Sociology

If you take a bunch of teams and you look at how they overlap, now you have a social network.
How art being produced in teams comprised that you got a social network

Collaboration (or bipartite) networks
It is basically when you have a bunch of groups or teams or clubs and you assume that everybody in that group or team or club knows each other and then you say that if theres two, if theres a person who is in two groups or teams or clubs, then that person forms an inter-law between the two groups or teams or clubs

Examples of unipartite networks (in contrast to bipartite networks)
1. Interested in facebook friends
Person named A    person named B    person named C  that would be a unipartite network
Or another application of this might be you say
2. Diseased transmission network
A is a sexual partner with B and then depending on what do you want to do in temporality which is a controversial issue in this kind of things
But you could say that B is cheating on A with C which means that if A has some nasty sore, its a problem for both B and C
3. Ambitious project trying to map every junky in the city of Vancouver, to basically see how HIV and hepatitis and things like that spread between junkies and spread needles
Its not like theyre member of the West Vancouver Junky Club and theres one person whos also member of the East Vancouver Junky Club and you say that person forms an inter-lawlock between the two Junky clubs, its like you have individual people who are sharing needles

Basically a situation where you have, lets say theres A and then theres B and C and theyre all members of the group together and then B, D and E are members of another group together. So the letters would be people and the circles would be groups. Because all are members of the same group, A B and C all know each other and B D and E all know each other. But whats yet interesting, is you can say that (lets call this group 1 and group 2), you can say that group 1 and group 2 are connected through B. And you can say that, person D and person A are connected because B connects them through the groups. So sometimes, bipartite networks social with the groups with one column in the people and another. So you might have A, B, C, D, E and then you have one and two and it shows like this, like that. That would be another way to show that same social network as I just drew the other one.

One of the things that bipartite networks are used classically, actually one of the first examples of the bipartite networks, theres this classic data sets because it is used to be that theres like no network that they were like four network data sets and people just analyze, and theyre just kept doing, they just kept using them over and over and over again, they were like fruit flies, like biologist that study fruit flies all the time and like theres other bugs out there. In the same kind of way, social network analyst used it. Theres like this one data set unlike this monks and this monks they didnt like each other. And social network of this monks like they pass off the grass of chew of each other of this monastery. There was another data set that was a bipartite network where was basically a bunch of rich women in some southern city, it measured which clubs they were members of. They had daughters and competitors and the flowering garden club, and you look to see who is on overlapping club. Nobody who is in all of the clubs, but if you looked at overlapping sets of club, the women that would be one partition of the network and you had the clubs and there would be another partition of networking you could have the women who were connected through the clubs. Another thing that bipartite networks have classically been used for is interlocking board of directors. Lets say that these are business executives and these are companies. Lets say this is Apple computer, and lets say that this is Disney, Steve Jobs

Apple computer and Disney entertainment have interlocking director because Steve Jobs is a member of both boards. He is the president CEO of Apple and hes largest shareholder in Disney. The reason hes the largest shareholder in Disney is that he own Pixar and sold it to them in exchange for stock. If youre interested in, one way to look at it is Apple goes to Steve Jobs, goes to Disney, but the other way to look at it is you could just ignore Steve Jobs you could just say that hes just structure which obviously doesnt a shareholders dont believe. Every time it comes out that he is using aroma therapy that treats cancer theres stock up draft points 10.16. If you do treat him as just structure then you could just say theres a link between the companies.

Interlocking board of director is a very popular application of bipartites social networks. This is specially done by Marxist covers where interested in saying how was it, if there can be an effective class-consciousness of corporate agenda 1043. So the buildings that elaborate networks that entire fortune 500 and though basically said that theres couple of investment banks that the port 1051 of the network. In theory thats how agency is exerted for the social class as a whole. But thats not the point, the point is just that bipartite networks are things that you can build up all sorts of things. But in art, theyre particularly interesting because you have artistic teams, and now if people does work with the same people over and over and over
Gilbert and Solven
Di Caprio and Schwarsezi

