Power Law in Popular Media
https://medium.com/@michaeltauberg/power-law-in-popular-media-7d7efef3fb7c
The article explores power-law on different media with specific data and calculations. In detail, the author explicitly collects data from the internet and uses the data to generate mathematical graphs to indicate how the power-law is presented in multiple forms of media. The article presents examples in books, music, movies, video games, newspapers, and podcasts. Surprisingly, all of these areas follow the power-law distribution in marketing.
The author then explores why power laws distributions form. In short, he concludes that “popularity is a network phenomenon”. He explicitly mentions how the spread of social media contributes to more people following the general trend and popular things get more popular due to these effects. The author then analyzes the effect of power-law in the current world and concludes that it has both negative and positive impacts. Although power-law makes “the rich get richer”, it also provokes innovation and creation.
In the lecture, we had a brief introduction to how power-law distribution works. We mainly discussed what is power law and how to calculate and predict popularity. This article focuses more on real data and gives a vivid description of how power-law actually affects popularity of different media. Such evidence gives a straightforward illustration of the effect of networks and serves as a perfect supplement for the materials we covered in class.