Information Networks in Television Media
I remember seeing the Netflix icon for Squid Game a month or two ago and scrolling right past it. I had no interest in watching the show because I had never heard of it before, but within the week my housemates and I were powering through the last couple episodes. How was a show none of us had ever heard of able to push its way to the top of our watchlist so quickly, and why were we so satisfied with our experience? The answer to these questions lies in the ideas of information cascades and network effects.
An information cascade is a response to the sequential decisions of others when prompted with a choice. If the public opinion points strongly enough in one direction, people will be less influenced by their own personal information and observations when making decisions. This is exactly what happened last month when the Netflix original, Squid Game swept across the globe. An article by Nick Statt of Protocol examines how viewers contributed to the success of the show to the “spreading by word-of-mouth” and “high critic and audience praise” that it received. These are both opinionated recommendations which allow people to see both that others were watching the K-drama, and that they were enjoying it.
The first effect of this information network was that people were seeing an overwhelming majority of their peers watching the same show, assuming it must be very good, and then watching it themselves even if the genera did not originally appeal to them. The second effect was that the more people bought into watching the same media, the more incentive others had to also watch it so that they would not miss out on the conversations and analysis that was occurring within their social networks related to Squid Game.
These directly point to the network effect of user-ship contributing to perceived value and to the information cascade effect where people will blindly watch a show if enough of their peers are watching it. This does not explain why it was such a hit, however, leading to another question. Was the cultural response to Squid Game organic or part of a network effect? Young-Jin Lee of the University of Pennsylvania claims that “the higher the average rating by prior users is, the more likely a subsequent user is to choose a high rating versus a low rating”, meaning that the largely positive reviews the show received could be related to the pressure of earlier viewers opinions causing conformity.
https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1324&context=marketing_papers
https://www.protocol.com/squid-game-netflix-popular