YouSaid · the spoken record

Derek Thompson

lines on the record: 87
first: 2017-03-24
most recent: 2017-03-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I wish coming out of school, you know, I was in, I was a political science major and I do wish that I had taken more economic classes number one, but also really history classes that I've had to catch up on my history education since I graduated from school. I think that understanding academia, understanding research papers, that isn't the most important thing I think of being a good journalist. I think the most important thing is understanding where we've come from. I wish I'd taken more history in college and I am still in the process of catching up.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Niche at scale. And this is a concept in the last chapter of the book. And niche at scale, I think, is something that young people should aspire to.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, then your market is 40 million. And within that 40 million, sure, there's a couple thousand people who love 1970s music and 1980 whiskey. The internet is Tokyo. The internet allows you to be niche at scale. And ironically, the best way.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At understanding the application of Medicaid on minority children or something like that. And the reason I think this is true is I call it's like my Tokyo example. If you go to Tokyo, you'll see there are all sorts of really, really strange shops. There'll be like a shop that's like only 1970s vinyl and like 1980s whiskey or something. And that doesn't make any sense if it's a shop in like a Des Moines suburb, right? Des Moines suburb, to exist, you have to be subway. You have to hit the mass market immediately. But in Tokyo, where there's 30, 40 million people within a train ride of the city.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a lesson, a piece of advice that comes out of that chapter, the audience of my audience, which is that there's a paradox to scale, I think. People who want to be big sometimes think I have to immediately reach the largest possible audience. But in a weird way, the best way to produce things that take off is to produce small things, to become a small expert, to become the best person on the internet.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a little bit desensitized. Yeah, that's so much CSI that I'm like, well, you know, of course, like, say, the private Ryan's opening scene is absolutely heart-wrenching, but there is a lot of ghoulish stuff on broadcast television. Tons”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's put it this way. Meditation is a hot concept right now, this idea of reaching a sort of personal nirvana or allowing a quietude to descend upon oneself. My meditation is law and order SVU. That sounds sick if you know exactly what is happening on Law Order SVU. That's funny. But there's something just so beautifully predictable and satisfying about every episode, a problem, a solution, a problem, a solution. And here I am neat. It's so tidy and so neat and it allows for a kind of a mental spring cleaning every Saturday.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love reading deeply. I love reading widely, and I like reading deeply and widely so that I can reward myself with 10 hours of Law& Order on the couch. Okay. I think that everyone.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a huge proponent of procrastination and mindless, pointless relaxation. I will take some Saturday afternoons and I will just lie down on a couch with a coffee and a bagel and watch 10 hours of law and order. Really? And I think of it.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's start with physically fit. I hate working out. I working out to me is like brushing my teeth. I don't like the process, but I hate having not done it. And so I have a very nice physical, my only splurge in life is that I have a physical trainer and I pay him to kick my butt because if I didn't pay him to kick my butt, I wouldn't go to the gym and I would just feel sad about myself.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's, you know, this book is a journey out of wrongness. There are dozens of things I could tell you right now that I wish I'd put in it. But that's why we have an opportunity to write new articles, do new podcasts, write new books.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but no, but of course it is. Everything that I've written, this book, the last column that I wrote, I'll look back on it after two weeks, back on it after Monathan. I'll think, I missed this, I miss this. And I think that one of the more important things for writers to do is to maintain this awareness that everything that they write, everything they will ever do is a failure in some way. And it's dispiriting when I see some older journalists who I will not name and certainly don't sit in the room where I'll see that they've attained a level of fame at which they no longer need that feedback loop. They no longer feel like they have to read the comments or read the mean tweets. They'll just say, I'm above it. And when you lose that feedback loop and you lose the expected rush of criticism, you lose touch with the thing that journalism is supposed to be about, which is a journey out of wrongness, not necessarily to truth, but always out of wrongness.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Popular historian and a genius at using topic A to discuss topics B through Z. He's wonderful at sort of zooming in on a topic and then broadening out. And I love writing that understands that every question has historical context.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's those moments when you're bored, when you come up with that aha insight that answers the question you previously couldn't when you were at work. So that's a great book that I love. I love the work of Bill Bryson, a short history of nearly everything, a walk in the woods at home one summer. He is a brilliant”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a handful of books about cognitive psychology that are just mainstays and uninteresting, like Thinking Fast and Slow I thought was utterly fascinating. I get a lot of my insights about the world and particularly about how to write from novels. Really? There's a couple sort of hidden allusions to the corrections throughout this book. Some of my favorite lines from the corrections sort of slightly modulated to talk about new issues. There's a line from Franzen's book where he says afternoons are a cavity in which infections breed lazy afternoons are a cavity in which infections breed when he's talking about the frustrations of an older character. And I think I have a line where I steal from him a bit while noting in the index where I say boredom is a cavity in which creativity breeds because I do find that sometimes”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economists either I would say this. I think that when I didn't know anything about economics, it was useful because if at 9 a.m. I had a question. I needed the answer to. And I talked to a couple of economists before 1 p.m. At 2 p.m., I could write the story remembering my ignorance at 8.30 in the morning. And so in a way, I think I was able to explain some of these really complicated issues in simpler ways because I remembered what the first questions were of the ignorant person. I was so recently departed from the land of ignorance.