Do quality and popularity always go together?
Very often, the first thing we do when we aren't quite sure what to do is to look at people around us to see what they are doing. Then, if we can't see anything obviously wrong with what others are doing, we'll typically follow suit.
One advantage of this way of doing things is that it saves us a lot of thinking. Let's face it, we don't have time to think through every single action we take. Another advantage of following suit is that it at least partially shields us from embarrassment: should our actions be found to be faulty or just plain dumb, we can always fall back on the excuse that everybody was doing it. (This is the basis for the classic maxim "Nobody ever got fired for buying from [insert well-established company name here].)"
Now, in a world with an abundance of choice, just taking the time to examine all of the options available to us is inconceivable. Take the case of music. Tens of thousands of music albums are released each year, which roughly amounts to a hundred a day. Say you wanted to choose this year's best song. Well, this is a needle-in-a-haystack problem. Even if you spend 24 hours a day listening to music for the next year you won't be able to give each album a complete listen. So you'll have to take a cue from what others have chosen to listen to and talk about, and actually completely ignore the majority of what is out there.
Does this mean that you have to give up any hope of picking the greatest song of the year? Perhaps not. Whether it be through the media or through your social network, you will almost certainly be exposed much more to certain songs or albums than to others. Some songs are more talked about and played: they are more popular. One line of reasoning goes like this: since better songs become more popular, if a song is any good, chances are that you'll learn about it. Conversely, if you never hear at all about a song it probably wasn't worth hearing in the first place. Therefore, the thinking goes, the best song is certainly among those you will hear this year, and chances are you'll hear it several times. Heck, everyone will hear it several times.
The same line of thinking could be applied to all kinds of things: books, scientific articles, shoes, even ideas (memes for those who like that term).
This approach, then, roughly consists of equating quality with popularity. One of its flaws is to assume that quality is absolute or objective, that is, that the quality of a thing is the same without taking into consideration the user (or reader, listener, etc.) of that thing. There are many contexts where this is not true. To pick an obvious example, the "best shoe ever" might be a woman's shoe, in which case it's not the best choice for me.
But even where we may assume that quality is absolute, there are pitfalls. In the next few posts I want to discuss some of them. Stay tuned.
(Heh, looks like I found a nice way to pressure myself to write at least another post :)
