michael Porter calls an "industrial cluster" in which the financial industry is deeply embedded, and Silicon Valley represents technology's preeminent industrial cluster, so Sweden stands in for songwriters. Soon after arriving in Stockholm, as Kotecha relates it, "I met up with RedOne, Lady Gaga's songwriter, and his whole crew. Through another connection there, I met Simon Cowell and became involved with the X-Factor, which made me the lead coach and songwriter for One Direction. A few years later, I met Max Martin. And then everything really exploded."
Due in no small part to his relocation to the songwriters' hub that is Stockholm, Sweden, Kotecha has written songs for or with Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Usher, Maroon 5, and Carrie Underwood, just to list a few. Being at the right place at the right time factored critically into his ultimate success, but his abilities for developing catchy melodies are, of course, tantamount. What separates a good melody from a bad one is a methodology that even the most experienced songwriters struggle to explain. But there are essential elements that seem pervasive in any catchy melody, one such essential element being repetition.
In 2009, a fifth-grade music teacher named Walter Boyer played a recording for his class of a woman speaking the following words:
The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible... sometimes behave so strangely... sometimes behave so strangely... sometimes behave so strangely...
That final phrase, "sometimes behave so strangely," repeated over and over, and with each subsequent repetition broader smiles gradually grew on the children's faces, the repeated phrase manifesting, over time, as a song, with tempo, with melody and rhythm, all musical elements which the group of fifth graders uniformly and simultaneously recognized. "Try it," Mr. Boyer suggested, and at his behest the class began to sing the phrase just as though it were, indeed, a song.
The voice on the recording belonged to Diana Deutsch, a psychologist at the University of California. Several weeks after the episode described above, Deutsch saw the video of Mr. Boyer's class and reinforced her formulation which she called the "speech-to-song illusion." "'When somebody is talking, there is a central executive in the brain that makes decisions about whether a phrase is spoken or sung,' Deutsch told [Thompson]. 'Repetition is a clue. It tells the brain to listen for music.'"
And where repetition is a clue, pattern is the smoking gun. David Huron, a musicologist at Ohio State, discovered through experiments with mice that there exists a particular pattern which attracts one's attention and satisfies one's desire in equal measure. Where "B," "C," and "D" each represent a different note in a scale, Huron cites that a pattern which goes BBBBC-BBBC-BBC-BC-D scares the mice for the longest period of time with the fewest notes. Said another way, the pattern is has the repetition necessary for capturing a mouse's attention and the intrigue required to keep it. Thompson keys on the last bit of the pattern, BBC-BC-D, which he recognizes as what Kotecha might deem the "basic pop structure" of verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge.
"'People find things more pleasurable the more times you repeat them, unless they become aware that you're being repetitive,' Huron said. 'People want to say I'm not seduced by repetition! I like new things! But disguised repetition is reliably pleasurable, because it leads to fluency, and fluency makes you feel good.'"
While repetition provides a clue as to whether a phrase might be a piece of music, it doubles as a simple yet immensely effective rhetorical device. Jon Favreau, not the actor from Swingers cum creator of the Mandalorian, but the political speechwriter who got himself a job penning President Obama's most famous lines, said "If you want to make something memorable, you have to repeat it." An example from one of then-candidate Obama's most renowned speeches, delivered after losing to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Iowa caucus:
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sun by immigrants as they struck out from distant shored and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
The "Yes, we can" refrain is a rhetorical device known as epistrophe. Thompson lists others:
Repetition at the beginning of a sentence.
"We shall fight on the beach, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields." -Winston Churchill, 1940
Repetition in short triplicate.
"Government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, 1863
The same word repeated over and over.
"Just remember those four words for what this legislation means: Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs." Nancy Pelosi, 2009
Repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption.
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933
"Drill, baby, drill." Sarah Palin, 2008
Repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859
Repetition of grammatical elements.*
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
Rhetorical inversion.
"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." John F. Kennedy, Inaugural address, 1961
*Thompson actually appears to get this a little bit wrong, for he cites Parallelism is "repetition of sentence structure," while most grammatical authorities, among them the University of Lynchburg and boords.com, agree that it relates to any component of grammar, be it a word, a phrase or sentence.
Goose bumps are caused when thin muscles beneath the skin called arrector pili tug the bottom of the hairs to make them stand on end, a process that helps trap warm air near to the skin's surface. This evolutionary trait not only protected early hominids but remains as an autonomic response to various stimuli, among them feelings of nostalgia. Thompson relates a story of hearing Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" during a return visit to his college campus in Evanston, Illinois. The remembrance of the song summoned fond memories that in turn gave Thompson the chills. Goose bumps.
