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The Wisdom of Audiences
As a person who works in the consulting business, I have a big stake in the concept of "expert." It is in playing this role that I make my living and find fulfillment. A lifetime of studying, experimenting, reading, and writing got me here. Continuing to do those things helps keep me here, or at least I hope it does.
Western civilization's belief systems, social norms, assumptions underpinning educational design, marketplace dynamics, and modalities of self-actualization all conspire to support the concept of "expert." I'm not alone. Our whole culture has an enormous amount at stake here.
You can imagine, then, how challenging it was for me to read and think about James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds.
The core of Surowiecki's premise is this:
“Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant — better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.�
Undoubtedly there will be some reading this who will dismiss this premise out of hand, and think that "it's time to stop reading this ridiculous post right now. I've got work to do."
Please reconsider. The evidence in the book is so compelling and Surowiecki's methodology is so sound as to render argument against his case useless.
Surowiecki's book - and his premise - describe in dynamic terms the behavior of diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals rather than crowd psychology (mob mentality) as crowd behavior is traditionally thought about.
Having spent my entire working life in the performing arts, when I hear the word "crowd," I cannot help but think about audiences, so I've been thinking about this premise in this specific context: the relationship of the artist, arts organization, and arts marketer to its audience and how audience behavior might be signaling its "wisdom" to the artist or organization.
Surowiecki's thinking is not unlike statistical sampling theory. Many independently-deciding individuals will more accurately represent the universe of possible outcomes and produce better predictions.
Surowiecki qualifies his premise with some specific conditions and caveats. First, not all crowds are wise. There are particular pre-conditions and traits that help distinguish the wise crowd from the unthinking mob.
1. A wise crowd evidences a diversity of opinion where each individual has access to private information, "even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of known facts." Audience members rely on what they've heard about an artist or production, what they've read, and the quality of their previous experiences with the venue.
2. Independence: The opinions of individuals within a wise crowd are not determined by or shaped by the opinions of those around them. They think and decide independently. Audience members usually make their purchase decision independently, not within a "mob" dynamic where a group of people might sway them.
3. A wise crowd is decentralized and the individuals specialize and draw on localized knowledge. Clearly, most audience members don't know each other when they pull the purchase trigger. They bring specific knowledge, taste, and experience to their transaction decision, meeting the ultimate definition of "local."
4. The crowd's wisdom can be aggregated because there is a mechanism that transforms private, independent, decentralized, and diverse opinions into collective judgments. With audiences, this happens twice. First, transaction channels (ticket offices, WEB sites, phone orders) aggregate all the purchases and indicate the number of people who have decided to join an audience for a particular event. The audience size may be read as a first indicator of the crowd's collective opinion of the perceived value that the event offers. Second, the performance or exhibition venue itself physically aggregates the audience. The audiences' reactions may be read as a second indicator of the collective value that the event has delivered. The expert marketer recognizes a powerful opportunity in this last crowd-wisdom indicator. Any audience's reaction is not reflective of the experience, alone, but is also reflective of any difference between expectations that were created to drive the purchase decision, and the fulfillment of those expectations.
Considering these qualifying dimensions, then comparing them with how audiences are formed and then behave, I believe that most audiences meet Surowiecki's critiera to qualify as a "wise crowd."
If they do - and if one believes in the wisdom of the premise - some tough questions emerge:
1. Are audiences more astute judges of artistic quality than than the artists or artistic directors who create works for them? Or are they simply more accurate in appraising relevance and experiential resonance? Are these distinctions worthy of merit?
2. Are au courant dimensions of quality really relevant or meaningful? Consider, for example, in classical music the preference argument between the use of original instruments versus modern instruments in the performance of Bach.
3. How important is it for artists, artistic directors, and presenters to reconsider their aesthetic opinions/judgments toward populism and the artistic products that the commercial sector produces? Shakespeare, Mozart, and Verdi were all popular in their times.
4. Are our prejudices and assumptions regarding the pandering-to-the-audience, leading-the-audience continuum wrong-headed? Is audience research such as testing story lines with audiences really an incursion into artistic territory?
5. What does a decline in audience interest toward the artistic canon mean in regards to how we define what is timeless, a classic, and what is not?
6. How much should the audiences' opinions about what they want be taken into consideration when crafting programmatic agendas?How do arts organizations typically behave toward their audiences?
In the performing arts, we behave towards audiences with such mercurial inconsistency that if our sector were an individual, this person would likely be diagnosed as both paranoid and schizophrenic. At the very least, we'd have "issues."
We're seriously conflicted. We need audiences. We also occasionally despise them. Without them, we'd be rendered both purposeless and paupers.
We spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to build audiences. We write warm, inviting messages that express affection, ask for support, convey status, and seek loyalty. We ask our audiences to take risks with us, but when they do, but don't enjoy the results, how often are we defensive, dismissive, or worse?
It has not been my experience that audiences are respected as if we believed that they were wiser or more discerning than we "experts" are. This is tough to do. Among other reasons, as I wrote above, we are acculturated and rewarded for thinking differently.
When audiences are cool to a particular work or don't seem to "get it," it's not unusual to hear a dismissive "What do they know?" remark uttered. This is especially true when the story we tell ourselves is one that bubbles up from our own high opinion of a work's artistic merit.
When an audience's reaction diverges too greatly from our own expert opinions, does it threaten us?
Even though we may know intelligent and perceptive individuals within the audience, there is a reflexive, defensive need to make this crowd nameless and faceless - a great unwashed hoi polloi without taste or discernment.
I cannot help but wonder whether how we think about and behave towards audiences may be driving high audience churn rates and trends of decline. Do our crowds sense our attitudes toward them?
Arena Stage's Executive Director, Stephen Richard, told me yesterday that TCG reported that some 80% of theatres across the country are reporting declining audiences. Such widespread declines purport tectonic implications. If you believe Surowiecki's premise, these declines reflect the wisdom of a very large crowd, indeed.
Among other conclusions, one might draw a conclusion that the live theatre sector is failing to deliver what its audiences want or expect. While this may seem obvious on its face, such declines are often attributed to other dynamics such as generational changes, disruptive technologies, cocooning, or competitive incursion. What if, instead, these declines reflect the failure of experts? What if audiences just don't value what the experts offer them?
Occam's Razor dictates that "when multiple competing theories have equal predictive powers, the principle recommends selecting those that introduce the fewest assumptions and postulate the fewest hypothetical entities." In other words, the simplest explanation is probably right: the evidence suggests that the audiences don't want what's being offered.
What do we do with this information to make it useful?
First, I believe that it is vitally important for artists and arts organizations to cultivate a much more respectful view of their audiences. Audiences have a great deal to tell us about our effectiveness. Failing to recognize and exploit the opportunity present will not only alienate audiences and continue to drive high acquisition costs, it also deprives us of the opportunity to learn.
Second, we have to create and use systems that tell us what our audiences think and how they feel. First, among equals, is developing and implementing a robust research agenda. And the art itself can no longer be off-limits in audience research. Artistic directors may not want to hear what their audiences have to say, but they turn a deaf ear to their peril and to the peril of their organizations.
Third, sales and marketing systems can be designed to leverage the dynamics that are already in place. For example, p2p marketing approaches intentionally disrupt the degree of independence that individual audience members have from one another. They create systems, tools, and forums where people can influence each other's behavior. People aggregating software platforms like MySpace and Friendster create marketing opportunities where the crowd markets to the crowd.
Fourth, technology tools offer opportunities for us to let us leverage crowd dynamics. In these settings, crowds create momentum in crowd behavior. Apple's i-Tunes Music Store lets people know that someone who bought Tom Petty's Highway Companion also bought The Raconteurs and Los Lonely Boys. Amazon and Netflix - two extraordinarily successful enterprises - both use the same customer-assisted filtering systems.
References:
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki
The crowd is smarter than you think. Author delves into 'The Wisdom of Crowds' By Todd Leopold
CNN, Weesday, July 14, 2004
The Wisdom of Crowds from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Posted on July 27, 2006 10:23 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Very interesting entry with a lot of good points. This entry (about the audience and their thinking) is a great companion to your previous entry (about artistic and sustainability values from the POV of the people who present the work) I have a few thoughts on some of the points:
-The audience, I believe, is a more astute judge of a work than the artistic director. Ultimately, it does not matter what the artistic director thinks of the work (he may think that it is the best thing since sliced bread), if the audience does not buy tickets for it, or see it, not like it and tell their friends to stay away, that's it. Likely, if the audience likes the show and tells their friends to go see it, then all the better for the venue.
Even if the audience is as informed as the AD, it could boil down to personal opinions on the work, personal taste, etc.
-I think that part of the reason for the audience decline is that audiences are oversaturated with similar material all the time. I can only speak from personal experience, but I feel that there is sometimes a lack of variety or "excitement" in classical and orchestral music presentations. You can hear somthing of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and the other masters often in a concert setting; it's a lot harder to hear anything by Stockhausen or any other of the more post-modern composers in larger concert settings outside of the niche festivals with the odd performance. If the concert halls want to grow their audiences, they can't ignore the niche audiences and alienate them by not presenting what they would like to hear.