This week, rapper Jay-Z released “Glory,” a song that addresses his feelings about becoming a parent to his newborn child with Beyoncé, a girl named Blue Ivy. The single marks a significant departure from what fans of rap are accustomed to hearing on the radio and Internet: it is both a love song and a lullaby, a lament over a lost pregnancy, and a promise to faithful service as a father. Fans of Jay-Z’s music won’t be surprised at the content or tone of the song: the rapper has a decade’s worth of lyrics dealing with his feelings about parenting and his love of children (most especially, his nephews). But “Glory” calls our attention to the remarkable absence of rap songs that are by or for the pre-teen set.

The world of what we might call “kids rap” is populated almost entirely by children, and most of them are the offspring of music professionals. The singer Jordy, son of music producer Claude Lemoine, is on the record books for being the youngest #1 charting singer for his rap, “Dur Dur d’être bébé!” While relatively unknown in the U.S., this 1992 single—produced when Jordy was only 4—was a dance hit across Europe, South America and Asia. Children of rappers in the U.S. have not fared as well on the charts.  Lil’ Romeo, son of rappers Master P and Sonya C, may be at the top of the pack with one gold, one platinum and one double platinum album. While there is some rap music that is marketed to children—the 2008 book and CD “Hip Hop Speaks to Children” is a good example—it is generally repackaged or excerpted, as opposed to being created for this purpose.

There are good reasons to think the market in kids rap would flourish. Within film, actors who become parents tend to diversify their portfolio to include films for children. Rappers haven’t done this, even though many are parents or even grandparents. Additionally the pre-teen market is huge, a fact demonstrated in Taylor Swift’s recent phenomenal success. According to one estimate, the 12-to-19-age bracket is at a historic high of 35 million kids. Kiddy ditties, or bubblegum pop, have captivated these consumers; the leading edge of the demo fueled the success of boy bands like O-Town and divas like Britney Spears. Moreover, this generation grew up with rap music woven into all aspects of their cultural experience: from school curricula to car advertisements.

The explanation for the missing genre of kids rap lies in the nature of creativity. Almost all of our popular music grows out of artistic circles where members collaborate and experiment, share grievances and opportunities, and cobble together enough money to continue to perform for bigger (or better) audiences. The music that does not grow from these roots, a collection of what we might call “music without genres,” is music made to satisfy market demand, with no community to support it. Kids rap, like bubblegum pop, and World Music, are commercial products crafted for a specific demographic. Consumers of kids rap might think of themselves as music fans, but they’re really not distinguishing on the basis of any musical characteristics at all. Just as World Music combines varied musical cultures, kids rap combines attributes of multiple styles and mutes their differences in order to attract dollars.

It is hard to imagine another fate for kids rap, as so many of the attributes of adult creative collaboration are beyond their emotional and developmental reach. But it is possible to imagine a group of rappers, convinced of the necessity of making mature, kid-friendly music, combining their powers to create something new, and something beautiful. “Glory” should be an inspiration to us, just as Blue was to its author.

I am writing to you here, on my blog, rather than finding out your “real” identity for a couple of reasons: first, you saw no need to correspond with me, the author of the content you removed, so I think it is fair that I do the same. Well, now I do. The truth is that until today, I had a different understanding of our mutual rights and responsibilities–mine as “author” and yours as “publisher.” Until today, I did not expect that you would erase my words or ideas without my permission. Second, I don’t particularly care about this single decision as much as I do the class of decisions into which it falls. That is, I don’t care so much about reinstating the text on the blog. After all, the blog is your property, not mine. But I think it is important that educated people have frequent discussions about the character and quality of discourse and freedom of expression, and this is an opportunity to do so.  Third, I suspect your decision was based on your sense of what the leaders of the organization that employs you would prefer, rather than your individual wishes or preferences. In this sense, it makes little sense to address you as an individual. And fourth, organizations–publishing houses or record labels, art galleries or museums–don’t typically make decisions in a vacuum, but base them on a sense of best practices in the field. So, the field is a more appropriate context for appeal.

I must, therefore, address myself to all those bosses, leaders, and decision-makers who believe the moral course, when faced with the possibility that some employees, clients, members, or followers might be offended, is to blight that offense from the earth. To remove it from view. To extinguish it.

