The_Walrus wrote:
It has less than you think.
If we encouraged people to start voting on things rather than reading about celebrities, they would immediately vote to return to the status quo.
For the most part, the media publishes what people want to read. If it didn't, they'd go out of business as they lost customers and ad revenue.
The media will jump on anything that becomes popular in the hope of selling more of their s**t. But I think things become popular through an intricate effort utilizing psychology, historical trends, and massive marketing campaigns.
It is rare that something become popular by word of mouth or just happens to take the public's imagination. For the most part it is a result of marketing. If you don't believe this then a good example to investigate is how the UK music singles charts changed during the mid 1990's. Promotion of certain acts/songs became paramount and the charts changed from being a list that represented the songs people thought were good enough to buy, into being a list that showed the industry which marketing campaigns/promotions were the most effective. Of course this changed somewhat when downloading came into play, but promotion is still the biggest factor in what sells music.
28 Oct 2013, 4:42 am