Basically, you just have a bunch of, you have a circle, and a circle and a circle and they went overlap. You would just be like, heres A and B, but because A and B work together until they die, they never form networks with anybody. Heres C and D and they work together until they die so they never form a network. Lets say that at some point, A and B have a falling out, and C and D have a falling out. And so, B and C start working together, then you start forming a network. Whether or not this is a good idea art and well get into that, its a very good thing for network annuals 1210 because it means you could form a network. That fact that theres a lot of turn over in the teams, that its just not repeated collaboration. Theres some repeated collaboration, but the fact that there is large turn over, means you can build a network out of it and you can look at that.
Broadway musicals from some work done by Brian Uzzi and his collaborators, and I say Brian Uzzi is the sociologist of the team, the other people in the team are physicist. He labeled 1243 his data set of Broadway musicals over the 20th century. And they basically have the entire history of Broadway in this data set.
From the AGS paper, actually from the working paper before they came out the AGS paper. Theyre showing how you can build a bipartite network out of Broadway.
One way to read this network
Red lines  represent the musical of the Pajama Game
Blue lines  represent West Side Story
Green lines  Gypsy
Gray lines  Fiddler

You can see that theyre all connected to each other indirectly. There is not a direct connection between Fiddler and Pajama Game, but theres indirect connection between them. Even if each one of these docs is a person, when we talk about filming, A is Harold Prince, B is Stephen Sondheim, and C is Arthur Laurents

One way to read this graph
Harold Prince is connected to Stephen Sondheim through West Side Story, so you could say that projects connect workers. In common sense, you could say that Harold Prince met Stephen Sondheim while working on the West Side Story. Maybe they met each other socially. So you could use projects to connect workers.

Another way to do would be these workers to connect projects
West Side Story is connected to Gypsy through Sondheim

Its weird to talk about plays being related to each other but you could talk about plays being related to each other through except that they have overlapping artists involved in that. You could say that, Sondheim connects those two plays

If you view each of this of the hexagon and the pentagon, and the reason that theyre like that is that cause theyre click. Were assuming that everybody on the play knows everybody else on the play. Its not like theyre working together and then they dont know the other people. This is what you call a click

One of the assumptions of the bipartite networks is that each given affiliation forms in internal click, that everybody inside the affiliation knows each other which is actually debatable assumption.

Theres been like a thousand people who worked on general hospital. The standard assumption of these models would be that all thousand of people know each other, which in fact is not true. Some other people whove been on general hospital recently were born after the original people died so they dont know each other, they just managed to be part of this rather long-running thing.

One of the problems of this analysis is takes general hospital too seriously, not on their artistic sense but in the structural sense.

Another way to view this is to basically take each of this, view it explicitly as a click and then look it where the points that overlap. You can see which plays are adjacent to each other.

The graph of the overlapping boards of directorates of major arts organizations in Los Angeles. If you look at non-profits organization, non-profit theaters, art museums, and you look at how they have overlapping boards with each other so they share board members, you can build this network structure out of it.

Small worlds

Small world structure is you have basically a bunch of clicks or whether not fully full clicks but close to clicks, you have a lot of clustering. Theres a bunch of people pretty much all know each other, almost all of them know each other. (green circles)

Maybe theres a couple of people who are members of both clicks, those people will connect those two clicks.

Small world structure is where basically, theres a couple of very insular groups and everybody in them more or less knows each other.

This click is isolated, these people pretty much all know each other but they dont know anybody else. Imagine that one of the people and one of these boards will join one of these boards, then wed have a black light, then there will be a connection to the main structure of the network. But theres not, so this is isolated.

These are actually the long beach organizations and it turns out that nobody in the long beach art community knows anybody in downtown or Pasadena or Sta. Monica. But if one of them works have joined, then you have this connection.

Black Lines  random elements or random graph elements, have to do with a bunch of math. It turns out that these random graph elements drastically changes the nature the network. It really cuts down on the average path like.

Traveling across the country, for example youre trying to get from Los Angeles to Las Vegas about 4 hrs and 15, Salt Lake City another 6 hours. If you want to drive to New York, from LA to New York is about 5 days. You could build that up, you could basically say that the travel time is basically a linear function of distance.

Thats what social network theories call a ladder structure, it is where basically distance in the network.

Bright idea
Saying, youre work is really far from LA, I can fly there and then get a rental car. Taking the plane from LA to New York is a random graph element.