I hope to convince you that your thinking is wrong.

I argue that the moral thing –when you think something good and right might pose offense– is to add a step into the process that allows people to chose for themselves when and what kind of material to consume. In this case I included both a description of the content in the video and added a hyperlink instead of embedding the content. Thus, only those readers of your blog who decide–after reading the description–to click through to the video would be able to see it.

Here is that text:

“Gobbledigook” by Sigur Ros. In the final chapter of Banding Together I mention a number of bands and songs that are, for my purposes, “unclassifiable.” It made sense to end the playlist with some of these, including this charming tune by Icelandic band Sigur Ros. You should watch the video for this song, as long as you are not offended by playful nudity.

See? I explain there is nudity and describe it as “playful” (check it out if you care to; I stand behind this). And I make people click through–I don’t embed it right there for all to see.

I am not interested in regulating what others view on the internet. You shouldn’t be in this business either. Particularly so as you are engaged in a business which depends upon free inquiry and creative expression. If such freedom did not exist your press would either cease to function, or would publish–one imagines–even more books about identifying finches.

Finches are great, but is that really the world you envisioned when you took this job? Or did you think you might contribute to the expansion of knowledge? The cultivation of the mind? The exploration of new ideas?

I think your decision today is inconsistent with what you do, and should, stand for and behind.

And not for nothing–the “Gobbledigook” video is not profane. I mean, I’m sure there’s someone on earth who would find it to be so–that’s why I presented it as I did–but surely that is a small and reactionary minority of viewers. And we should stand up to them, because they are wrong. If you watch the video you will see that it depicts naked humans (presumably they are Icelandic humans, as that’s where the band is from) running on a beach, through a forest, playing “drums” on a downed log, talking, painting letters on each other using some sort of mud (I think), singing, and dancing. Yes, they are naked. But they so clearly and undeniably represent beauty, and freedom, and the majesty and wonder of the human form. Not its cruelty. Not its avarice, or meanness, or resentments. Its joy. You should get behind joy. You should get behind beautiful bodies. You should get behind any piece of culture that makes people hopeful. That makes us laugh, or smile, or remember what it was like to be a kid, or what it’s like to be with friends, or out camping, or running. What sand feels like between your toes, or what autumn leaves smell like when you run your hands through them. These are the things to stand behind.

I’ve created a playlist I’d like to share with you (“Banding Together: The Spotify Playlist for the Book”). Right now it clocks in around 3 hours, and I’m still looking for more music to add! Each of the songs included is either specifically mentioned in the text, or stands as a representative of a musical style that I discuss in Banding Together.

Anyone that wants to hear the playlist needs to join Spotify (by creating a login ID and password), and downloading the free software. Then you can find the playlist for “Banding Together” by typing “spotify:user:lenajc” into the search box, or clicking on the link above.

Herewith, the track annotation for Banding Together: The Spotify Playlist:

