The network law that I agree with the most is Sarnoff's Law. This law proposes that value is determined through the amount of listeners and or viewers. One might argue that not all people enjoy everything that they see and or hear yet to me both good and bad attention is positive when it comes to media value. Not only does this expose people to numerous advertisements it also spreads like wildfire. Whether liked or not liked people talk, people share and people make other people want to check something out. Once that person spreads his or her opinion it invokes curiosity thus causing others to view the program. These overall numbers of views to me are what drive the industry. With views comes advertising money, with advertising money comes more programs. Its a cycle that is gaged by those overall view numbers, not the quality. And that in itself is value.
Even though I support Snarnoff's Law I feel that in the future the overall spread of information and value will be gaged through testimonials. I think about how social media runs today and how people value what others say about a program, no matter the medium. Whether it be the new movie coming out or the new video camera in the market opinions matter. This being said, testimonials will rule how people get there information 5 years from now. It has already started. Look at ebay or amazon or even 5 star ranked movies on Netflix. How your peers view something and what the overall social consensus on a topic is or is not will be the new way of getting information. Though peoples overall opinion will stand on how they feel about a product or service, opinion based testimonials will continue to grow as an influential medium for information flow.
I agree with what you're saying about testimonials. People care a lot about what other people think. Everyone wants to "fit in", so if something is trending, a lot of people are likely to hop on the bandwagon so they don't feel left behind. Not to mention, testimonials tend to be trustworthy, minus the ones companies pay people to write. We tend to trust people like ourselves. When we see Katy Perry on a Proactive commercial, most of us probably think "yeah, right" because Katy is a superstar and probably doesn't struggle with acne like the rest of us. When we go online and see a friend post about how Proactive has really helped their skin, we tend to take their word for it.
ReplyDeleteIn your second paragraph you mention that people's testimonials will drive the internet and how people gather information. Does this mean that opinions will trump facts and research and the place of academics with doctorates will deteriorate into something that is no longer credible and the credibility of people will be vested in their opinions of something? Even if that's not the case I do see the point of everything moving towards these kind of testimonials because people's opinions often drive companies to sometimes change their whole looks or people to find different things to study as time goes on. It's certainly possible that the art of research will be lost and we'll be solely dependent on what our peers say about things.
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