What's Popular Is Good

The "information cascade" and the collective wisdom of crowds which James Surowieki talks about are a phenomenon which have fascinated me for a long time. Starting an information cascade has been, in fact, the main goal of advertisers as long as they've existed. Once a lot of people use something, it can be very difficult to get them to use something else that performs the same function, even if it's better at that function than the thing they commonly use. The story of Microsoft is perhaps the ultimate example of this.

Certain people are often snobby about things that are popular. Personally, I find books and music a lot less appealing when it seems like everyone knows about them. But the fact is, almost everything that gets popular is exceptional in some obvious way. If you spend a lot of time reading books that never really sold or music by bands that never really caught on, you'll find much of it is indeed fairly mediocre, if not actually bad. In probably 80% of such cases, the crowds were right. Of course, there are overlooked gems, excellent pieces which, had they come out at the right time or been promoted better or the creators hadn't died in a car crash, could've entered the pantheon of big successes. And you see, in these cases, how much dumb luck can matter as much as anything. But they're a lot rarer than you'd think. Most of the good stuff does get identified.

All of which is to say, I do have a great deal of faith in the wisdom of crowds; I think we see it demonstrated all the time. Not just on the internet, though obviously, the internet has put it to work in a way I'm sure no media has before. Which is why everyone's trying to get things to go viral--pure interest counts for an awful lot.

As for Encyclopedia Britannica, is it still even around? I don't think I've seen any editions printed after, like, 1995. It's pretty clear who won that tussle, and it wasn't just Britannica that got its hide tanned--anyone remember Encarta on CD-ROM? Anyhow, it's not like encyclopedias are some kind of ultimate source of information. I spent a significant part of my childhood pouring over our set of World Books, and I often found the articles pretty unsatisfying. You still need to dig a little deeper if you really want to know about something. Heck, I still go to the library. Laugh if you want to, but I'm not the only one.

Encyclopedias, though, are clearly obsolete. I don't know where Wikipedia will be in 10 years, but it's safe to say that the days of people buying 15-volume sets are gone. As to whether books generally will be gone in 2019...well, personally, I doubt it. I wouldn't be surprised if ebooks ended up filling very specific niches while traditional books remain better for others. Kids books, for instance. Would you let your baby chew on your Kindle? I didn't think so.