"So basically we're doing a whole package about stuff that is terrible." This was a colleague's verbatim reaction to the idea of a culture package devoted to popular things. I don't blame her — after all, it's how we've been conditioned to think for the past century or so. We've seen the rise of mass culture, pop culture, camp culture and trash culture; the cross-pollination of highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow and nobrow; and, with the advent of the Internet, the introduction of a battalion of shiny new metrics with which we can measure something's popularity to the second, the penny, the click. We are now better equipped than at any time in history to judge, say, the most popular pop song of a given moment, yet we're more confounded by what all this popularity actually means. For example: What constitutes the most popular pop song in a given moment, anyway? The most purchased? The most streamed? The most illegally downloaded? The most ambiently inescapable?
From all this chaos, though, one truism about popularity apparently survives: If something is popular, it can't also be good.
Popularity used to be simple. We had the chart-topping song, the top-rated TV show, the No. 1 best seller, the highest-grossing movie of the year. You could define yourself, taste-wise, as either in league with the popular or against it, and while you didn't have to like what was popular, you certainly were aware of what it was.
Now the concept of cultural popularity has been flayed, hung by its heels and drained of all meaning. For example: "NCIS," the naval-police procedural, is the highest-rated non-football program on television, routinely drawing 17 million viewers a week. By a straightforward accounting, that makes it the most popular show on TV. Yet by a different definition — the extent to which, say, a show saturates the cultural conversation — you could make a case for "Mad Men" as TV's most popular show, even though it draws only 2.5 million viewers. Or "Girls," which draws a paltry 615,000 viewers a week but sometimes feels as if it has generated at least as many essays. By one measure, no one watches "Girls." By another, it's fantastically popular.
We already understand why this is: it's a tenet of faith that we no longer experience culture as one hulking, homogeneous mass. Not that long ago, we had "Thriller," which, at last count, sold about 66 million copies worldwide. Nothing sells 66 million copies anymore. The finale of "M*A*S*H" drew 125 million viewers; no TV broadcast, save the Super Bowl, will ever draw that many simultaneous American viewers again. That's because we've turned off Top 40 and loaded up Spotify; we've clicked away from NBC and fired up Netflix; we, thanks to the increasingly concierge-style delivery system of the Internet, are each sheltered in our own cultural cocoon.
The Most Popular Single Rental on the Met Opera's Streaming Service: The 2010 performance of Bizet's 'Carmen'
Elina Garaca in "Carmen," directed by Richard Eyre
Where does this leave the concept of popularity? Paradoxically, popularity is now both infinitely quantifiable and infinitely elusive. We're awash in cold data even as we try and reconcile how these numbers relate to our larger intuitive sense of what people like. Back in 1940, Billboard published a single music chart, simply named the Best-Selling Retail Records, which solely tracked sales. Later, the Billboard Hot 100 collated several factors — radio play, jukebox popularity and sales — into one measure of overall success. Around the same time, the lone tree grew several categorical limbs: R. & B., country, rap and so on, each taking the measure of popularity in a different genre. From one chart grew many. This seemed to make sense.
Then the methodology evolved even further: paid downloads were included in 2005; digital streams in 2007. The top-selling song was no longer necessarily the most popular song in the country. Now it could simply be the song that the most people, somewhere, were listening to, somehow. Then, this year, Billboard announced it would include YouTube playbacks as part of its rankings, and the song "Harlem Shake" immediately became the No. 1 song in America. This was thanks largely to a snippet of it being used as the soundtrack for thousands of viral YouTube videos. That meme, like most, burned out quick as a Roman candle. So instead of "Remember the summer of 'Harlem Shake'?" we might one day say wistfully, "Remember the two weeks in February of 'Harlem Shake'?" This is how we ended up with a No. 1 song that isn't even really exactly a song. I'd venture to say that its ascent to that once-hallowed position — the No. 1 song in America! — felt intuitively correct to exactly no one, including the makers of "Harlem Shake."
As for books, we know everything and we know nothing. As any jittery author can confirm, Amazon will now tell you right out in the open where anyone can see exactly where in the vast universe of literature your particular contribution sits. You can watch your sales ranking rise or (more likely) fall in real time, like a stock ticker of public disinterest. On the other hand, The Times publishes 17 separate best-seller lists, from Combined Print and E-Book Fiction to Children's Middle Grade to Manga. The purpose of all these different lists is to effectively capture the elusive phenomena of consumer choice — the individual decisions that reflect genuine widespread interest. In contrast, the Nielsen Company offers the BookScan application, which stands as a model of modern bloodless techno-tallying. BookScan will tell you, to the copy, how many books have sold in the past week in 85 percent of the American book market. This includes lots of bulk, discount purchases that aren't so much about people picking books as having books thrust on them. Popularity is something that's no longer just tallied, it has to be curated — and the more-finely-grained measurements seek to differentiate between what people want and what they merely accept out of habit or passivity.
Meanwhile, in the TV world, the old models have more or less gone kablooey. Once upon a time, the Nielsen Company basically polled a handful of households and extrapolated from there. The fundamental question — who's watching what? — remains the same, but measuring it is now exponentially more difficult. Between first-run and repeats and DVRs and downloads and DVD binges and streaming, just how many people watch "Downton Abbey," exactly? Somewhere in there, amid the confusion, "Duck Dynasty," a reality show on A&E about a family of industrious duck hunters that it is entirely possible you are hearing about right now for the very first time, became the No. 1 reality cable program of all time. "Duck Dynasty" T-shirts are the most popular shirts for men, women and girls at Walmart, which is, by some measures, the most popular store in America. So while "Duck Dynasty" may not be the most popular show on TV, it is, by several legitimate metrics, the most popular show on TV.
