Brand Value
Bringing Bourdieu to a Content Farm: Social Media Production Fields and the Cultural Economy of Attention
Ashley Mears
Social Media + Society, August 2023
Abstract:
Attention is a valuable and scarce resource in the online “attention economy.” But not all attention is equally valuable. This article advances a relational theory of the value of attention by situating social media content production as a field. I draw from an ethnography of a “content farm” and interviews with 60 creators who make highly-paid but low-status entertainment videos designed to go viral on Facebook, as well as on SnapChat, TikTok, and YouTube. I propose an inverse relationship between status and reach: higher reach may pose risks to a creator’s status and reputation. Furthermore, in pursuit of the highest possible reach, viral creators construct situational authenticity, rather than personal authenticity, and they relate to their audiences antagonistically, in contrast to existing studies of influencers. How creators seek attention, from whom, and with what conversion strategies, I argue, depends upon their location in a cultural field because online audiences exist in a hierarchy of perceived social worth.
Temporal Framing in Balanced News Coverage of Artificial Intelligence and Public Attitudes
Sukyoung Choi
Mass Communication and Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigates how balanced news coverage, presenting both the positive and negative aspects of artificial intelligence (AI), may lead to attitudinal changes among the public when it is paired with different temporal frames. Different construal levels associated with temporal distance and evaluations of pros and cons provide a theoretical grounding to understand these dynamics. The results of an online experiment showed that exposure to the near-future temporal framing of AI (vs. distant-future temporal framing) induced greater perceived severity of AI risks. This, in turn, decreased public support for AI development and use. The indirect effect was conditional upon message order such that the effect was only significant when the message was presented in the risk/benefit order. The findings suggest that non-refutational two-sided frames reflecting journalistic norms of balance may lead to public opinion change because the accompanying temporal frames unwittingly impact which side people put more weight on. Thus, the selection of sources and the use of time reference need to be carefully vetted by journalists when reporting controversial science and technology.
How long ago were the “good old days”? Comparing the prevalence of nostalgia in YouTube comments on music videos from recent versus distant decades
Charles Areni & Mathew Todres
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on motives for using social media suggests competing hypotheses regarding how far back in time people vicariously travel to experience nostalgia online. Automated text analyses of user comments on 56 YouTube videos featuring Billboard Magazine's top 30 songs of the year from the 1950-2019 period identified clusters of co-occurring words suggesting nostalgia. Boolean operators transformed the word clusters into sentence structures conveying nostalgia [e.g., ("miss" and (("young" and "man") or "days" or "times")) → "I miss those days when I was a young man"]. Analysis of 37,217 comments revealed that the percentage expressing nostalgia was higher for videos from the 2000s-2010s compared to the 1950s-1980s. Social media has made instant online access to the recent past a normal part of daily life, making users more prone to expressing nostalgia toward relatively recent experiences.
Art made by artificial intelligence: The effect of authorship on aesthetic judgments
Cinzia Di Dio et al.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
Human-robot interaction requires that competent robot partners have a multiplicity of human characteristics. Can we accept that these competencies extend to the artistic domain, where humans have always expressed their uniqueness as a species? This study investigated whether aesthetic judgments evoked by abstract artworks vary depending on whether the author was believed to be a human or a robot. Adult participants were asked to give beauty (BJ) and liking (LJ) judgments, where BJ reflected artistic competence and LJ a more idiosyncratic, affective facet associated with the stimuli. Aesthetic judgments were made in a blind-baseline condition, devoid of authorship information, and a primed condition, where authorship information (human or robot) was provided. A significant variation was found in LJ and BJ between the blind and primed conditions. The human-authored paintings received a higher liking rating in the primed than the blind and robot conditions; opposite, the robot-authored paintings received a lower beauty rating in the primed than the blind condition. These results suggest a resistance to accepting artificial intelligence in the production of art and highlight the emotional component associated with human art-making. Furthermore, aesthetic judgments were correlated with the attribution of mental states to a human and a robot to evaluate what mental characteristics are most related to aesthetic judgments. Both BJ and LJ of robot-authored art were significantly associated with the mental ability of creativity, thus pinpointing this skill as a marker of human art-making.
The fragility of artists’ reputations from 1795 to 2020
Letian Zhang et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 29 August 2023
Abstract:
This study explores the longevity of artistic reputation. We empirically examine whether artists are more- or less-venerated after their death. We construct a massive historical corpus spanning 1795 to 2020 and build separate word-embedding models for each five-year period to examine how the reputations of over 3,300 famous artists -- including painters, architects, composers, musicians, and writers -- evolve after their death. We find that most artists gain their highest reputation right before their death, after which it declines, losing nearly one SD every century. This posthumous decline applies to artists in all domains, includes those who died young or unexpectedly, and contradicts the popular view that artists’ reputations endure. Contrary to the Matthew effect, the reputational decline is the steepest for those who had the highest reputations while alive. Two mechanisms -- artists’ reduced visibility and the public’s changing taste -- are associated with much of the posthumous reputational decline. This study underscores the fragility of human reputation and shows how the collective memory of artists unfolds over time.
Quality Differentiation and Matching Performance in Peer-to-Peer Markets: Evidence from Airbnb Plus
Hongchang Wang et al.
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Matching makes or breaks peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms. As the platform-based P2P markets shift from their grassroots nature toward elite offerings, will differentiating suppliers by quality increase matching performance? Can P2P markets differentiate certain suppliers without marginalizing others? We seek answers to these questions by leveraging an empirical opportunity on Airbnb, which differentiates listings that meet high quality standards from others through its Plus program in several U.S. cities. Our findings are threefold. First, we find a sizable increase in market-level matching performance after the program launch, that is, a 15.8%-16.2% increase in the number of booked nights. Second, the rise in matching performance is attributed to reduced search frictions, evident in markets with higher discovery and evaluation costs. Third, the Plus program benefits all listing tiers through reduced search frictions, yielding the most benefits to the Plus and non-Plus listings in terms of increased bookings and prices. Regular listings also receive increased bookings because of competitive prices. Our findings hold across multiple robustness checks and offer important insights for platform design and supply management in P2P markets.
Preference for curvature in paintings extends to museum context
Enric Munar et al.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the last two decades, contour shape has been widely studied as a factor in visual aesthetic preference. Many studies have shown that humans and other species usually prefer curved to sharp-angled contours. The reasons for this preference, although keenly debated, still remain unclear. Studies of preference for curvature have tended to rely on simple visual stimuli due to the need to control confounding variables, which has limited investigation of this effect in complex stimuli like artworks. Our objective in this study was to test whether the effect of preference for curvature can be extended to the art domain in an ecologically valid setting. We conducted two studies using original artworks exhibited in a museum context. Stimuli consisted of a series of 48 paintings divided into 16 sets with three versions in each set: one curved, one sharp-angled, and one mixed, while color, size and style were controlled for across each set. In both studies, we recorded participants’ preferred viewing distance and responses about liking and wanting the paintings. The results showed that participants looked at the curved paintings from a closer distance than the sharp-angled paintings, which we used as an implicit measure of approachability. Participants also liked and wanted the curved paintings significantly more than the sharp-angled paintings. We conclude that contour curvature is an important perceptual factor in people’s aesthetic judgments about artworks viewed in an ecologically valid setting.