Information Cascades, Writing Blog Posts, and What it Means to be Novel.
How do posters choose a topic for their blog posts?
The structure and length of blog posts are loosely set by the professor and the teaching team. Instructions read: “at least two paragraphs”, to include “A link to an on-line resource”, “some commentary about the resource”, and “A discussion of how the resource connects to some topic covered in the course”. Additionally, it is noted that previous blog posts are still available for view and that students can view them for topic inspiration. But have students used these previous blog posts for more than just topic inspiration? Looking back at blog posts (Nov 2019) that seem to have been prompted by a similar assignment, there is an obvious formula that most follow. A link either precedes or follows a body of text ranging usually from two to six paragraphs. This same structure is seen in our current posts and is expected. What’s intriguing, however, is that it is relatively difficult to find duplications of topics. The similarities between these papers can be described as a strategic imitation. It is strategic to follows the rules of posting on the blog and imitate everyone else’s structure because that is how a good grade is achieved. Therefore, everyone will follow the basic guidelines. There’s no rule, other than the assertion that posts will be graded on “novelty“, that states all blog posts must be about different topics, however. There are definitely repeats, but they are not easy to find. What drives us to want to be so different and so similar simultaneously? And what does novelty even mean?
One could argue there is an information cascade at work but opposing our classical thought and design. Instead of players knowing what the first few players do, blog post writers observe what the most recent writers on the blog have written because of the structure of the blog. Inevitably, a blog post writer will want to differ from the previous writers in an effort to be “novel” so he or she will search for a topic that is different from the recent blog posts. This cascade will continue as new writers review the previous posts, which are now new but different from all the other posts appearing on the page. But what happens when this seemingly novel post becomes buried behind many other blogposts? A paper focusing on “First-Mover Advantage” would argue that the poster of this buried post has lost his or her control over the asset (in this case a specific topic) and the asset is again free to be used. This phenomenon can be seen in some of the posts. searching for terms such as “Covid”, “Election”, and other currently popular topics there is often a trend. A post focusing on this topic will control a span of around 2 pages of blog posts. After this, the preemption of the scarce asset is no longer helpful and another poster will come along and focus on an extremely similar topic in their own post. This creates a hopping effect as posts with similar topics, although being much more popular than many other topics that are posted about, become spaced out in a systematic way that showcases how far a particular student may have looked as a test for “novelty”.
The topics of blogposts could then be described as having a component that is semi-cyclic and another component that identifies topics that are truly new. The cyclic nature of popular topics will be driven by the pseudo-cascade of writers observing only a finite number of the most recent posts and choosing to act as everyone else does and maintain a section of the post history: posts being completely different in topic and relatively similar in structure. Interestingly, the individual who comes up with a truly novel topic may not know they have done so. Assuming every student has not looked at every previous blogpost but only a number they deem sufficient to argue that their topic is novel enough to suffice the rubric request, that student is acting in a similar way to the student who duplicates a topic (not intentionally, but because this topic has become buried) in an effort to be novel.
The “First-Mover Advantage” is then systematically gained and lost as writers post and then others search through past topics before coming up with a topic that is “novel” to them.
Links:
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/2486211
- https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1057%2F978-1-137-00772-8_275