Chart-topping original movies have gone extinct. People have a lot of explanations for this, but they're all incomplete because they don't realize the same thing is happening everywhere. An oligopoly has conquered all of popular culture.
In television, for example, it used to be pretty rare for two versions of the same show to appear twice at the top of the viewership charts. Now it's common.
The oligopoly has come to music, too: the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades (chart cred: Azhad Syed, towardsdatascience.com/hot-or-not-ana…)
And literature. Until 1990, it was pretty remarkable for one author to have multiple top-10 bestselling books. Now it happens almost every year.
And video games. These days, basically *all* bestselling games are franchise installments.
Most importantly, I don't think we've realized what all these sequels and spinoffs are doing to us. It's not that they're bad––some are great! But movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, and they can't do that by feeding us reruns forever
Published today in PNAS: people don't know how American public opinion has changed. I've been working on this for a very long time and I'm excited to share it. Here's a thread so you don't have to read the paper. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
(If you do want to read it, this link will be available until the Feds shut it down. Science should be free!) shorturl.at/deuJ9
A few years ago I got into reading lots of public opinion polls, and I was constantly surprised. People became *more* in favor of immigration after Trump's election? Support for gun control has *fallen*? White Americans feel as warm toward Black Americans as they did in *1964*?