Base line  driving highly clustered network

Random graph element  serving similar factors for network distance as regular air roots to travel time. These are important because they allow information to flow between clicks. Networks theorists love random graph elements because they totally change the nature of them. Its like if you watch a science fiction and they talk about like theres a worm hole, thats basically the same thing as random graph element, its like a jumping point. If you are playing a video game and theres like a war point in the video game and it saves you from having the whole joystick for the whole 3 hours to walk all the way across.

Most networks have small world structures. Small world structures are extremely common in social networks which actually surprise people because the earliest people to study social networks were mathematicians. And mathematicians started out from the assumptions that the two basic network structures were the last which is basically a checker board and the random graph which is basically just like people just go on meet each other totally in random. It turns out that theyre not like that at all but a typical social network is actually a small world structure which is to say that you mostly know friends of friends. The simplest way to explain that is the concept of triadic closure.

Triadic closure  another key concept in social networks. It basically says is that if A knows B, and B knows C, its fairly likely that A will know C.

If you have an open triad which is A knows B and B knows C, its pretty likely that eventually A will know C. Lets say youre B and A is your boyfriend and C is your best friend, eventually youre going to introduce your boyfriend to your best friend. One of the outcomes of that is that you do that enough times and basically, you know youre just building up this huge click. Where its like really densely interconnected and everybody knows everybody who knows everybody. Thats how you have click formation, you have really strong triadic closure, you tend to get the formation of clicks thats why you have the green circles.

Another example, a survey of top 40 radio stations.
Who they talk to What other radio stations do they talk to

Basically its a small world structure so theres a click here and theres another click here and another click here. But there is definitely a core, these are the most important radio stations to the structure and basically these are the big cities radio stations. The big city stations tend to be more popular with their peers (Kiss and WHTC). Theres a couple of clicks elsewhere and theres random graph element. These radio stations know each other but theyre relatively disconnected from the core except that theres this one connection.

Another example, entire internet movie database, the raw data set before you turn into a network data set which makes it bigger. The raw data set for this is like half a gigabyte of just like raw text. You can see the lines but theres this little clusters in it where people know each other. So basically, you have clicks and random elements. It turns out internet movie database is one of the prototypical small world networks.

Duncan Watts is most closely associated with the small world network. One of the networks that he used to demonstrate the existence of this network was the internet movie database. The reason he did that was basically cause of it was free and it was out on the internet and he could get it easily.

Another paper from Brian Uzzi about social network formation and it uses data from the Broadway study and also from other social networks. This study is showing that networks want to be a small worlds. Another way to put that is small worlds are emergent from complexity.

Complexity is a concept about Social Science that means that you have a few simple roles and you build up from those simple roles and you end up getting a complicated structure but its built from just a handful of roles that are relatively simple. Supply and demand in Economics is a familiar example of a complex system. Information cascades are simple example of a complex system. And it turns out that small world social networks are another example of another fairly complex system.

If you look at the top part of the graph, this shows the social structure Broadway over the course of the 20th century. So the very beginning you had just a few plays, and if you look at how they link to each other, theyre basically like a big line. Theres no triadic closure basically. And the line gets bigger, few structures come off the side, few people know other people but not really that much. You have the formation of a few triads, but its still fundamentally a changed structure, everybody is still lining up. It folds in on itself, it turns into a big figurate structure. In order for this to turn into a big figurate structure, one of these people had to meet one of these people. Its almost that a changed structure is unstable because the only thing has to happen to break the chain and to turn into this figurate structure is for one person close to one of the ends to meet somebody close to the other ends and just folds in on itself. At this point its a small world. This structure right here meets the technical demands of the small world but it turns into bigger and bigger. They built an abstract mathematical model of why you get social networks. You make assumption here and you make another assumption here and based on that you see how likely you are to get a small world.

Graph Boundary of being the small world and not being a small world and its really thin described as a phase transition.

Phase transition  in Physics, when one state of matter turns into another state of matter (ice, boiling tea)  half small world (its unstable, either not to be a small world or a full blown small world)

Oracle Bacon  a website where they taken the internet movie database and it tell it any actor and it tells you what the closest steps are to get to Kevin Bacon.