The reaction was produced by a synthesis of activities: Hearing a song, recalling the past, re-experiencing emotions. "Reengaging with the same object," according to Cristel Antonia Russell and Sidney J. Levy, "even just once, allows a reworking of experiences as consumers consider their own particular enjoyments and understandings of choices they have made." Nostalgia is not a phenomenon which connects a point in the present to a point in the past, but rather bundles a multitude of experiences, emotions and memories and deposits them into a complex context which includes not only the bundle but an individual's entire existence between then and now. It is, in both the figurative and literal sense, chilling. Goose bumps.
In the mid-1940s, young people could pay 10 cents to go to the movies. Unlike a contemporary visit to the cinema, back then the movie theaters would show numerous programs, and so the 10 cent ticket would offer viewers several cartoons, a short, a feature film, and a serial, which was a 25-minute episode from a continuous story. Serials would often end with the hero hanging perilously off a cliff, thus spawning the phrase "cliffhanger." George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, made a routine of going to the movies during this era. His favorite, one which he shared with countless other young people, was Flash Gordon.
As Thompson writes, "Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe includes exposition that rolls up into the top of the frame and ends in ellipses; there are screen wipes between scenes; and the story concerns a male hero leading a great rebellion against an evil emperor fought with 'laser swords, ray guns, capes and medieval garb, sorcerers, rocket hips and space battle.'" Sound familiar? Lest you grow nervous that Star Wars was a knock off consider that, as Thompson explains, Flash Gordon, too, had as predecessor, having been based on John Carter, a character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who coincidentally also created Tarzan.
Among George Lucas' other cited influences on Star Wars was Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, which itself was drawn from a prior Kurosawa film, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, which, you guessed it, was based upon a play called Kanjincho. The roots go deeper. Kanjincho was a 19th-century reframing of an old Japanese drama entitled Ataka. And the characters in Ataka were adapted from folktales about Minamoto Yoshitsune.
Vincent Bruzzese developed a system by which he could help Hollywood studios predict an audience's reaction to a script. Not a movie. Not a trailer. But a story. Bruzzese's predictive schematic has been proven effective time and again, and thus Thompson offers him, and his work, to illustrate the core principle of Hit Makers: MAYA. Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. People, individually and en masse, respond positively to concoctions made of just the right amount of familiarity and just the right amount of originality.
Peter Blogojowitz died some time in the 1720s in his home of Serbia. Within several months of his passing nine members of his small community died after brief illnesses. The villagers quickly declared a culprit: Blogojowitz. In concert with the timbre of the times it was determined that he was a vampire, the undead, and needed to be re-killed. So they exhumed his corpse, drove a stake through his chest, and burned the body.
As Thompson explains, Blogojowitz unfortunate double-end was not unusual. Cultures far and wide had long-since established their own versions of the vampire myth, citing it, in the absence of anything resembling modern medicine, as the cause of mass deaths. And what provides the soil in which such a myth to grow? Thompson asserts that it is the perfect story, one which provides a reasonable-enough explanation to otherwise confounding phenomena and simultaneously arming regular people with agency by putting the means of solution (e.g. re-killing an already dead guy) firmly within their grasp. Any villager with the stomach to dig up a corpse, plant a stake through its heart, and burn it could be a hero.
Great stories are seductive. A great story can not only enchant, but it can also suppress the truth. The Salem Witch Trials. The Nazis' Jewish Conspiracy. Trickle-down economics. (Sorry.)
Stories can also produce false narratives, and those false narratives have the capacity to be transmitted transgenerationally with enough velocity to shape cultures. To Gina Davis, star of Beetlejuice, Thelma & Louise, and A League of Their Own, one such false narrative had cultivated outsized chauvinism in Western society. That's why, in 2009, in collaboration with Madeline di Nonno, another film industry veteran, she founded the Gena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in order to expose gender biases in TV and movies which buttress the notion that men are born to be heroic and women are born to be pretty.
The results of Davis' and di Nonno's research are stark. As Thompson writes:
Most troubling might be the overt, and dreadfully one-sided, sexualization of young female characters. Girls and women were twice as likely as boys and men to be shown in sexually revealing clothing, and five times as likely to be called out for their good looks. In the world of film, women account for less than one third of the workforce while they represent two thirds of its sex objects."
Reenter Vincent Bruzzese. Bruzzese's focus-grouping has revealed that both male and female audiences respond to assertive male characters positively while responding to assertive female characters negatively. Assertive men are badass. Assertive women are bitchy. Thompson asserts that Hollywood has been hoisted on its own petard. Having established a narrative wherein men are heroic, assertive, badass, and women are sex objects in need of rescue, they have pigeonholed themselves into a requirement to continue to reinforce the stereotype. But Thompson also asserts that the solution to Hollywood's bias problem is simple: Just make a bunch of movies where assertive women are your protagonists. That is, reeducate your audience.
