Explaining the Twilight Phenomenon
I, along with almost every breathing female between the ages of 13 and 30, have read the Twilight series. After completing this ordeal, I realized that all Twilight was was an overdone Romeo and Juliet wannabe plot with fangs and an even more pathetically in love and sappy female lead. The sparkly vampires failed to strike fear in the hearts of the readers, and the writing itself wasn’t even very skillfully done. Needless to say, I didn’t enjoy the series. However, I’d be willing to bet there’s upwards of a few million girls out there who would disagree with me rather strongly. But why this cult-like obsession with a series that is far from a literary masterpiece? Once the first few readers are hooked, I believe that information cascades and information based and direct benefit reasons are a main contributor to the popularity of Twilight.
Twilight has a few key components that historically attract young female readers: the tall dark and handsome male lead, the “ordinary” girl that the readers can relate to, and of course a passionate love story. However, this storyline, even with the addition of the supernatural, is fairly standard. I believe that the immense popularity of Twilight can be explained by information cascades. The target market for the books is females between the ages of 13 and 30 approximately. This demographic is notorious for gossip and spreading information(whether true or false) amongst themselves. Here is where the information cascades come into play. All it takes is one girl to read Twilight and tell her friends. They trust her decision and will probably go on to copy her decision and read the book themselves. As the crowd of people who read the book grows, information and direct benefit effects also take place.
Information effects mean that your desire to read Twilight stems off of the fact that you might think the crowd of people who have read the book knows something about the book that you don’t know. Obviously, if so many people have read the book one would think it would have to be good, so the larger the following, the more likely it is for you to think that the book is good and be inclined to read it yourself. The direct benefit effect can also be seen here, and is probably the reason I read Twilight. Direct benefit means that sometimes being part of a crowd has value in itself. In this case, since so many people had read Twilight, I felt very out of the loop when everyone was talking about it and I had no clue what was going on. This can happen to others, and they will read the book to fit in and be able to be part of the fad that everyone was talking about. Twilight can almost be considered a defining aspect of our generation, and wanting to be a part of that craze is what direct benefit effect is all about.
-pinkpanther39
References:
http://suite101.com/article/twilight-series-popularity-a257172
http://www.helium.com/items/2259262-why-twilight-became-a-success