Mean path link  one characteristic of social network, if you take any two people on the network how far part of these two people (80 gazillion possible combinations in the internet movie database). Take any two actors in the internet movie database and you can usually connect them in about three steps. One interesting properties of this is if you do this over and over again, youll see that there are certain movies that keep coming over and over again and theres also certain people that keep coming out over and over again, those are your random graph elements. The connections are what we call hubs

The single biggest hub in the internet movie database is Royce Tiger 4557

Why they care about networks They make really cool pictures. The other reason to care is because they has interesting implications, they cause things we care about.

Creativity

One thing that cause that we care about is creativity in artistic success

Broadway  Q (either the clustering coefficient or ratio of mean path link to the clustering coefficient)

Clustering coefficient  basically the rate of triadic closure

Mean path link  Paris Hilton to Laurence Olivier  you get that number, Paris Hilton to Eminem  you get that number, Paris Hilton to John Wayne  you get that number, you do that for every possible combination of actors and you figure it out what is the average number that means path links

Small world coefficient  clustering coefficient over the mean path link

Example of a structure with a low clustering coefficient, basically theres a changed structure. Chain definition has low clustering. No repeat collaboration. Not a lot of repeat but overlapping.

The 1st structure If I know you and you know Pamela, definitely I know Pamela.
The 2nd structure I dont want to meet your friends.

What does it have to do with creativity and artistic success
Lets say youre a member of a team and youre making a play and theres actually a kind of trade of between developing new ideas on your own and learning about new ideas from other people.

One of the reasons that we have genre conventions is they cause facilitate kind of spot transactions. If you think about going to McDonalds and buying a coke at the counter of McDonalds, you and the clerk at McDonalds, you dont have to sit there and negotiate how this interactions going to work. You dont have to ask if do you give me the coke first or do I give the money first. You both know how this works. You dont have to have dealt with that person before the transaction. W have established procedure that we all understand. If we didnt have rules like that we have to rely much more on repeat collaboration. The first time you hire a babysitter, you have to build in an extra 40 minutes, because thats how long it takes you to explain this and that.

Same thing with artistic creativity, if you think of this sets of rules to understand how to interact with each other, one form of those rules, lets say our genre conventions. One of the implications of that, is that if youre dealing with a new person everyday, if youre never dealing with the same people day to day, the easiest way for you to be able to effectively interact with each other is to converge on a set of very conventional, very genre bounds things. Lets say youre a lounge singer and you show up at your job at the piano bar one day and theres a new piano player and youve never worked with him before, youre not going to say why dont we try that new song I wrote last week, youre going to say play what everybody knows. One of the implications of that if you have too much aggregation, it could be that people can be very conventional because it takes a certain number repeat collaboration in order to develop a new idea. It only makes sense to develop a new idea if youre working together over and over again and have the time to develop it. On the other hand, lets say youre sitting on your little piano bar in some tropical island with just the two of you, you can never going to hear new ideas. You need to bring in new people every once in a while to learn their ideas. What this implies is this situation, youre not going to have any creativity because theres so much turn over that theres never any room for you to say you know that thing that we did on the last play, I want to do that in a slightly different way. You both know what youre talking about because you both work on the last play together. Its like Goldilocks situation, this porridge is too cold, thus porridge is too hot, this one is just right. Its like you have enough repeat collaboration so that you can develop ideas over time. But you also have enough new blood that youre exposed to ideas from the world so you have enough ideas to develop and you also have enough exposure that you can recognize.

If you look at the artistic success of the Broadway season, they define that as how much of a small world this is which is defined as clustering over mean path link.

Not really a small world  not too good
Too much of a small world  not good
Moderately small world  just right end up having a lot of artistic success
Best thing for creativity, youre working with people often enough, you can develop new ideas together. You can form a school which is one of the themes of the gradual reading 5804 this week on a Saturday Night Live. You want to have school where you can bounce ideas off each other, you get used to each other style and build up new ideas. This is an important concept because it means that you can use social networks to understand where creativity comes from. Theres certain social network structures that there going to be more conducive to creativity than others.

Status

Another issue that you can use to understand art using social networks is the idea that theres kind of a pecking order in art. You could also see that in a network sense. Example, movie poster which says George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson and John Goodman.