Does such a suggestion violate the MAYA principle? Initially and broadly, yes. Change takes time and while subsets of the global movie-going/streaming public will enjoy seeing women in "leading man" type roles, all indications show that most audiences will react negatively. But that is subject to change. Quoth Thompson, "In 1996, just 27 percent of Americans said they supported the right of gay people to wed. In 20156, 73 percent of people under thirty-five said they supported gay marriage. So, in less than twenty years, the idea of marriage equality went from absurdly radical to freshly mainstream to boringly obvious."
Delineating why this is more popular than that is an activity which is mediated by three factors: Choice, economics, and marketing. Thompson cites car-buying trends in 1918 versus car-buying trends now to elucidate the impact of a market flush with choices. Of course black cars were the most popular - said another way, of course buyers preferred black cars - because no other colors were available. In the absence of choices, popularity can be fairly easy to predict, and so, of course, the opposite holds true. Regarding economics, when (mostly American) parents had significant amounts of disposable income, they could afford to buy expensive, stylish Abercrombie clothes for their teenagers, or give them large enough allowances that they could buy the clothes themselves. When the housing crisis of 2008 descended on the American economy, those disposable incomes and corresponding teenager allowances, dried up, and with them went Abercrombie's business. And as for marketing, the song "We Are Young" by the band Fun may well be an all-time great song, but comparing it in any objective way to other songs would be impossible because its popularity was so dramatically impacted by its placement in a Chevrolet Super Bowl commercial in 2012.
But what if there were a universe where popularity of this versus that could be studied in the absence of choice, economics and marketing? For Thompson, first names represents that very universe.
Prior to the industrial revolution, there weren't very many first names, a cultural feature which seemed consistent across societies all across the globe. But by the mid-19th century, factories called the multitudes to leave the family farm for life in the city, thus introducing them to new names, and, simultaneously, rapidly increasing education rates also exposed people to new names. Not only were myriad new name choices all of a sudden available, but how people thought about name-giving changed, as Thompson puts it, "creating a virtue around newness where formerly none had existed."
Clothing, and the fashion thereof, followed a similar evolution, though, of course, choice, economics and marketing have forever played their roles to varying degrees, in opposition to the fashion of names where there is no merchant who benefits from you naming your child this name or that name. Like names, clothes as a fashion emerged some time in the 13th or 14th centuries, with historians theorizing two likely reasons being rapidly proliferating trade roots made it easier for aristocrats to outfit themselves with new garments, and more efficient manufacturing methods making it possible for the common man to dress like an aristocrat, thus provoking the aristocrats to embrace new fashions by which to distinguish themselves from the lower classes. The machinery of fashion having been ignited, so too was the process by which one item of clothing becomes cool as another becomes outdated, a process quantified by British fashion historian James Laver in 1937, memorialized as Laver's Law:
As I write this summary of Derek Thompson's book Hit Makers in the spring of 2024, Evelyn is ranked as the 9th most popular name for baby girls having been born in the US. The last time the name Evelyn saw such popularity was, according to babycenter.com, in 1935. In this instance, at the very least, Laver's Law holds up. Evelyn is somewhere between a charming and romantic name. Thompsons ponders the social motivation which first makes a name popular, then renders it outdated (or dowdy or amusing), and then again ushers it into popularity once more. And like a society reviving a formerly popular name, Thompson again invokes the fundamental premise of his book: MAYA. "Familiarity underlines popularity... and many parents are Goldilocks, choosing from that large swath of names that is neither overexposed nor proudly weird." He continues, in summation, "Individually, these parents are just picking names they like. Collectively, their choices create a fashion."
In Dr. Robert Cialdini's book Influence, he suggests that "the greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct." But touting an idea's (or a products, or a song's) popularity can result in an inversion of expected returns. Thompson cites a paper written by Balazs Kovacs and Amanda J. Sharkey, "The Paradox of Publicity," in which they report that books on Goodreads.com that won awards were more likely to receive negative reviews than books which were merely nominated for awards. As Kovacs and Sharkey write, "some people...are excited about disliking acclaimed works, because they look forward to forming a counterintuitive opinion about a book that people are talking about." If one were to incorporate Kovacs and Sharkey's findings into a graph charting the lifecycle of a popular book, one would see a gradual upwards slope as critics and tastemakers lend their endorsements; followed by a steep increase in velocity as the respective followings of those critics and tastemakers embrace their recommendations; then culminating in a flattening of the curve as contrarians enter the fray and offset new fans. And depending on the book's quality (and luck, timing, marketing support, etc.) the flattening effect may sustain, devolve into a decline, or, like Orwell's 1984, for example, find itself embraced by new audiences.
