Intertextuality and the Diffusion of Cultural Innovations: Empirical Evidence and Practical Prediction
Predicting the “next big thing” is valuable. So valuable that many businesses bet their futures on guesses at what that next thing might be. The concept of intertextuality suggests that we might be able to identify emerging trends before they hit – while there is still time enough to capitalize on them. Is intertextuality detectable and predictable?
What research has been done into the idea? What empirical evidence has been found? Does it have true, predictive value?
Establish the relevance of various media – which medium is the ‘thought leader’ and which are merely repackaging ideas for mass consumption?
What commercial gain can come from, early identification of trends?
1. Search engine optimization – build adsense sites before new keywords rise in popularity (and competetiveness)
2. Be the first to brand or trademark new terms
3. Develop products, t-shirts, etc and have them in place
4. See which ‘guesses’ industry has made and invest in those properties
Which media can be analyzed this way?
1. Newspapers (daily)
2. Magazines (weekly or monthly)
3. TV Shows? (daily, weekly)
4. BBC Radio or other radio shows? (daily?)
5. Speech-to-text auto-transcribing programs? (Of Internet radio feeds…?)
6. Archived movies – scripts are available on line and can be tied to release dates (months)
7. Blogs (daily)
8. The Internet as a whole? Google rankings, search frequency logs, etc?
9. Overture is available as a monthly snapshot
The only criteria are the availability of text to analyze and dates to tie the text to.
Methodology:
1. Determine which media are available – which have enough usable text?
2. Collect media to analyze
3. Evaluate date and frequency of all non-noise words
4. Compare presence of keywords
Other research questions:
1. What other analysis could be done of Internet radio? We can compare feeds from various places around the world, to study the ratio of commercials to music, or types of music, etc.
2. What speech-to-text capabilities exist? How fast and accurate are they?
3. In what other areas might there be interesting correlations? The stock market? If a company rises in discussion – does that tie to a shift in stock price?