On Doculink, the fantastic documentary film discussion list I belong to, there's been a great debate recently on the idea of context. Should the documentarian avoid sending out screeners (advance copies of a finished film) knowing that they'll get watched on a TV somewhere by someone eating a sandwich and struggling to get thorugh a marathon screening session? Gene Weingarten's recent awesome article on virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell's mostly ignored performance in the Washington DC metro raises the same sort of question. Hey, did you know that that playing of live music in the metro in DC is forbidden? That's my newest answer when people ask me why I moved from there. Anyway, Weingarten chatted with Post readers recently about his piece, and one of them sent in a link to a video of Bruce Springsteen playing "The River" in Copenhagen with a local street musician.
Thing's happen in three, so this morning in the New York Times Magazine there's an article by Columbia sociologist Duncan J. Watts called "Is Justin TImberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?" It's not up online yet, but the gist is that Watts and his colleagues ran some online experiments to test whether music rated higher by other users would grow in popularity, independant of how well they were rated by users in terms of quality. You'll have to read it to see how it turns out, but Watts does say this:
Thing's happen in three, so this morning in the New York Times Magazine there's an article by Columbia sociologist Duncan J. Watts called "Is Justin TImberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?" It's not up online yet, but the gist is that Watts and his colleagues ran some online experiments to test whether music rated higher by other users would grow in popularity, independant of how well they were rated by users in terms of quality. You'll have to read it to see how it turns out, but Watts does say this:
[I]n fact, the question "Why did X suceed?" may not have any better answer than the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss's surprise best seller, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," who, when asked to explain its success, replied that "it sold well because lots of people bought it."Interesting stuff.