All of which brings us, inevitably, to "Sharknado," a purposefully campy TV movie on Syfy about a tornado that is full of sharks. It is not, by any known definition, good. And yet, for a few weeks this summer, it was very popular. At one point, the movie generated 5,000 tweets a minute. "#Sharknado" became a nationally trending topic on Twitter. Yet when it was broadcast, it was watched by only slightly more people than watch pretty much anything that Syfy throws on the air on a typical night. So the question is: Was "Sharknado" popular? Syfy proudly called it its "most-social telecast ever," but what does that mean, exactly? It's as if "Sharknado" won a trophy that had been created only for the purpose of being awarded to "Sharknado."
Syfy, by the way, has already approved the production of "Sharknado 2: The Second One." The title was chosen by a vote held on Twitter. It was the most popular choice.
Perhaps the best way to think about the state of popularity is like a kind of quantum element: Both static and in perpetual flux. For example: You can most likely now close the record book on any record that measures how many people did the exact same thing at the exact same time. The movie with the highest box office of all time, adjusted for inflation, is still "Gone With the Wind," released in 1939.
The other metrics of popularity, though — the ones that measure, with increasing exactitude, what we do, when we do them, how long we do them for and how much we enjoyed doing them, are restless and ever-changing. Did you happen to linger for a moment longer on a particular article this morning on the Times Web site? Duly noted and recorded. Did you impulsively skip a particular song on your Gotye Pandora channel? That has been fed back into the algorithm, and good luck ever hearing that song again. You are, to an unprecedented degree, the emperor of a personalized kingdom of popularity, and zillions of bots are working tirelessly to heed your whims and hone your experience.
As a result, we don't live in echo chambers so much as isolation booths. This might be a good time for me to confess that I've never seen an episode of "Duck Dynasty," I can't whistle a single bar of "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons and I've never read a single page of any of the Harry Potter books, even though I understand all these things are enormously popular. This isn't a question of taste; it's a question of time. When everything's popular by some measure, it's impossible to keep up with everything that's popular.
Or put another way: The old order of popularity is personified by Tom Hanks, a movie star so popular that you could walk a thousand miles in any direction and still not find a human who doesn't know who he is.
The new order of popularity is personified by Pauley Perrette, a star of "NCIS," who is much less well known than Hanks but is so beloved by the fans she does have that, a few years back, she managed to tie Hanks (and Morgan Freeman) as the American celebrities with the highest Q Score (a proprietary ranking that's "the recognized industry standard for measuring consumer appeal of personalities, characters, licensed properties, programs and brands").
For that matter, the new order is exemplified by the existence of Q Scores, which micromeasure the popularity of personalities, characters, brands.
At first inspection, this refraction of the culture into ever-smaller slivers leaves us instinctively with a sense of something lost. Once we listened to the same song together, watched the same show together, argued over the same movies together. Now we're each focused on our own screen, listening to our own playlist, we're bowling alone, etc. A landscape that once featured a few unavoidable monoliths of popularity is now dotted with a multitude of lesser monuments, too many to keep track of, let alone celebrate.
If you're of the sour view, like my colleague quoted above, that popularity is inherently linked to mediocrity, then this development can count only as progress. After all, you can't be held captive by the terrible taste of the masses when there's no such a thing as masses anymore.
I subscribe to a more democratic and optimistic view. Popularity may not guarantee artistic quality, but it does confer viability. No matter how it's quantified, popularity ultimately serves as a form of validation, and we all benefit when it's dispersed more generously. I don't mean the kind of judgment-free, trophies-for-everyone mentality that suggests a refusal to exercise critical discretion. In fact, the rise of micropopularity implies the opposite: Things that are good are more likely to be recognized and, on some scale, to thrive. (And things that are absolutely, irredeemably terrible have even fewer excuses.) "Girls" can remain on TV because, on a fundamental level, HBO has a different notion of popularity than CBS does. The sitcom "Arrested Development," which was very good, wasn't popular enough to survive under the old network-TV model. But it's plenty popular enough to resurface in the age of on-demand streaming Internet video. To me, that counts as progress.
Popularity is not just about making cultural products financially viable; micropopularity encourages creativity in more ephemeral ways as well. Maybe your band is not at the top of any Billboard chart, but if you have 1,000 fans on Facebook, that puts some wind in your artistic sails. You might not be writing jokes for Jimmy Fallon, but 500 retweets of your best one-liner will keep you dreaming up punch lines. And 50,000 retweets might just get you a job writing jokes for Jimmy Fallon.
As it turns out, cultural popularity functions best when it's liberally interpreted and freely distributed. If you encounter something that's popular and it turns out not to be to your taste, that's fine, no sweat, move on. In the meantime, get excited for all the new things you might enjoy. I can happily report that my colleague, as a direct result of working on this project, is now a convert to the most popular podcast in the country ("Welcome to Night Vale") and, yes, to "Fifty Shades of Grey." If those don't catch your interest, how about the most popular single rental in the Met Opera's on-demand streaming service? (Elina Garanca in the 2010 production of "Carmen.") I can practically guarantee you that, if you put aside a reflexive aversion to the popular, you'll discover something new that brings you pleasure. So take heart: once we break down the sample sizes into small enough segments, we are all, by some measure, popular.◆
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