An excellent recent essay from The Economist, "A World of Hits," explores how the ever-increasing world of choice brought by the internet has given blockbuster hits, those cultural juggernauts so many discerning audience members loathe, more cultural and financial dominance, not less:
In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.
This explains why bestselling books, or blockbuster films, occasionally seem to grow not just more quickly than products which are merely very popular, but also in a wholly different way. As a media product moves from the pool of frequent consumers into the ocean of occasional consumers, the prevailing attitude to it—what Hollywood folk call word of mouth—can become less critical. The hit is carried along by a wave of ill-informed goodwill.
This is a problem. As the essay further explains, it used to be that companies could make money on more obscure cultural offerings because there were fewer choices and something a little more narrow in appeal and/or risky in subject matter would be guaranteed at least a fair-sized--and therefore profitable--audience. Not so much anymore. It raises a specific possibility of how all of the creative freedom brought by the internet could be substantially harmful to creative work of substance. It's excellent food for thought, read it here.
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