Clooney  doesnt look that good
Goodman not in the poster

Goerge Clooney, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts
A real mess, weird order

Do you think the one who did this poster never read the people magazine
Do you think that the reason that the poster looks like this cause the artist just dont know who these celebrities are

1. Agents are a big part of it, sometimes these people have the same agent.
2. Bounce between box office runs screen times
3. Star power, big stars get their names first Hollywood contracts are written such that the order of the credits is a sacred thing and nobody is allowed to mess with it.
4. This is kind of a social network

When Turturo accepted the second position, he admits that Clooney is a bigger star than he is Clooney and Turturo are bigger stars than Nelson.

You can build up networks form teams.
Blue line  represents Punch-Drunk Love (Emily Watson is second on behind Adam Sandler)
Green line  The Luzhin Defence
Yellow line  Mr. Deeds

You can use social networks to build up star power for all of Hollywood.
Tricky issue with social networks  youre building them up over time but youre trying to view them cross-sectionally.

James Moody of Duke University is doing some interesting work, he is interested in sexual networks. If youre interested of who gets sick, theres a big difference between having sex with somebody before they get sick and having sex with somebody after they get sick.

A nobody who suddenly appears at the top of a major picture is going to have more star power than a nobody who appears in a movie wither nobodies.
A people who appear top of the credits with really good supporting people even though theyve never been into, they should have high status.

Centrality on a directive graph (who knows who), end up having character actors have very high centrality because theyve worked with a lot of different kinds of people. This is measuring who is at the end of the road.

Centrality in a directive sense vs. on a symmetrical sense, it turns that they always dont go together.

One way to validate is to look at things such as who is a good movie star, such as who appears on a cover of entertainment weekly. Actors who appear on a cover of entertainment weekly have weighed higher centrality.

Who to put in the cover and this network measure of whos the big movie star are very highly associated with each other.

Look at the list, most of people you recognize. Theres not really many women at the very top of the list. In top 20 there are only 2 women, Drew Barrymore and Eva Mendes. The reason for that, whenever there is a movie with a male lead and a female lead, the male lead is always listed first. One classic example of that is When Harry meets Sally.

You can use networks to measure star power. This is extremely good predictor of who gets nominated for an Oscar. The higher you are in the pecking order credits, the more likely you are to get nominations for an Oscar.

Week8 02.24 Wed.

Genre coordination
Producer side and consumer side.
Producers.
Howard Becker, he played music as part of dance dance, full time student. He falls asleep in the middle of the song, but when he wakes up, he realized he havent stopped playing the music and he even improvised when asleep. 30 years later, he wrote a book called Art Worlds. The book is all about artists, gallery owners, night club mangers, and people within the art world and how they work together. One of the most important aspects of this is the art conventions.
Some of these people that he would be comfortably playing with that he could continue playing even in his sleep, he just met those people that day. That became possible because they have the same understandings of what basically swing music could sound like.
Calvin and Hobbes. Theres a concept called Calvinball, a field sport.
The Great American Songbook  the canon (originally comes from Christianity where there were church councils which books were going to be in the Bible)
Columbia University began creating the notion of the secure 1257 canon of literary classics, certain works of secular writing that any educated person should be familiar with (Shakespear Hamlet, Macbeth  literary canon)
Tin pan alley songs  every musician should know
Tono modernism 1951  composers awful concept
That very basic convention of what the musical scale should be that facilitates coordination across time and space by strangers.
Consumers.
Lets watch a movie.  What movie  What kind of movie
Greta Sue, Davis Business School 2856, done some interesting work on the film genre, films can have multiple genres.
Two fundamental issues
1. How many genres
2. Genre clarity or genre consensus  how much can we all agree as to what genre ir is (one says its a duck the other says its a rabbit)

James Cameron  we always think about sci-fi and action but we forget about the love story

Casablanca  kind of masculine but theres a romance sub-plot
The Bridge over the River Kwai  about different kinds of rationalities added sub-plot

The more genres, the more successful too many genres, it turns into a mess (confusing)

Zombieland  comedy, horror, and action (many genres but you all understand  focused identity)

