They flare up, change everything, starting from

They flare up, change everything, starting from the ordinary, and bring something into our world that completely changes it too. How do they do it? What tools do they use? And what is the essence of the science of popularity and competition for attention? 

Background. The bewitching, intelligent and talented Derek Thompson appears primarily in the English-language information segment. The fact is that the star of this 33-year-old famous American journalist only rises in the field of non-fixation. But the scope of this ascent, which the world media writes about, many would envy.

Thompson wrote about economic policy, technology, and the media industry. Now - Senior Editor of The Atlantic magazine and weekly analyst for NPR "Here and Now." Born in McLean, Virginia, he graduated from Northwestern University in

 three specialties: journalism, political science, and law. Four years ago, he wrote a cover story, “A World Without Work,” about the future of jobs and technology. “Hitmakeri: The Science of Popularity and Zmagannya for Respect” became his first book - the study of success stories.

Hitmakeri is a fresh and fascinating study of how the media work and spread ideas. Smartly written and convincing, this book, responding to its title, is a hit, ”writes the Financial Times about it.

And here it’s hard to add anything.

Original title: Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

Publisher: Yakaboo Publishing, Kiev

Plot. This is where the music and songs come from, which suddenly begins to be sung by a huge number of people even in the most remote corners of the planet, why some paintings become known, while others do not, why the Internet "rips" viral videos and memes, and in the eyes of people who have come off new mobile applications, you can read surprised: "And how did we live without all this?" But, as Democritus said, nothing arises from nothing. And this world is subject to certain clear rules and algorithms, which Derek Thompson decided to explore.

“Success is achieved by those who have managed to marry the new and the old,” he says and adds: “To sell something familiar, make it unexpected. To sell something unexpected, make him familiar. ” Love for a friend is in the ancient human instinct. “I already saw this and it did not eat me up,” thought primitive people, meeting something familiar in their path and building trust.

At the same time, the so-called aesthetic “aha!” Or “moment of insight”, which arises between the anxiety of meeting with the novelty and the comforting flash of his comprehension, leads the success. Therefore, the hitmakers are the masterly creators of familiar surprises who skillfully play on the two opposites of most of us: curiosity for everything new and fear. In a word, they take what is already there and add new things.

A wonderful illustration of this unexpected conclusion is the story of Star Wars by George Lucas, who created this film based on well-known stories, introducing new elements along the way. “Star Wars” is a child of Kurosawa (“The Hidden Fortress”, “In the Footsteps of the Tiger”), which are rooted in the plays of the Kabuki Theater, which means this film is the great-great-grandson of Japanese mythology.

“Should we be oppressed by the fact that the famous stories of our time are the freshest incarnations of the myths of past generations? Perhaps not, ”the author asks and answers at the same time.

What unites the stories that subsequently become world hits is also the fact that in the beginning they fail and, as it were, give a kick on the path to success. So it was with the famous singers Shroud Kotech, who began with the fact that in the hotels he tried to give the celebrities discs with their songs. He was kicked out, but he did not give up, he even constantly changed clothes so that he would not be recognized. In the beginning, the Led Zeppeling group, and now the textbook Harry Potter, also failed.

Modern success is also based on the ability to create a network and build contacts, develop your audience and subsequently use it as a take-off platform. In 2004, Facebook started as a reference for students at Harvard University and some other colleges, but quickly spread among young people. So it was with the Tinder network, the creator of which, Whitney Wolf, traveling around the country, asked a group of young people in colleges to download this application.

And Erica Leonard, who later became known to the world as E. L. James, author of the “viral” novel “Fifty Shades of Gray,” built up and studied her audience on the world’s most popular erotic site for women, FanFiction.net, and laid the foundation for her work. world mythologemes such as “beauty and the beast”, “rich and poor”.

On the other hand, the success of new projects often requires repeaters - famous people who “push” them on their sites in social networks with millions of audiences. So it was with the promotion of Instagram: famous celebrities re-posted several photos from the new resource on Twitter, where they had millions of followers.

Other tools also work for success. These are the repetitions (both in music and in political speeches) that fulfill the function of orthopedic memory, these are, in fact, the stories themselves, which are transmitted from generation to generation, appearing in one form or another, but based on one and the same the same meaning and reminding in a certain way unknown witchcraft.

But hitmaking is also an unexpected, completely unknown thing. Sometimes it is governed by Newton’s laws: the force of action causes a reaction. Example? The heyday of e-books was to destroy the small shops selling print media. But the number of independent bookstores has increased by 35% since 2009.

“The basic needs of people are complex, but old. People want to feel unique, but also to feel involved, they want to bathe in a friend, but also to have a slight provocation, they want their expectations to be realized and broken, and realized again, ”concludes Derek Thompson.

You will like it if you are open to new thoughts and impressions, you want to find non-standard answers to standard questions. Love when they tell you not only about their findings, but also generously reinforce them with famous stories from life. And then you read it all, remember, analyze and think: “Ah, so that’s it, that’s what it turns out to be.” The book is written in an incredibly stylish and good language, and almost from every page I want to take myself something “tasty” for the quote, as far as it is something talented, original and modern.

You will not like it if you are a perfectionist, and from this book you also expect, if not the ideal, then at least a clearly structured answer to the question: so why does one become famous in this world and the other not? The author does not give a definitive answer, he only encapsulates this persistent search in his conclusions and worldviews, which, of course, are based on many interesting studies and examples, but are not, in fact, the study itself.

The main reason to read: “We are going through an industrial revolution in the field of attention,” concludes Derek Thompson. The preferences of man, motives of behavior have been interested in the world since ancient times, and this curiosity embodied the media world: from “spies” in the last century who traveled by public transport and watched what people read on which page, to the modern Chartbeat system, which controls for the readership, providing real-time information about them (that is, when readers read the site, the site reads the readers).

In the meantime, the revolution continues, changing technology faster than people, hits remain those fragments of meaning that are transmitted from one network to another, turning into mass ones.

"In the 1960s, Andy Warhol predicted that everyone would have only 15 minutes of fame," says the author of Hitmaker. In fact, technology has already reduced that time to seconds. And in order to understand how these mechanisms work, they must be analyzed and understood. That's about this, in fact, this amazing and interesting book