• “Funky Butt” by Mississippi John Hurt. The Library of Congress did us a magnificent favor by funding the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress, which now contains over 3 million artifacts including recordings like this one. “Funky Butt” is King Buddy Bolden’s “signature tune” (and on page 79 I describe its link to other “funky” things), but I love Hurt’s version—a beautiful guitar tone, a strong and sweet vocal, and hilarious lyrics.
• “Livery Stable Blues” by the Original Dixieland Jass Band. I included this song for two reasons: the first is that I discuss the politics around the crediting of this white band as “original Dixieland” in Chapter 3 (starting on page 98). The second is that Chicago Judge George A. Carpenter argued (while presiding over a copyright dispute) that “no living human being could listen to that result on the phonograph and discover anything musical on it” (see page 101). I wonder what you think about Carpenter’s taste?
• “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” by Mahalia Jackson. If you’ve never heard black gospel, this is a great place to start. The song was penned by the “inventor” of gospel, the Reverend Thomas A. Dorsey, and later became a million-record seller for Elvis Presley (see pages 104 onward, and his version is in the playlist, too!). Here, one of Dorsey’s “discoveries,” the great Mahalia Jackson, shows incredible vocal control and spiritual inspiration. Jackson toured the “gospel highway” for five long years, but her hard labor was rewarded with a feature in Time Magazine, and the honor of performing at JFK’s 1961 inauguration and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral.
• “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” by Bill Monroe. Monroe, the “father of bluegrass,” performs this country and bluegrass standard, the lyrics of which are etched on the wall of the Country Music Hall of Fame, in Nashville, TN. Originally a hymn, adapted into country song, and performed by scores of musicians ranging from Johnny Cash to Moby, it is a true American original.
• “Fables of Faubus” by Charles “Charlie” Mingus. An example of bebop jazz’s more political edge, I describe this song as “a cacophonous, mocking song about Orville Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, who barred the entry of black students into Little Rock’s Central High School” (pg. 39).
• “Night in the City” by Judy Collins and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” by Crosby, Still and Nash. These two songs, plus singles by Janis Joplin (also with Big Brother and the Holding Company), The Doors, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and Leonard Cohen (singing one of my all-time favorite songs, about his brief romance with Joplin), represent the wild and wonderful years of the “Laurel Canyon” group on Ridpath Lane. Stephen Stills plays guitar on the Collins song, and his bandmate Graham Nash wrote and named the second tune after Judy. You can read more about their bohemian grove in Chapter 3.
• “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke. Quite simply, one of the very best pop tunes ever written, but one of those nearly lost to history. Cooke originally recorded the tune while working under the name “Dale Cook.” After the weak sales of his first single, “Lovable,” Specialty Records released him from the contract leaving the rest of the session, including this song, on the cutting room floor. Thankfully, his producer kept the tape and it later was a hit for the singer recording under his own name.
• “Sex Machine” by James Brown (technically, “The J.B.’s”). Brown’s collaboration with brothers Catfish and Bootsy Collins and trombonist Fred Wesley is often referenced as the world’s first funk song. For better or worse, today’s young people may know it as content on the Rock Band series of video games.
• “Chocolate City” by Parliament. The wild ways of George Clinton’s fun groups Parliament and Funkadelic are carefully detailed in Chapter 3 of Banding Together. The lyrics of this song figure in the text. Which of today’s black entertainers do you think Clinton would hire for cabinet posts?
• “Me So Horny” by 2 Live Crew. This song topped the charts at the very height of moral panics around the dysfunction wrought by popular music (in 1989). The song samples dialogue from two movies—do you know which they are?
• “On & On” by Jesse Saunders. Alleged to be the first House music album, this song attracted attention at the 1986 New Music Seminar in New York, and led a generation of DJs to be signed by British record labels—a brain drain that arguably led to the end of “original” House music in Chicago.
• “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. This song represents the rapid rise and fall of Seattle’s Grunge music. This song’s chart success in 1991 propelled the rock group Nirvana to the top of the charts, although the band was said to quickly tire of its infamy. It is often cited as the greatest rock song ever recorded.
• “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Oasis. This song stands in for all the Britpop bands spawned by the rise of “independent” rock in the 1990s. In Chapter 5 of Banding Together, I wrote that “[independence’s] power as a marketing category led to its adoption by labels, musicians, and fans in multiple streams, but particularly within the musical styles found in rock and rap.”
• “La Sicodelicao Polka” by Ernesto Guerra y su Conjunto. Spotify (like iTunes and the internet, for that matter) has very few polka tunes, and no South Texas Polka. I included this conjunto song on the playlist so that you can hear some of STP’s influence.
• “Nothing to Lose” by Cui Jian. I was so glad to see this classic of Chinese rock included in the Spotify library. The title is a mistranslation of the song I refer to in the book as “I Have Nothing.” While we watched from afar, Jian’s music was the soundtrack to China’s Tiananmen Square revolution. Here’s how I describe Jian’s performance in Banding Together: “Jian’s vocal style is pinched and rough, and his lyrics are often unintelligible; his rhythmic accompaniment borrows heavily from Western rock, while the melody is often compared to Northern Folksong styles (although Jian denies the association), and instruments often include those in the Chinese repertoire, including the suona (a reed instrument), and the dizi (a transverse flute made of bamboo)” (pg. 123).
• “La carta” by Violeta Parra. This is easily my favorite song to emerge from Chile’s nueva cancion movement of the 1970s. The title references a letter that brings Parra’s protagonist news of her brother’s imprisonment. She laments: “A letter comes to tell me/ There is no justice in my country/…/Luckily I have a guitar/ With which to lament my pain.” Heartbreaking.
• “Water Get No Enemy” by Fela Kuti. Fela was and still is the king of African music (in as much as Elvis is American music’s king). I won’t spoil his amazing life story (see Chapter 4 in Banding Together!), but it is the only one in the book to include a defenestration.
• “39.2” by Ceca. The wedding video of Serbian turbo-folk star Svetlana “Ceca” Veličković to paramilitary commander Željko Ražnatović Arkan was played outdoors for days, a technique designed to antagonize and terrorize the Croatian residents of Mostar during the terrible Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Her songs are a testament to the destructive power music can have when it falls into the wrong hands.
• “Gobbledigook” by Sigur Ros. In the final chapter of Banding Together I mention a number of bands and songs that are, for my purposes, “unclassifiable.” It made sense to end the playlist with some of these, including this charming tune by Icelandic band Sigur Ros. You should watch the video for this song, as long as you are not offended by playful nudity.