According to Susan Alice 4311 its kind of a sweet spot. She got three different databases (internet movie database, rotten tomatoes, and he cant remember  something like almanac). She saw which genre each of these data sets mention. Mathematical index  measured it as consensus (0  3 data sets completely disagree, 1  they perfectly agree

Unfaithful  moderate amount of consensus
1st database drama
2nd database dramathriller
3rd database dramamysterythriller

Hostile - basically horror
Hangover  basically comedy

Ezra Sacramento 4904 done works in typecasting (helps the worker to get more work)

Genre trajectories
Article by Jan Lina and Richard Peterson, they say that genres come from somewhere.
Common trajectory  a genre will start avant garde, it says that when genre was first invented, its usually a couple of people who know each other (less than 10) and they work intensely with each other, and they develop a new idea.
You tend to actually got the development of new ideas when you high clustering.
Mass Market (industry phase)  hooks up with the ministry 5711 industry (MTV, magazines, pop chart. Eventually, people get sick of it, this genre became unpopular. When you get something interesting, you get nostalgia (traditional mode of appreciation). Basic model for most music genres of all. (alternative rock)
Pixies (1987)  develop alternative rock sounds
College Rock (late 80s)  alternative rock
Nirvana (1991)

1998, alternative rock started to die out and bubblegum pop like Nsync replaced them.

K-rock  half now and half 90s

2004  Pixies reformed

Industry to scene 010524 to traditional, theres never an avant garde phase and the scene and industry or reverse.

Genres are spin off of the core pop music industry. You end up getting local variants. When it sees to be popular, you end up getting people who basically do reunion tours, cover bands and stuff like that.

Nashville sound  highly commercial style country music that became popular originally around early 80s. It wasnt invented by a bunch of people living in a house together. It was invented by a powerful producers inside Nashville.
(Garth Brooks  later example of Nashville sound) (Brad Pacely 1750  recent example of Nashville sound)

Traditional country music  no drums
Grand Ole Opry  had a rule against drums
Genre conformity
Note I guess the speaker wasnt able to finish his discussion because its time already.

Week9 03.01 Mon.

Entertainment Industry Gatekeeping
How do people actually do their jobs in the media What is it that they actually do to a certain extent And todays going to be on gatekeepers in the entertainment industry. So the fundamental problem were going to talk about today is how do gatekeepers choose which products to filter through This should be reminisce it from the hersh 0204 model that I summarized with the triangle and each of these stages there is a person who has to decide. Remember that some artist get distribution, some get surrogates, which will be like airplay-popularity with the audience. Weve been mostly talking to these people but how is it that distribution firms share publicity.
This lecture is about
1. Network television executives
2. Movie studio executives
3. Record company
4. Radio station programmer
5. Anybody uses break, green light, or sign as a verb



Aesthetics
An art criticism, can be formal logic or intuitive thing romantic notion (a good gatekeeper is somebody with good taste  maybe formally trained or their taste itself is romantic). Gatekeepers in this are almost an artist, they have the ability to recognize art before anyone else can (guru mentality).

Fads

Sociologist often put it institutionalism. It becomes important in the social theory called institutionalism, which is the theory of action especially economic action but also political action. The focus is not on efficiency per se. Lets say you have a bucket and youre trying to pull a water from a well using your bucket. If the bucket is too big, it is going to be too heavy and youre going to hurt yourself and on the other hand the bucket is too little (bucket  efficiency). For the sake of argument, you are not just trying to pull water out of the well, theres other people who are watching you do it, and you are trying to impress them. And they may have ideas that are good or they may have ideas that are bad, but theyre going to have ideas about what is the best way to pull water out of the well. Lets say that these people are convinced that theres a big difference between having a red bucket and a black bucket, and you know that it doesnt really matter. Thats an example of a harmless fad but you are going to conform to them because when other people have strong ideas about how you suppose to do things, it makes a certain amount of sense to do it the way they expect you to because it grants you legitimacy  key concept.

Institutions and fads become important when you are dealing with situations where there is a lot of uncertainty and there is a lot of goal ambiguity. One classic example of this is education (add and subtract, character building). This theory predicts that you are going to get a lot of silly fads in education.

Popular culture is intensely characterized by goal ambiguity and by uncertainty.
One of the things you are trying to maximize is sales.
You are not just trying to maximize on each individual project. You are trying to maximize your relationships.

