There is another key part of this relationship – the ability of items of high social value to soar in the public consciousness far above their neighbours in the inherent value space. For example, two paintings might have similar inherent value but if one gets picked up socially perceptions of its overall value can become highly inflated.
I’ve been trying to track down signals of these issues and started by listing up some cultural artifacts which might have inflated values. Here’s a list of the type of thing I mean:
The Wikipedia page on The Mona Lisa, for example, gives some indication as to the non linear nature of interest in this work of art:
Until the 20th century, Mona Lisa was one among many and certainly not the "most famous painting.”
Update: take the remainder of this post advisedly. I note that Google’s news time series suggest a very lumpy sample of news data which may be the ultimate force behind the signal reported below.
Where was I? So in looking into the Catcher in the Rye a little, I pulled up the charts from Google News and Trends. Interestingly, while the news chart shows obvious upward attention, there is a peak and then decline. The news trend goes from 1950 to 2009 – the book was published in 1951.
Google Trends shows less data, but the decline is discernable.
Part of this may be influenced by various attempts and claims around creating a film version of the book. However, searches on Google News for articles that don’t mention either ‘movie’ or ‘film’ show pretty much identical trends.
So why did it peak? Is the news trend an artifact of Google’s data? Given the reduction in searches, perhaps not. Note that the search graph is only for the US market in an attempt to remove any issues to do with language and international markets.
July 2001 was the 50th anniversary of the book, so perhaps this represents a generational aspect to its popularity.
One of the reasons behind separating these two is that hyperlocal content, and especially blogging, is not simply content about a location and of a particular geographic granularity. It is intended for people resident in that location and, importantly, it is written by residents of the location. Local news does not require the later.
I’d love to hear more opinions on this topic, as well as links to favourite blogs or other hyperlocal resources.
Is Seattle unusual in its coverage, or are there other places that have a thriving hyperlocal blogging culture? Please comment if your neighborhood is covered.