This Banding Together Spotify playlist demonstrates the varied influences, instruments, and personality of several musical idioms, while the book emphasizes the things they share in common. Within each genre, fans, club owners, journalists, merchandizers, musicians, and other community members must band together to make music, and the book is a study of how and when that happens. You will only hear traces of those communities in these songs: in the featured performers, borrowed lines, and references to people and places in the lyrics. I hope you’ll read Banding Together to learn more about how genres create communities in popular music, and I hope you’ll have fun with my musical book, even if you can’t dance to it (without Spotify).

The shorter as the first–a comment posted today on WITW (and caught by wordpress’s excellence spambottleneck):

I saw a lot of website but I believe this one contains something special in it. “Of all human ills, greatest is fortune’s wayward tyranny.” by Sophocles.

I take the backhanded compliment, and only wish this was coming from one of the spam bots that had both “elongate” and “member” in the address–that would be a cherry on top of this sundae.

Number two is sent by a friend–email spam:

Dear Email Account Holder,

This is to inform you that your email address has won a compensation grant
of $100,000 (USD) in the ongoing CBN (Central Bank of Nigeria) and IMF
(International Monetary Funds) joint mandate to compensate victims of
scam/Advance fee fraud whom have lost money to Nigeria scammers under the
pretense of Lottery, Beneficiary, Loan and Contract awards etc.

Contact the Debt Management Office for the clearance of your funds with the
details below;

Dr. Abraham Nwankwo
Director-General
Email: dmo.gov.ng@9.cn
Telephone: +234-703-239-3153
General Fax: +234-9-523-7396
Website: www.dmo.gov.ng

Payment would be remitted to you within 3 working days upon certified
verification from the office above. We would appreciate your urgent reply to
ascertain vividly that you are the bearer of this email.

Thanks and Congratulation in advance

Regards,
Lindy Tucker
Public Affairs Commission
Central Bank of Nigeria

So, the scam here is that you are entitled to money due to winning a Nigerian lottery held to repay people who lost money in Nigerian lottery scams. Brilliant. We live in a very post-, meta- world.

Aura: Scatterplot

Siri: Montclair SocioBlog

Nadine: A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book/Code and Culture

Jed: Total Drek

Keith: The Soc Shrine

Frankie: Crooked Timber

Charlotte: WITW

“no regional restrictions, no crap. You can download this file, play it as much as you like, burn it to a DVD, whatever.”

Of course, the risk was that copies would soon be distributed “for free” over the internet, and fans would not pay the $5 to purchase directly from the website. Economists are a fan of these sorts of experiments–to see under what conditions people will pay for a service that they could use for free, when the expectation is that users should pay. The one I know best I think of as “the bagel experiment,” and there’s a nice, reader-friendly description of it here, by Dubner.

Louis went on Jimmy Fallon’s show last night to announce sales had topped $1 million. His website now includes a screen shot of the paypal page showing these sales, and a statement including the following:

I wanted to let you know what I’m doing with [the money from sales-. People are paying attention to what’s going on with this thing. So I guess I want to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes.

So I’m breaking the million into four pieces.

the first 250k is going to pay back what the special cost to produce and the website to build.

The second 250k is going back to my staff and the people who work for me on the special and on my show. I’m giving them a big fat bonus.

The third 280k is going to a few different charities. They are listed below in case you’d like to donate to them also. Some of these i learned about through friends, some were reccomended through twitter.

