Engineering the Current Thing

If you pay attention online you might have heard of “The Current Thing.”

What’s The Current Thing? The Current Thing is any concept that grabs hold of public attention, sometimes out of nowhere, and which demands an answer: are you for or against?

I also like Marc Andreessen’s explanation.

But where does The Current Thing come from? Does it just happen or is it made? How does it work?

And so, I read through the paper “Availability Cascades and Risk Reputation,” after Andreessen mentioned it as a seminal work on The Current Thing. Here’s how the paper begins:

“An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public responses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance.”

Συνέχεια εδώ

Πηγή: unintendedconsequenc.es