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to accept a conthamant? Yeah, it's just Your economic idiocy was absolutely illuminating for me in 2009 when we were all idiots. And so to be the smartest man in the room, nearly to be the last one.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you this: when I started off writing in 2009, there were a handful of blogs that were absolute musts for me to develop an expertise in economics. Ezra Klein was one, Mataglesias, Ryan Avent, Felix Salmon, The Big Picture. So there were a handful of these blogs that I absolutely needed to read every single week to stay on top of the financial crash and the recovery. And so you were a huge help there.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had some great teachers in high school and in college. A lot of my mentors were actually theater directors. I was an actor before I was a journalist. And I think that acting is a very useful Education in journalism because it requires the individual to develop a kind of internal sense of authenticity and an external sense of entertainment and so much of great journalism, I think, is that which is informative is true, but also is informative truth expressed in entertaining ways.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a tribal major. I should take that off. That's crazy public record. So it does not count. So, first of all, every journalism major is invited to, if not practically demanded, to major in something else that was political science for me. And then I realized there was this special trick at Northwestern where if you double counted a lot of classes and wrote a 5,000 word paper, you could get a legal studies major. And I figured that in sort of the long tail possibility that I would want to become a lawyer, I should do that, but I sit before you today having not taken a single law class since.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. In short, markets are neophilic. Consumers are neophobic. And hits are that special place in the middle, just new enough, just surprising enough and yet perfectly familiar”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the 1800s, we're happy to watch the same Netflix shows over and over, listen to the same songs over and over. In many ways, I think the cultural appetite for new products is an economic creation. It is something that had to be created after the Industrial Age in order to allow the factories to sell as much as they could make.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. The last thing I would say is that first 90% of the time we're listening to music, we're listening to a song we've already heard, according to musicologist David Huron. Powerful bias for familiarity in song. But more broadly, I think, there is obviously a commercial economic interest in what I call neophilia. making consumers love new things the way that GDP grows, the way that profits are made, is by getting people to buy new stuff. That is the rule. Get people to buy new stuff. But this macroeconomic instinct toward neophilia is always cross-cut with consumers' actual preference with that which is familiar. We are very happy wearing the same clothes over and over. In fact, we did so for thousands of years until the 1300s. We are very happy naming our kids the same names over and over throughout history. In fact, first names only became a fashion.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want to believe that the biases that we've just arrived at are correct, and we want to seek out places that will reliably tell us that our biases are correct because what was the first question of this entire segment? Fluency. We like ideas that are easy to think about, and there is nothing easier to think about than a beautiful essay that tells us that everything we think is true. Moreover, there's nothing more difficult to think about than an articulate essay that says that all these ideas we consider morbidly abhorrent are in fact moral. That's a really tough thing to consume. So naturally, attention markets like Facebook, which is just, you know, an attention clearinghouse will gravitate toward fluency, even though that's not necessarily great for our civic body.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. It is a confirmation bias cascade. And what fake news is, it's sometimes just propaganda, and that is pure broadcast. But lots of what is fake news, which actually just means news that turns out to not be true, which is something we've been living with a lot longer than just six months. Right.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a bunch about it, exactly. The second deeper point, though, is that Familiarity, the bias toward familiarity is so powerful that in many ways what readers have always wanted from the news is to learn that that which they had previously intuited is in fact correct and backed by massive evidence. Confirmed.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Two things I would say about this. First, as you've already acknowledged, there are obvious broadcast mechanisms by which that which seems to be quote unquote viral fake news is not actually viral at all. It is broadcast by Breitbart or by InfoWars or by Macedonian teenagers with Russian propaganda backing. And a whole bunch of...”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is true with Batman as well. And even with Spider-Man, there's this question of the media hates him and he's always trying to realize whether or not he wants to be Spider-Man or be with Mary Jane, that his heroism is always darkened in a way by the fact that he can never truly sort of transcend humanity in our problems.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will get some angry readers. I guess his story in our universe, or at least in our solar system, clearly, begins with invincibility, which in a way makes him, I think, a... An interesting exception to the rule, which is that most of our superheroes begin without any element of invincibility, begin as for sure-man, right? Exactly. I mean, obviously there's Kryptonite, but I wonder whether that is one of the things that has made it more difficult for Superman to catch on in this century, is that there are so many movies now that are made in the familiar hero's journey formula where the character always begins with obvious flaws, that even the new Batman movies that came out Christopher Nolan.