• The Fistula Foundation
• The Pablove Foundation
• charity: water
• Kiva
• Green Chimneys

That leaves me with 220k for myself. Some of that will pay my rent and will care for my childen. The rest I will do terrible, horrible things with and none of that is any of your business. In any case, to me, 220k is enough out of a million.

I never viewed money as being “my money” I always saw it as “The money” It’s a resource. if it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system.

It is interesting to see how cultural markets react in the face of customers having an enhanced understanding of the principles on which they are founded. As we understand more about how internet-based markets work, our decisions are impacted, and the markets change in response to us.

One thing I haven’t seen yet is a groupon-style market (where a reserve number of purchases needs to be met) where price is variable. That is, the provider of the service (say, an album, or a comedy DVD) defines in advance the cost of that service (e.g., $500K for labor, overhead, talent, etc.), and the cost to consumers cannot rise above that amount. What is left to vary is the number of users that bear the cost. In this hypothetical, 500,000 users would pay $1, 250,000 would pay $2 and so forth. How many people would participate? What other variables would need to vary in order to impact participation levels? What if, for example, consumers had only a week to decide if they would participate, but had no knowledge of how many others would do so? What if users had 2 months, but could see a counter of people who had agreed to pay into the pot? What if the size of the total cost was hidden, and users could only see the current per-person rate?

Curious as to your thoughts, on the Louis CK thing, earlier similar events by Radiohead and others, and my hypotheticals.

1. You may be interested in reading Sarah Sobieraj’s piece on Occupy Wall Street, which features a photograph (taken by me) that first appeared on this blog.

2. The final Grammy nominations came out a few weeks ago and we were on it! Here’s the announcement from my friends at ALIAS chamber ensemble:

It is with tremendous pride and joy that we share with you news that ALIAS Chamber Ensemble has been nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Small Ensemble Performance category! While this news would be exciting for any organization, it is especially so for ALIAS, as it is for our very first CD, Gabriela Lena Frank: Hilos, released by Naxos Records’ American Classics label in February 2011.

Hilos would not have been possible without the tireless support of composer and fellow performer Gabriela Lena Frank, engineer Gary Hedden, producer D. Wilson Ochoa, the fantastic musicians and dedicated Board of Directors of ALIAS, and Naxos Records. To each, we offer a sincere thank you. Thank you, too, to our project supporters The Schubert Club, Drs. Jonathan Neufeld and Jennifer Lena, Vanderbilt University and the Blair School of Music.

Jonathan and I are listed as “project supporters” because we provided the bulk of the funding for the commission and the recording of this record through a research grant awarded to us by Vanderbilt (which is how they got in the list, a little unfairly, to be totally honest).

I’d like you to write about:
1) how and why recommendation engines seem to get suckier over time using them – what’s with the degradation of predictive power, the more it knows what you like/are listening to/are buying? How could Netflix imagine that I’d want to watch Apollo 13, much less that it’d be a top 10 for me?

2) Pushback by content producers in the technological transformation of cultural product delivery. E.g., How is it that a mass paperback like David McCullough’s The Great Bridge, from 1983, is available for $.35 as a used paperback, but is $15 on a kindle? How is it $18 to ‘buy’ Mean Girls on AppleTV?

I love these questions, especially since I’m unlikely to look tragically unhip answering them.

On #1:

Two broad answers seem likely.

First, it could be that prediction engines are just stochastically good at predicting your preferences, but you’ve mis-interpreted them as providing less accurate predictions over time.+ As I understand it, the algorithms combine a small amount of basically unsophisticated information that you provide about your own likes and dislikes (rating out of 5 stars, with only whole stars possible) and batch that with billions of pieces of information about millions of other users. From time to time, the algorithm identifies what we might think of as “true” resemblances between users and is thus able to accurately predict a movie you will enjoy in the future (or, one you will not enjoy).

So, let’s take each half of my argument in turn. First, why should we expect that recommendation engines sometimes, and sort of without warning, correctly predict your preferences?

