INFLUENCERS: How Trends & Creativity Become Contagious | Hypebeast

¬¬The “Influencers” is a promo piece created on behalf of the Paris-based creative agency R+I. The short documentary promises to shed light on how trends and ideas become contagious in music and fashion today, which I guess they’ll say are created by creative marketing and public relations people just like those at R+I.

The trailer suggests that trends are created and spread by ‘influencers’, unique, tuned-in individuals whose godlike abilities to think different and to create and predict the future puts them in a unique position to shape today’s pop culture zeitgeist. The influencers in this film apparently also work very closely to promote each other. [Sky Gellatly of Hypebeast is interviewed along with Jeff Staple of Staple Design and Jon Cohen of The FADER. Rob Stone, another co-founder of The FADER is also featured. Incidently DJ Neil Armstrong and Jeff Staple who are also friends with Sky Gellatly were also interviewed in another R+I produced film. DJ Neil Armstrong toured with Jay Z (Jay Z is discussed in the "Influencers" trailer) and Staple Design has done branding for both Hypebeast and editorial work for The FADER. Sky Gellatly is also the manager for DJ Neil Armstrong (Jay-Z’s Tour DJ), and so on and so forth.]

So will “Influencers” deliver on it’s subtitle and offer us any penetrating insight on ‘how trends and creativity become contagious’ or will it amount to little more than a promo piece whereby a collective of incestuously linked ‘influencers’ pat themselves on the back and shout out to their sponsor brands while propagating fallacies and myths on the nature of both trends and success in these industries?

INFLUENCERS ARE DIFFERENT
“An influencer”, the trailer tells us, “is someone who has a different way of thinking and a different way of expressing themselves.” Now the film, fashion and art worlds are full of people who have unique visions, but that alone doesn’t explain which of them rise to become an ‘influencer’. Does the film explore the randomness inherent in their success? Does it look at the idiosyncrasies of the selection processes used to identify talent in the fashion and art world? Does it look at how these markets are vulnerable to the random, to the tyranny of the accidental, to winner-take-almost-all effects–or how membership in certain fields is disposed toward being a giant or a dwarf (with no typical member)?

By looking at the success of influencers we are guilty of observation bias–the problem of data mining. You see the survivors, the winners; you don’t see the losers so you are likely to misattribute the causes that led to the winning. There are countless books of the kind that tell us the ‘secret to getting rich’. Typically they interview a bunch of millionaires to figure out what makes these people different. We learn that they have a bit of intelligence, that they are hard workers, and that they are not afraid to take risks. But we don’t hear about the failures and bankruptcies of people who share those traits, which indicate the unique trait that all the millionaires had in common was mostly luck.

What about pop culture trends shaped by rather ordinary, unremarkable people? The song of Antoine Dodson’s unintentional lyrics set to music is selling more than Lady Gaga. Or trends shaped by coincidence–work released by individuals that shares themes or stylistic devices with other works release independently by others at the same time i.e. ‘the cyberpunk movement’. And what of trends shaped by no single individual at all, but perpetuated by scores of brands, ad agencies, designers, film makers, celebrities, curators and editors who simply regurgitate remixed elements of the culture around them, haphazardly creating and perpetuating trends from pop culture flotsam and jetsam?

Nor is being in the position of an influencer any guarantee of future success. Plenty of ideas, inventions, products, services, movies and ad campaigns created by influential individuals have flopped. Tastes changes and once popular musicians, writers and designers can find themselves having fallen out of favor just as quickly as they rose to success.

The narrative seems to perceive and disguise luck as nonluck (that is, skills), and to perceive and disguise randomness as nonrandomness (that is, determinism). How many influencers are lucky fools who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attribute their success to some other, generally very precise, reasons?

CHANGE HAPPENS IN JUMPS
Influential trends in fashion and other novel ideas, events and technologies that have a huge impact on the world typically lie outside the realm of normal expectations, but we humans are wonderfully good at wrongly retro-predicting them. People tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Rationalizing events by hindsight doesn’t increase your chances of understanding or predicting future unlikely events.

People can become very powerful overnight on a very small idea, and the world is more and more influenced by that type of randomness. Randomness of this type is impossible to model, and the result is that we understand less and less of what’s going on.

¬¬The “Influencers” is a promo piece created on behalf of the Paris-based creative agency R+I. The short documentary promises to shed light on how trends and ideas become contagious in music and fashion today, which I guess they’ll say are created by creative marketing and public relations people just like those at R+I.