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But his performance in usual suspects and astonishing and LA Confidential is again for Guy Pearson, for Russell Crowe, its ways for the characters to grow. So great movies, quality movies, best picture nominee movies are disproportionately character studies. And so the formula is not, let's send this character on a hero's journey. No, no, no. That is to conventional for a character study. A character study is an investigation of an individual's realization of self in a way that doesn't necessarily follow a Campbell's arc journey.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into self essentially stages for complex acting. And what you see, American beauty, both Kevin Spacey and, oh God, And at Benning, we're both nominated for Oscars. And I forgot who the.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly. So the first thing we're talking about, which is heroes journeys, I think apply most specifically to blockbusters, right? To movies that are not Trying to be best picture nominees, but are just trying to maximize their audience. So I asked him, I said, okay, well, is there a formula? Is there a rule to best picture movies? What would that rule be? And he had an interesting answer. He said, look at best actor and best actress nominations every year and tie those to best picture. You almost always have a very clear relationship between the best leading actor nominations and the best picture nominations, which says to me, him talking to me, which says to me that What we consider to be quality movies are not heroes' journeys, but complicated investigations of individuals.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, they all won awards. They're all among my favorites. I think that, you know, the award circuit movies. Follow slightly different rules. And I asked when I was talking to Vincent Brusese and talking to the movie producer.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a great point. I think that those movies aren't necessarily, I mean, they are famous. And certainly, I think the usual suspects might guess that that's the biggest box office performer of the three.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And what's so fascinating about Campbell's theory is that the individual storytellers aren't trying necessarily to copy each other. They're just trying to tell a good story. But there are certain elements of that which is a, you know, capital G, good capital S story that seem to be relatively universal. We need an element of relatability. We don't want to attach ourselves to a hero who's already invincible. The hero has to start off normal. He has to go on a journey with that's pockmarked with all sorts of defeats. There has to be defeat and recovery and defeat and recovery. And then finally, he has to accomplish something that is not only powerful and gives him a glory, but that he learns from. And it makes him a better person because it tells us that our own journeys are self-improvements as well.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a fascinating meta view of films and it clicks right back into one of the first theses of the book, which is that we love that which is familiar with a slight twist. And you can think about this for all sorts of hits that, you know, what is Star Wars? It is a Western set in outer space. It is in many ways an unbelievably conventional story, an orphan goes on a supernatural quest to defeat a villain who is involved in his origin story and returns to the normal world as a hero. That's Lord of the Rings. That is Harry Potter to a T. It's the hero's journey. It's Joseph Campbell.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think one thing that is still so special about books, even in an age of proliferating an ever more developed media technology, books are special because they're ours. They belong to us in a way that the movies don't because we are responsible for creating a movie from them. The seraphs themselves, the print itself cannot be revealing of anything. We have to interpret it. We have to senesthesize it into words and images and connections and our own ideas and our own self-help. And so I still think that books are special because they are more individual. The individual has a larger role in internalizing it than they do for something like a movie or a song.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting because We live in a world right now where with movies and virtual reality, there are all sorts of experiences that were essentially just, we're given them, right? Everyone agrees what a movie looks like. Everyone agrees in what the song sounds like. But books are really interesting because it's this weird arbitrage where I, the writer, have an idea. A mental image that I have to translate into letters, and then you, the reader, read these letters and create your own movie. And sometimes it's the same movie, but it's rarely the exact same movie. It's slightly different. You're imagining different pictures. You're making different connections to Mill Brooks”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. With a big brother like we are rebels, this is a rebellion. And every cult is a rebellion against a mainstream. In many ways, I think identity is antagonistic. Identity is that which we are not. And so in many ways, I think that you see lots of advertising right now, which is all about allowing consumers to define themselves by that which they aren't.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it is, I mean, this is one of the really interesting paradoxical things about human psychology, which is that in a weird way, we feel more like individuals sometimes when we belong to a group, which doesn't make any sense, right? I feel more like an individual when I belong to a group, but this is precisely what cults are all about. It's all about individuals saying society doesn't get me. But if I enter this different group of people, then I can be my true self, I can realize my true individuality, but only if I find the right group, right? And so I think in many ways this is one of the things that marketers and advertisers that think about culting in their own messages try to do. You think about one of the most famous cultting advertisements of all time, Apple in 1984. You are defined by that which you are not. We're not the totalitarian big blue IBM company, right? We are the people who throw, what was it, a hammer?”