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There does seem to be an enormous and long-lasting trend for the public to have insane interest in the every-day life of celebrities. I’m curious to know if the novelty will wear off once either: people will be born into the culture of already having access to a live tweet-stream of a celebrity’s life, and so the novelty will not exist, or, people will become more sensitive to the fact that much of what’s being said by these celebrities is controlled and managed (at least in part) by marketers and perhaps a PR firm. AMA’s on Reddit seem to be a more advanced and mature version of getting to know about a celebrity’s life, mainly because it’s bidirectional (in the discussion, not usually in question asking, I believe). There could be an insurgence of AMA style communication, and then perhaps those too will die off.

One of the women in the audience asked I think a really important question, which is how exactly does one measure the extent to which engaging with an audience on social media assists with building a fan base and encouraging higher album purchase rates. She says it’s very difficult to measure that, naturally, because one can’t control for the music that a band is playing. But, perhaps a better way to construct the study would be to isolate the control group in some way so that they cannot interact with a band’s social media, and have no way of knowing that the band has social media, and have the same band interacting with the treatment group through social media. That way, the music would not be variable. Note that on a technical level, it may be easier to enable the treatment group to have access the social media rather than trying to hide it from the control group.

P.S, watching people eat at 2x speed is pretty hilarious.

I never would have imagined crowd funding to have dated all the way back to 1993.

I thought one thing that was really interesting is that we’ve transitioned to, as she puts it, a “presentational” experience of music rather than just having it in the background or as something that everyone participated in. I’m curious as to why that is the case.