http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?_r=4&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

The article above discusses the popularity of musicians in society today. It analyzes the phenomenon from a networks perspective, but only scratches the surface of the material that we talked about in class. Nevertheless, the article does hold much value for our purposes because the examples and qualitative observations mentioned pertain to the general concept of information cascades.

In class, we discussed the effects of information cascades, but the graphs we drew were primarily linear. We examined the decisions of individuals based on the signals and decisions made by people upstream in the cascade. Realistically, each of these graphs would represent a branch of the cascade as a network. The cascade looks like a large tree from a broader perspective. In fact, an information cascade generally runs through the Global Friendship Network. To this end, we see a mix of signals pervading the network and the formation of either accept or reject cascades on a large scale.

The article remarks upon how the song “Lockdown” by 52metro was a No. 1 song in one “social-influence” world, and No. 40 in another. One can conjecture that perhaps in the “world” that contributed to the songs No. 1 rating, there were a large number of high signals, and thus multiple accept cascades occurred. Of course, this idea does not imply that everyone “accepted” the song, but rather the cascade reached a point where one person noticed that more people were accepting the song than were rejecting it, forming an accept cascade. The No. 40 song in the other “world” probably had more reject cascades, or even just a balance between high and low signals. When people in an information cascade receive an equal mix of high and low signals, they are rendered indifferent between the two options. As much of this phenomenon is left to chance, the song happened to receive the attention that it did.

Ultimately, the musicians that have become popular appealed to the audiences of their time. The article refers to research conducted in which the popularity of a musician was determined by its market share of successful songs. They found that the market share did not predict the popularity of future songs released by the artist, and thus concluded that much of this idea relied on chance. There is no way to undoubtedly know how people will react to a new product, fad, or opinion, but by studying information cascades, we can understand the phenomenon and understand how it works in our society.