Two Narratives Of Success
Both of these ideas are very sticky ones, culturally.
Idea 1. The correlation between quality and success is non-existent at best. If lots of people like a thing, it probably sucks.
Idea 2. The correlation between quality and success is clear. Quality drives success, and deserves to be rewarded.
Idea 1 tends to be applied to art - particularly popular art - and for some products (home computers, restaurants, a bunch of foodstuffs).
Idea 2 tends to be applied at the level of individuals and businesses: talent and hard work succeed; brands succeed because they do things better or smarter than their competition, and so on.
From my own point of view neither of these ideas hold up. The first is a hugely imperfect filter mechanism, the second mostly post-facto rationalisation. But that’s not the point - they persist, and people apply them to different things so there’s no great contradiction between them.
Now here’s the interesting question: which of them do - or will - people apply to social media?
You can see Idea 1 emerging - people on Twitter complaining how stupid the top trending hashtags are; eye-rolling at high-views YouTube vids; sneering at Facebook’s meme-rich environment.
But you can also see Idea 2 in play - Seth Godin proudly notes his blog is the most popular by a single individual; Facebook’s mammoth user base is seen as evidence of its obvious superiority to MySpace, and so on.
So would it be fair to say that on the level of individual shareable ‘products’ Idea 1 will hold sway, but on the level of users and tools Idea 2 will?
It’s not that simple. You can ALSO see Idea 1 appear when people slap their heads at celebrities on Twitter with million-plus follower counts, after all. And you can detect Idea 2 in play when the connective power of YouTube makes the world fall in love with Susan Boyle, or a particularly potent viral.
What it all suggests to me is that social media increases the crossover and blurs the lines between individuals, brands, products, and cultural products (like art). Which means that not just the way we define popularity and success, but the meaning we attach to those things, are in flux.
I’m not pretending to have any answers or predictions - I do think this is a fascinating area and as social media culture starts to settle down it’ll be very interesting indeed to see what new ideas about popularity and quality come through.