Imagine that I rated the Zach Galifianakis “Live at the Purple Onion” comedy special with “4 stars.” And I rated “The Hangover” (a movie in which he plays a lead character) with “4 stars.” The recommendation engine combines my high ratings with those of other users (and in this case, there are millions, because so many people saw The Hangover) and recommends “The Hangover 2″ with an expected rating of 3.7 stars. It did not expect that I would give The Hangover 2 a rating of 2 stars. This is because it wasn’t able to determine that I have no attachment to Galifianakis as an actor–no consistent “liking” of him–but rather particular preferences for aspects of the first two films (in the first, it is the resemblance to a Andy Kaufman style comedy; in the latter, the situational pleasure I took in seeing the film with a good friend, in the right mood–I’ve never gone to “adjust” the rating to be lower, reflecting my repeated viewing of the film, and depressed pleasure in it).

In contrast, the engine correctly predicted that I would like the TV series “White Collar” despite my not having rated many “crime” TV shows, not having rated any shows and movies starring any of the major characters, etc.

A few hypotheses flow from my explanation:

a. Users who rate more videos will probably not have more accurate predictions than those who rate fewer videos because:

1. The relevant predictor variables are rare (e.g., watching a film in the right mood with a specific friend);
2. The relevant predictor variables are impossible to code (e.g., that Galifianakis reminds me of another comedian whom I like, but who does not appear in the dataset, or whom I only like occasionally, or whose resemblance to the present case I am not conscious of)
3. User preferences are unstable (e.g., I stopped “liking” The Hangover)

b. Rating engines cannot be improved by adding more data, but only by using different data, which will prove to be enormously burdensome on the user, and therefore might be impossible to execute. (Plus, what makes us think that I am any better at predicting my future preferences than engines might be?)

The second part of my argument is that you would view the recommendation engines as having less accurate picks over time, despite the fact that they are consistently inconsistent in the accuracy of their predictions. Why?

Here I have to defer a little to the cognitive/culture sociology literature, about which I know very little. But it is my understanding that we tend to impose order, and that we impose an order that privileges our own autonomy, knowledge, etc. In other words, we’re much less likely to impose an order that casts ourselves in a negative light. In the case of taste, it is clear that our typical bias is to view ourselves as having stable, predictable, coherent tastes, even if they are tastes we view as inexpert. So, in comparing our vision of ourselves (e.g., I would have known when I watched “The Hangover” that I would not enjoy “The Hangover 2″) to the recommendation engines, we view them as having done a bad job at a task we would have done well. And the fact that a “learning” engine continues to present recommendations for movies we do not enjoy heightens our sensitivity and irritation to this fact, making it seem like a stronger pattern than it truly is.

I have loads of things to add about this “science news” about the prediction of “hits” based on song qualities, but that will have to wait for a future post.

Now, the second answer.

Flowing from this psychological theory that we enjoy rejecting or questioning the authority of the recommendation engine (as a means to promote a positive self-image), it would follow that there would be a performativity effect with recommendation engines (here is Omar writing about performativity in the sense meant here). That is, the fact of a measure of our taste being presented to us would cause our taste to formulate itself in reference to that measure. I happen to think it is as likely that this performativity would cause us to agree with the engine’s recommendations more often (than we would have without recommendations being presented to us in this fashion), as to disagree.*

Of course, Kieran got here first: http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2008/04/01/the-performativity-of-networks/

I think we arguably find this effect with professional critics, who provide “recommendation engines” for readers who follow their columns and reviews. As Shyon Baumann showed in his research on film, professional film critics played a key role in legitimizing some American film as art, leading film goers to increasingly view some American film as art.

The fact that some of us are patterned in our disagreements with the recommendation of search engines probably points to our class backgrounds–our “habitus” of dispositions–than it does to some feature of the engines themselves. People with rather high levels of social and cultural capital might tend to reject the authority of recommendation engines more often than those from different backgrounds and with different resources.

This leads to some hypotheses:

1. Users with high levels of educational attainment, or high SES birth families, may be more likely to perceive recommendation engines as poor predictors of taste/ratings.
2. The more frequent the exposure to recommendation engines, the more strongly held one’s opinions of their performance (whether positive or negative).

Pushback by content producers in the technological transformation of cultural product delivery. E.g., How is it that a mass paperback like David McCullough’s The Great Bridge, from 1983, is available for $.35 as a used paperback, but is $15 on a kindle? How is it $18 to ‘buy’ Mean Girls on AppleTV?