The digital age has us living in a perpetual and pervasive popularity contest.
Leader boards, top 10 lists, most-liked posts and most-clicked search results define what is successful in business and culture.
Amazon's lists of the top-selling electronics, top-selling books, or top-selling electronic books, each with subcategories, tell us what to buy. The top choices of a Google results list are the ones we click on, never the ones at the bottom of the page.
Being at the top of these lists can generate substantial windfalls. The iTunes App Store, where apps like Angry Birds, Words With Friends and Pages have spent months at the top of the charts, help the app makers collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, while those who cannot get that visibility founder in obscurity.
"In some ways, the growth of the Internet has forced companies to create filters that help you locate and correlate things you need; lists are the perfect filter for that," said Matthew O. Jackson, an economist at Stanford who studies social networks and game theory. "But, being 11th on a top 10 list on the app store is a lot different than being 10th on that list."
Once at the very top of those iTunes charts, it takes a long time to fall off. And with good reason. Would you rather sift through 600,000 apps in the App Store or quickly browse the top 25 list?
"We have run into the filter bubble issue, which is a homogenization of culture," said Clay Johnson, author of "The Information Diet," a new book that argues that consumers should take responsibility for the information they seek and consume online. There are plenty of other games besides Angry Birds, he says, but you wouldn't know it from looking at Apple's charts. "Your clicks have consequences. With every action you take online, you're not just consuming, you're voting, too."
Popularity rankings are not new. There were Hot 100 music lists on the radio and weekly box-office tallies before there was a microchip. But the difference is that while a store may put the New York Times best sellers near the entrance, other books can be found there, too. The digital leader board channels us straight to the choices everyone has already made. This isn't to argue that we should do away with filters and lists, but the system now does not work if we want diversity of opinion and tastes.
It also turns out that getting on one of these list isn't always a question of who's best, but more about learning how to game the system. Companies can hire people to write positive reviews about products and apps in online forums and stores, driving interest and pushing them farther up the roster.
Ben Lorica, a senior data scientist with O'Reilly Media, who closely tracks the iTunes App Store, says the other technique to getting into the top lists in iTunes is to be promoted by Apple on the "New & Noteworthy," "What's Hot" or "Staff Favorites" section of the App Store. He said: "Getting on one of those lists is the single biggest thing you can do to boost your downloads."
Then there are suggested user lists, where start-ups like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pick the people they believe should be highlighted on a new service. People who were added to the Twitter suggested user list in the early days collected millions of followers from the windfall. Where do they get those lists of influential people? Often from others lists of supposedly influential people. Not only are we in a popularity contest. We are in a popularity contest in a hall of mirrors.
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