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Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson
Published in February of 2017.
"Content might be king, but distribution is the kingdom.”
The story of content is a tale of progress. Everything is better than it once was.
We have more and better books, long-form journalism, and short-form analysis than at any point in our history - at price points that are lower in both absolute and relative terms.
What is true for the written word is doubly true for the visual arts. TV shows that are as good - or better - than the best movies, (and which may be closer in narrative ambition to novels than films), now appear with regularity on cable.
Each technological advance, from cable to the internet to e-readers to the smart phone, has ultimately resulted in better content at lower costs.
In Hit Makers, Thompson tells the story of how the economics of content creation and dissemination has changed, and how these changes determine (and are determined by) which content our culture values most.
As Thompson discovers, the popularity of a given piece of content (be it a painting, a song, a book, a show, or a movie), is only partly a function of the inherent quality of the work. Exogenous forces, from the network of people supporting the work to platforms in which the work is disseminated, better explain the success (or failure) of a creation than any inherent measure of quality.
Can the same things be true in our higher education industry that have also proved to be true in the entertaining industry?
There are many in our business who wonder if we are due to suffer the same fate as the legacy incumbents in other creative, knowledge, and information industries.
It is not unusual to hear higher ed people wondering out loud if educators will share the same fate as newspaper journalists. We wonder if the future of the small, tuition-dependent institution will resemble that of video rental store in the age of streaming. We have watched the demise of cultural and economic icons - from Blockbuster to Kodak - and we wonder about what technological, demographic, or competitive wave might end up sweeping us away.
Higher ed worrywarts would benefit from reading Hit Makers. We are likely to see the various forces of new technologies and new competitors drive improvements in educational quality, access, costs - even if those same forces prove to be insurmountable challenges for some higher ed incumbents.
I love books about subjects other than higher education that make me think differently about higher education. Hit Makers is just such a wonderful book.
What are you reading?
