2022/07/12 by Jörg Döring, Niels Werber, Veronika Albrecht-Birkner +7 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Media Studies and Communication #Sociology and Education Studies #German legal, social, and political studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.2478/kwg-2021-0027
openalex publication_date 2022/07/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Being popular means getting noticed by many. Popularity is measured as well as staged. Rankings and charts provide information on what is popular while vying for popularity themselves. They do not speak to the quality or originality of the popular, only to its evident success across different scales of evaluation. People do not buy good products, they buy popular ones; they do not listen to the best music, but to popular music; they do not share, like or retweet important, but popular news. Even the ‘unpopular’ can be popular: a despised politician, a hated jingle, an unpopular measure. The popular modifies whatever it affords with attention. Its quantitatively and hierarchically comparative terms (‘bestseller’, ‘outperformer’, ‘high score’, ‘viral’) generate valences that do not inhere in the objects themselves. Conversely, the non-popular, which does not find any measurable resonance in these terms, risks being dismissed as irrelevant or worthless simply because it does not appear in any rankings or ratings. This can also be observed particularly with artefacts whose relevance as part of high culture could be taken for granted even when they do not achieve mass resonance. Our paper proposes the following central hypothesis: The transformations of the popular, which began in Europe