Catcher in the what?

Something that interests me greatly is the relationship between inherent value and social value. For example, a book (let’s say one of those Harry Something-or-other books) has some inherent value, but it also has social value. This social value exists in its function in our social networks. Did you read it? I did! Me too! Let’s strengthen our bond! The relationship between these two value systems gets more interesting when they diverge. It is possible for something to be not really that good (i.e. having low inherent value) but function with high social value.

There is another key part of this relationship – the ability of items of high social value to soar in the public consciousness far above their neighbours in the inherent value space. For example, two paintings might have similar inherent value but if one gets picked up socially perceptions of its overall value can become highly inflated.

I’ve been trying to track down signals of these issues and started by listing up some cultural artifacts which might have inflated values. Here’s a list of the type of thing I mean:

• The Mona Lisa
• Catcher in the Rye
• Wuthering Heights
• David Bowie
• The Blair Witch Project
• Jackson Pollock

The Wikipedia page on The Mona Lisa, for example, gives some indication as to the non linear nature of interest in this work of art:

Until the 20th century, Mona Lisa was one among many and certainly not the "most famous painting.”

Update: take the remainder of this post advisedly. I note that Google’s news time series suggest a very lumpy sample of news data which may be the ultimate force behind the signal reported below.

Where was I? So in looking into the Catcher in the Rye a little, I pulled up the charts from Google News and Trends. Interestingly, while the news chart shows obvious upward attention, there is a peak and then decline. The news trend goes from 1950 to 2009 – the book was published in 1951.

Google Trends shows less data, but the decline is discernable.

Part of this may be influenced by various attempts and claims around creating a film version of the book. However, searches on Google News for articles that don’t mention either ‘movie’ or ‘film’ show pretty much identical trends.

So why did it peak? Is the news trend an artifact of Google’s data? Given the reduction in searches, perhaps not. Note that the search graph is only for the US market in an attempt to remove any issues to do with language and international markets.

July 2001 was the 50th anniversary of the book, so perhaps this represents a generational aspect to its popularity.

Comments

[anon]

I think this has to do with a lawsuit over a novel that used material from Catcher in the Rye:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/books/06/03/salinger.catcher.lawsuit/

The more interesting aspect of this graph, to me, is that the seasonal trends strongly suggest that a lot of searches come from students assigned the book at school and that teachers are more likely to assign it at the end of the school year than the beginning.

[Scott Karambis]

Interesting, thought-provoking post. I like the attempt to draw a distinction between inherent and social value but I think most literary/art historians would claim that the value of all works of art are social by definition, in the sense that the only reason they have any value at all is because a group of people value them. They have no purely "inherent" value. That being said, I think you are on to something. Maybe the distinction has more to do with degrees of social circulation? in any case,thought you might be interested in this NYT's article here

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/weekinreview/21schuessler.html?_r=1&scp=9&sq=catcher%20in%20the%20rye&st=cse

which suggests "Catcher" is losing its appeal and relevance to those spunky can-do millennials who don't get the whole alienation thing.

[Richard Marr]

How do you define inherent value?

[Michael Nielsen]

Very interesting post. A minor point is that I've found Google Trends very frequently shows a slow decline like that you see above, often enough to suggest it's an artifact. I noticed this one evening when a group of friends and I tried about 50-100 very different terms in trends. Aside from a few where there was a good reason for a long-term variation, everything decayed just slightly.