The trailer suggests that trends are created and spread by ‘influencers’, unique, tuned-in individuals whose godlike abilities to think different and to create and predict the future puts them in a unique position to shape today’s pop culture zeitgeist. The influencers in this film apparently also work very closely to promote each other. [Sky Gellatly of Hypebeast is interviewed along with Jeff Staple of Staple Design and Jon Cohen of The FADER. Rob Stone, another co-founder of The FADER is also featured. Incidently DJ Neil Armstrong and Jeff Staple who are also friends with Sky Gellatly were also interviewed in another R+I produced film. DJ Neil Armstrong toured with Jay Z (Jay Z is discussed in the "Influencers" trailer) and Staple Design has done branding for both Hypebeast and editorial work for The FADER. Sky Gellatly is also the manager for DJ Neil Armstrong (Jay-Z’s Tour DJ), and so on and so forth.]

So will “Influencers” deliver on it’s subtitle and offer us any penetrating insight on ‘how trends and creativity become contagious’ or will it amount to little more than a promo piece whereby a collective of incestuously linked ‘influencers’ pat themselves on the back and shout out to their sponsor brands while propagating fallacies and myths on the nature of both trends and success in these industries?

INFLUENCERS ARE DIFFERENT
“An influencer”, the trailer tells us, “is someone who has a different way of thinking and a different way of expressing themselves.” Now the film, fashion and art worlds are full of people who have unique visions, but that alone doesn’t explain which of them rise to become an ‘influencer’. Does the film explore the randomness inherent in their success? Does it look at the idiosyncrasies of the selection processes used to identify talent in the fashion and art world? Does it look at how these markets are vulnerable to the random, to the tyranny of the accidental, to winner-take-almost-all effects–or how membership in certain fields is disposed toward being a giant or a dwarf (with no typical member)?

By looking at the success of influencers we are guilty of observation bias–the problem of data mining. You see the survivors, the winners; you don’t see the losers so you are likely to misattribute the causes that led to the winning. There are countless books of the kind that tell us the ‘secret to getting rich’. Typically they interview a bunch of millionaires to figure out what makes these people different. We learn that they have a bit of intelligence, that they are hard workers, and that they are not afraid to take risks. But we don’t hear about the failures and bankruptcies of people who share those traits, which indicate the unique trait that all the millionaires had in common was mostly luck.

What about pop culture trends shaped by rather ordinary, unremarkable people? The song of Antoine Dodson’s unintentional lyrics set to music is selling more than Lady Gaga. Or trends shaped by coincidence–work released by individuals that shares themes or stylistic devices with other works release independently by others at the same time i.e. ‘the cyberpunk movement’. And what of trends shaped by no single individual at all, but perpetuated by scores of brands, ad agencies, designers, film makers, celebrities, curators and editors who simply regurgitate remixed elements of the culture around them, haphazardly creating and perpetuating trends from pop culture flotsam and jetsam?

Nor is being in the position of an influencer any guarantee of future success. Plenty of ideas, inventions, products, services, movies and ad campaigns created by influential individuals have flopped. Tastes changes and once popular musicians, writers and designers can find themselves having fallen out of favor just as quickly as they rose to success.

The narrative seems to perceive and disguise luck as nonluck (that is, skills), and to perceive and disguise randomness as nonrandomness (that is, determinism). How many influencers are lucky fools who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attribute their success to some other, generally very precise, reasons?

CHANGE HAPPENS IN JUMPS
Influential trends in fashion and other novel ideas, events and technologies that have a huge impact on the world typically lie outside the realm of normal expectations, but we humans are wonderfully good at wrongly retro-predicting them. People tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Rationalizing events by hindsight doesn’t increase your chances of understanding or predicting future unlikely events.

People can become very powerful overnight on a very small idea, and the world is more and more influenced by that type of randomness. Randomness of this type is impossible to model, and the result is that we understand less and less of what’s going on.

i want to check that out.

Lame in what sense? Care to elaborate?

Lame in what sense? Care to elaborate?

Lame in what sense? Care to elaborate?

is not what you think is lame or not…….if its had a huge impact on a population then its an influence there for every and any brand thats done that is an influence such as staple

Must see this! awesome

Must see this! awesome

watch the helvetica doc

i like

this is so sick. deff a must watch.