In summation, Thompson categorizes this trend as a fashion, a phenomenon the life of which can be described by Laver's Law. Another example of such a phenomenon is the laugh track. Developed by Charles Douglass in the early 1950s, the device originally called the "Laff Box," was intended to replace the live studio audiences in front of which television shows were typically filmed. Since actors would regularly mess up their lines and therefore need multiple takes to land a joke, live studio audience reactions often produced lackluster reactions for viewers at home who were on the receiving end of a taped, and highly edited, broadcast. By splicing together audience reactions that he had recorded over several years, Douglass was able to offer television producers a reliable and customizable set of laughs, thus cuing the viewers at home to join in the boisterous laughter.
But by the early 2000s the laugh track had all but died out. Thompson asserts that TV shows produced in the 60s, 70s, 80s and into the 90s often looked and felt to viewers at home like plays, but slicker production methods developed throughout the 90s and 00s made them look and feel more like movies and so the laugh track came off as anachronistic. Thus, Douglass' creation followed the lifecycle of a fashion. It was cool, then popular, and eventually found itself outdated.
Could communication be beholden to the prescriptions of fashion? Our (homo sapien sapien's) first ~150,000 years saw us lack any written language. Sometime around 50,000 BCE saw the emergence of cave paintings. Some 40-ish thousand years later Sumerian cuneiform and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics crop up. Throughout the first and second millennium BCE varieties of phonetic alphabets would appear, but written language remained all but untouched by the masses until Gutenberg's printing press, which he developed in the 1440s. Even still, literacy, and moreover the ability and tendency to write things down, was perfectly uncommon until the 17th century, during which time the Royal Mail because the world's first postal service. The next great leap in communications technology would occur in 1844 when Samuel Morse built the first telegraph, followed in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell's telephone.
The 1990s saw the proliferation of cell phones and the infancy of the internet. The oughts gave rise to social networks like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook. The modern landscape of communicative tools includes SnapChat, Whats App, emojis and Bitmojis, Instagram Stories, TikTok, which in the aggregate, offer a world in which older modalities, be it writing a letter, talking on the phone, or even sending a text, are, at least among young(er) people, considered antiquated. Thus, as Thompson sees it, communication itself is indeed at the mercy of Laver's Law.
The term "teen-ager" did not find its way into the general lexicon until after WWII. Three phenomena contributed to its proliferation: The rise of compulsory education; the postwar economic boom; and the invention (and indeed mass production and distribution) of the car. As families were relocating from the farm to the city and sending their youngsters to work in dangerous factories, a movement began to send kids to school rather than to work. From 1920 to 1936, the percentage of teens who attended high school doubled from 30 to 60 percent. Spending significantly more time around young people their own age catalyzed teens to develop new customs, cultivate new mores, and create something akin to a social revolution. The flames of the youth movement were fanned by a post-WWII economic boom. Parents with greater disposable income had the capacity to furnish their lives with summer camps, music lessons, and a vast variety of other extracurricular activities, thus supporting even more connective tissue between and among teens. The third feature of the birth of the "teen-ager" was the automobile.
A common thread that runs through each of these three features is independence, and no outcrop of the Industrial Revolution promoted independence like the ability to hop into your Chevy Bel-Air, pick up your girlfriend, and drive to a party miles away. The impact of teenagers' newfound autonomy was extreme enough so as to trigger J. Edgar Hoover and President Dwight Eisenhower publicly express concern for the dangers of truancy and, at least perceived, criminality, which they determined to have been produced by young people all of a sudden roaming the streets. While much of the hysteria was unfounded, the psychological community has unearthed evidence that teenagers indeed act more recklessly, take more risks, and suffer more accidents.
Thompson notes that there are physiological characteristics which are unique to the human teenager: "loosely connected frontal lobes, the decision center of the brain, and an enlarged nucleus accumbens, the pleasure center." One crucial manifestation of these traits surfaced in an experiment conducted by Temple University professor Laurence Steinberg. Prof. Steinberg gave a group of teens and a group of adults a simulated driving test, each group performing first without an audience and then with an audience. The adults drove the same way, obeying traffic laws and such, regardless of who was watching, while the teenagers tended to drive with performative abandon once an audience was gathered. In essence, the teens wanted to look cool in front of their peers.
Though teens represent a consumer class that bears distinguishing features from, say, young parents, single adults, senior citizens, their behaviors also indicate that individuals do not exist in isolation, but rather within the context of concentric social circles. These social circles - family, friends, best friend, idols, enemies - serve to categorize that which is cool versus that which is uncool. Coolness is an ever-changing marketplace. Quoth Thompson, "culture is chaos."
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