37 GENIUS INTERVIEW Taha Yasseri
just because we have heard it’s bad, but often we go and watch a movie just because we have heard about it. We do not remember what was said about the movie. As long as the name sounds familiar to us, we choose that over other options we haven’t heard anything about. FEED: What effect do you see online influence culture having in the future? TAHA YASSERI: I might have sounded a little bit negative, but I want to say that this is not new. I hear that people say that social media is destroying our democracy, and we are in a post-fact era. Some of this might be true, but what I’m saying is that social media is not to blame. It might amplify some of the intrinsic features of human societies, but so have many other technologies. When the printing press became available and affordable books were printed in Victorian times, the elites were very worried the ‘commoners’ would read books and be diverted away from sane thinking! For any new communication technology, we fear it might destroy our society. I don’t think we need to blame or should blame the technology. Of course, with any new technology, there are challenges, and we need to learn about them. We need to regulate them and we need to control them. But the challenges are mostly and fundamentally about human nature and society – not just the technology.
AS SOON AS WE HAVE EVEN SOME INFORMATION ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WOULD CHOOSE, OR WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE CHOSEN, WE ARE VERY MUCH PRONE TO FOLLOWING IT
strategy could be producing content in different conventions of the network through social media bots. It’s very difficult to measure and to quantify the influence, but I think receiving the same content from four different accounts is much more effective than receiving the same content from a single account, but with many more likes. But I am just speculating based on the research that showed receiving information from multiple sources is much more effective. FEED: Is it true there’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about? Would you agree that negative press is just as good as positive press? TAHA YASSERI: It’s true. We had a project about seven years ago in which we tried to predict the box office revenues of movies
based on how much social buzz there was about them before they were released. When I was working on that project, many people told me, “Sometimes, you talk about a movie just to say it’s a bad movie. It doesn’t necessarily translate into tickets or box office revenue.” And I couldn’t argue with them at the time. But then, when we finished the project, we realised there is no such thing as bad publicity. There was a very clear relationship between the social buzz and success. We didn’t measure the sentiments. We didn’t measure if people were talking about a movie in a positive way or a negative way. It was beyond our method. We just measured the volume, and the sheer volume was a very good predictor of the box office revenue. That was the first time I actually believed there is no such thing as bad publicity. Sometimes, we go and watch a movie
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