When goal ambiguity and uncertainty are together, it implies that popular culture industry should be intensely characterized by fads.


What do people do when they care about legitimacy
1. They conform to expected scripts  conform to cultural scripts
    a. you might do this because you might not know what you are doing, you have no better ideas so just do some of the established rules  bounded rationality
Bounded rationality  people actually are not that smart

    b. you worry about maintaining legitimacy with your trading partners, youre worried about the people who you have to deal with whether its workers or audiences or the regulatory state, you want to make them happy and you know cultural scripts that would make them happy so you conform to those cultural scripts

How does it work
One way it works is in terms of genre. Media gatekeepers do not evaluate media products against some abstract platonic ideal of art completely disembody from any kind of artistic tradition. Gatekeepers are not producing their products that are expecting to sell the Martians 2521. You are not dealing with Martians, you are not selling products to Martians. You are dealing with people who have very strong expectations about products so it makes sense to conform to their ideas of those products. You judge products in terms of how well they conform to genres.

Example
X axis  time
Y axis  how many radio stations have started playing a pop song

La Tortura by Shakira
Hazard analysis  in every week, people who havent done it yet and theres constant proportion who started doing it.

This indicates that the radio stations are making independent judgments about Shakira. Theyre viewing it independently and theres a reason for that which is that they all know that basically Latin pop is an established genre, and they all have the idea about whether the kind of radio station that plays Latin pop or not. They knew what Latin pop sounds like and they knew whether Latin pop was appropriate for the radio station. So if you are playing country music on your radio station, obviously you are not going to play Latin pop. Each of these radio stations gets a song on a mail and they decide if they will going to play it or not.

Oye Mi Canto by Nore  one of the first big reggaeton songs, now we are all used to it. It came out in early 2004. This shows an increasing hazard function.
Lets say that theres one radio station that starts playing this song and theyre very happy with it, maybe they got a lot of request for the song after they start playing it. Called two radio stations to let this song be played and they start playing it and they have great success with it. So each of them calls the other two stations in other cities that says  we are having fantastic success with this. And then it builds exponentially. Eventually it gets to a tipping point where theres kind of a critical mass of popularity and then it starts to become legitimate (established fad) and this is how fads work. The more popular it becomes the more prominent and legitimate it becomes to radio stations. They do it not because of an established genre. If it was from an established genre, theyll just say that we play Latin pop. Eventually, it is no longer a weird genre, the genre itself can be popular enough. When you have a legitimate genre, when you have a genre that everybody recognizes, this is part of our culture stock of what we do, youll have a constant hazard function. If something is not part of the genre, youll have a logistic function (increasing hazard function).

Genres themselves can be subject to fads.

Sociology article called All Hits are Flicks 3618
It was written before the TV market has changed. TV market used to have this really well established routine, a pilot season, when all the producers would come out sample episodes of their shows. In late spring, early summer, the networks would decide which episodes they will going to commit to for the whole season or maybe half season at least. At the end of the summer, they have the Upfronts which is where the TV networks formally announced their TV seasons, their advertisers and try to convince advertisers that the shows are amazing.

They study pilot seasons
ABC primetime (example of a pitch)

If you are pitching a pilot and you want your show to go to season, a very good way to say is this show that I am trading 4005 is just like other show thats very successful now. The more conventionalize the show was, the more it hook in to these ideas of previously successful show, the more likely it was to get. This is basically why TV shows tend to come in clusters.

In this particular case theyre talking about, it was an example of the anti-sitcom fad. Not in the sense that people didnt like sitcoms but they were deconstructed sitcoms. If you think of the traditional sitcoms like in 50s like Father knows Best, sitcoms in the late 80s and early 90s were opposite of that, the creation of the archetype of the Dumb ass Father 4221. Another example is Everyody Loves Raymond. This fad has early examples of it but this time it started with Married with Children and it developed to The Simpsons and start to see live action.

Police procedural fad which developed gradually into forensics fad (NYPD blue, Homicide and Law and Order 4348).

Gradual development of the reality show, started from documentary format (The Bachelor, The House, Americas Next Top Model, American Idol).

Imitating past successes. Theres this convention on the show and they follow on these conventions of the show because it was successful last time.