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My pin back buttons to express something that's weird because in a weird way it's the weird message that makes people want to spread it along, not the message that says, hey, I'm just like everybody else.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And specific, because that small specific message or small specific product is more likely to get your audience, your consumer base, to say this thing gets me, and I'm going to share it with my close friends to show that it gets me. And so I talked to this, an Etsy designer who ended up being one of the most successful Etsy sellers in that company's history. He makes little pinback buttons. And one of the lessons that he gave me was, of course, he's as mainstream as an Etsy person can be right now. I think it's the top seller on one of its platforms for several years. But he said, I don't want to make pinback buttons that express purely banal thoughts, purely generic thoughts. I want...”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is an awesome question. And I think about this a lot, and there's lots of different answers that I provide in the book. But let me talk about one that I think might be most interesting, which is this concept from sociology of cults. What is a cult? A cult is a measured rebellion against a mainstream. So it is people thinking that they are special and the mainstream is wrong. And there's lots of interesting research that suggests that when people hear a song or read an article or experience a product that they think gets them specifically to the exclusion of the mainstream, that they're more likely to share it with their close friends in order to sort of draw that tight circle of kinship and say, see, there's someone who gets us. So one way to employ the audience, my audience principal somewhat paradoxically, is that if you want to be really big, start by making something that's small.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in a way, the psychology I have to employ is to think, I can't just be appealing to my audience. I have to make my audience think that they want to share it with their audience, the audience of my audience. And so I think that it sort of provides, I think, a really nice frame to see how do you create articles or essays or podcasts that... To create something that your listeners feel like, well, it will make them look good if they pass it along.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, yeah. Right after my chapter on virality and broadcast, I say, okay, well, let's say that you're trying to build a hit product or a hit company, but you're starting from a really, really small base and you don't have access to the Justin Bieber's the world. What do you do to make things that people want to talk about? And a way that I think about this is that when I write an article for that article to go big, it can't just be appealing to my first audience, to my first level of readers, and for them to simply say, okay, cool, and then click out and never talk about it again. I need a handful of them to want to pass it along because they think that passing along that article will make them, my readers, look smart, morally in touch with the world, surprisingly sort of counterintuitive about what is true and not true about economics.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's the broadcast? It is Justin Bieber, a celebrity with the following of any traditional broadcaster. Time magazine, right? Yeah, exactly. USA Today, broadcasting this song to his millions and millions of followers, and it's only then that the song becomes a hit.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So call me maybe a really interesting example of a so-called viral hit. You could say on the one hand that Call Me's popularity was engendered online, which suggests that maybe there was a purely viral mechanism to its popularity. But in fact, the song was sort of hovering in like the mid-level tiers of Canadian pop track popularity when a little-known star named Justin Bieber, right? Canadian star indeed found it, tweets it out, and makes a YouTube video of him and his girlfriend Selena Gomez dancing to it. That video goes absolutely wild, and it's only then after he releases that video that Callie maybe becomes a sensation. That's the broad”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Broadcast moments. But because we sometimes don't see these broadcast moments in the information cascade, because, for example, your friend reads an article on Reddit.com and then shares it with another one of your friends, and then you see that friend's article on Facebook, you can't see that it was broadcast on Reddit.com. And so I call it a dark broadcast. But my contention is that broadcast moments are still responsible for driving popularity on the internet.”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is what's really interesting about the age we're living through right now, which is that, you know, there was a period where technology was either social or broadcast. Telephones are clearly just social. That is a one-to-one conversation. Television is purely broadcast. It is just one to tens of millions. But most of the technologies that we have today are an interesting combination of social and broadcast. Facebook, for example, allows family members to talk to each other while seeing articles from Time magazine in Bloomberg. Reddit is a really fascinating combination because articles are upvoted socially by individual users. But once they hit a large page like the Reddit.com homepage, it suddenly is a broadcast. My contention is that for every piece of content that we think goes quote unquote viral online, it almost always needs at least one or hopefully a handful of”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, let's say I publish an article on the Atlantic. It doesn't hit the Atlantic homepage. It doesn't hit any major broadcast platform. But I share it with one friend on Facebook. He shares it with two of his friends. He shares it with a handful of his friends. And it grows over many, many, many generations of intimate shares. That's one way, right? That's how a virus spreads. That is true virality. But there's another way that information spreads online that's not a million one-to-one moments, but a handful of one-to-one million moments. So, for example, let's say an article that I write hits the front page of Drudge or hits the front page of Reddit or is shared by Oprah on Facebook. There's nothing about that mechanism that is viral. Millions of people are going to see that article from the same source. So it's very similar to that which we are comfortable calling a broadcast, like on television when twenty million people are tuned into”
2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source