Standing Ovation for La Scala, Second Life
It’s one thing to give a TED talk, and quite another to conduct further research during the very TED talk you’re giving. In a recent, thought-provoking post, Jan Chipchase, the well-known Nokia design anthropologist, confessed to just how disingenuous he found the applause that greeted him two years earlier.
You might think that such an (free thinking) audience would not be troubled by this issue — if you like the talk then stand, and if you didn’t then don’t’. Except that for most the issue has little to do with their level of appreciation and all to do with social dynamics. There’s a cost to staying seated when all those around you are rising from their’s: the view of the speaker is blocked, the space becomes a claustrophobic echo chamber; and if enough people around you are standing, it shifts from being a choice of whether to stand, to statement of dislike of the speaker and their talk. To paraphrase the words of John Miller and Scott Page in their excellent paper The Standing Ovation Problem ‘this behavioural mimicry is strategic (wanting to send the right signal … ), informational (the talk was better than anticipated), or conformal (standing so not to feel awkward)’.
In this regard, the Standing Ovation Problem seems integral, if not essential, to any “complex adaptive social systems”, as Miller & Page put it. Culture, in its entirety (whatever that means), might just be one massive Standing Ovation:
“The SOP is an apt metaphor for social situations in which agents make binary decisions and interact spatially. It applies to a wide ranging set of phenomena such as whether to send children to public or private school, to commit crimes (Glaeser, et al., 1996), to violate the law (Picker, 1997), to riot (Granovetter, 1978), to search for jobs (Menczer and Tassier, 2001), to retire (Axtell and Epstein, 1999), to vote for a particular party (Mayer and Brown, 1998), to experiment with drugs, to engage in unprotected or premarital sex (Durlauf, 1997), to pay your electric bill, or even whether to decorate your house with strands of multi-colored bulbs during the holiday season. These various phenomena all share elements of the SOP: people are socially influenced, they have varying degrees of sophistication, and information flows over a network.” (Miller & Page 2)
If the phenomena is exclusively a spatial one, it would seem that certain tendencies, reducible to the architecture of the space and the design of the event, must govern or heavily shape the outcome. Though I’m not aware of any studies that attempt to find fine-grained determining factors, simple timing could, so Chipchase surmises, theoretically produce a reliable cascade effect:
Is there a correlation between people who like to sit close to to the stage and people most likely to stand? Are people closer to the stage more likely to be positively affected by the talk? If all it takes is the two people in front of you to stand to force you to do the same to maintain your (status quo) view of the speaker how many strategically placed ringers at the front of the auditorium would it take to trigger a tsunami ovation? (And taking a step back, why is it important that one talk receives an ovation and another not?)
Miller & Page ask a similar question, if with a more egregious use in mind. The Standing Ovation Problem, they write,
can be used to explore some intriguing policy questions. We often pose the following question to our students: suppose you can place some shills in the audience, where would you place them, and how should they act in order to maximize (or minimize) the probability of a standing ovation? Other policy questions can also be addressed, for example, consider the architecture of the performance hall. Does the presence of a balcony alter the probability of an ovation? Of course, whether the Phantom of the Opera receives a standing ovation is of little (or no) global concern, but if we interpret standing as taking drugs, committing crimes, abstaining from dangerous sexual practices, or attending school, then we can attach much more normative significance to our ability to prevent and create ovations. (Page & Miller 2)
Though their logic flirts with some sloppy totalizations, it’s nonetheless clear that most behavior has an emergent, immediately social dimension. Which begs the question: how important is space and proximity to the solicitation of mimicry? I would think, not very much; in which case, nearly every domain of culture dependent on information and media strategies of some kind — social media, marketing, and of course all of politics — is open, if not already subject to, this emerging ’science’.
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