Movies, comic book adaptation.

Research

I may not know whether something is good but I know how to find out whether people like it.

Difference between aesthetics and research
Aesthetics  I know whats good (taste)
Research  I dont have an idea whether its good but I know how to find out whether people like it (procedure of finding out)

All decisions in the entertainment industry are influenced by a systematic data.
Differences in Rolling stone and Billboard
1. Fans
2. Statistics (Billboard has more, rolling stone essay-format)

1. Lazarsfeld and Stanton

Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton are the two most important people in the history of the media industry.

Paul Lazarsfeld  has enormous influence on Sociology and the media industry. He is one of the reason why both media people and Sociologists do a lot of Surveys. He pioneered the survey research (core of the mainstream Sociology). He studied in Austria and he studied about unemployment. In America he worked in Princeton in Columbia, he worked in Bureau of Applied Research. Columbia in mid 20s is more focused on methods than theories, more emphasized on quantitative methods. The third important school is Chicago which emphasized qualitative methods. Columbia have a very clever way of paying for their research that theyd sometimes turn the Sociology department into a market research company and theyd sign contracts with private firms who wanted market research done (tetracycline study, big networks of Sociology study). The Columbia Sociology department worked with Pfizer to interview every doctor in this four small towns Iowa Illinois and asked them when they started to prescribe antibiotic and why. Social network study but they tricked Pfizer that it is a drug study.

The invaders from Mars studies. Sociologist called people up the next day and said Did you think the Martians are bombing us last night

Frank Stanton

CBS research project, Lazarsfeld worked with Stanton. Stanton is a Psychologist who got PhD at Ohio State.

Dissertation Methods for Studying Radio Audiences

First invention is Little Annie 10336 (dial testing), a little box, you sit there with it. Adopted by CNN, sitcoms, presidential speeches)

Several implications
1. Frank Stanton became more powerful, promoted as president of CBS
2. This continues to be used by the presidents, comedies use it, pop music (auditorium testing), Posters and speech (Dick Morris developed this for Bill Clinton)
3. Beyond the immediate impact generally created a rationalize way

Other techniques
1. Call out testing  radio stations do, sign up as panel. 20 burn rate, they will stop playing the song
2. Focused groups  bunch of people in a room

Market research ethnography

Main thing is audience surveys (essential for advertisers, Nielsen and Arbitron)

2. passive vs diary audience measures

Audience measurements  to know how much to charge advertisers

Article by Peterson When information constitutes fields (sound scan revolution)
The most important thing in Billboard is the record sales

Problems
1. Corruption
2. Weird taste

Sound scan (1990)  they built a button on the cash register, and the cash register its directly records what CDs were sold and it sends directly to the computer. This is perfect.

Diary measures (self-reported)  you are talking to people personality type questions. The problem is laziness. (remember what they did, be diligent)

People metering (Passive measurement)  sound scan in order to do this effectively they invented the portable people meter  listen to the radio with you and it recognizes what song is played and what station. This is perfect measurement technology for radio. Theres winners and losers.

Radio station 98.7  today Rockaholic (men), 5 years ago the color of the billboard is pastel (women)

PPM  for radio
LPM (local people meter)  for the television market
Nielsen and Arbitron  racist monopoly

4 Profit media (PBS and NPR were worried that congress will going to cut the budget for the corporation for the public broadcasting, they figure they have to lie more heavily on audience donations or audience subscriptions. Because they were afraid of losing their congressional funding, their congressional subsidies, they started worrying more about how do we appeal the audiences. What is it that the audience likes that we do And they found out that theres nobody listening to classical music or jazz on public radio stations, people only like all things considered and based on that, they created morning edition, created bunch of other shows. And thats why today, a lot of public radio stations, if its daylight, its playing talk or news program and they only play music during the graveyard shift. The logic was how do we make most money from our listeners and its by playing news.

Note
Dear Client,I listened to the podcast again but I didnt hear the term disputes over research techniques. I guess its the same to the theme passive vs diary audience measures, though I am not really sure about that.The name GiovannoniGiovannoin was not also mentioned in the podcast. The speaker actually has something more to discuss but its already time, so he ended it with the story, which is the last paragraph I wrote in your order.Best regards,Writer