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Big Data For The Us American Film Industry

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Before the advent of the Internet and social media, Hollywood executives were often wandering in the dark when it came to understand in detail what their audiences wanted and how any given film could be marketed to exactly the right audience, thus those parts of the population more inclined to spend money on a certain type of film. With the advancement of technology the tables have, however, turned. The Internet and especially social media have opened up a wealth of options to access information about people’s preferences and interests, often in real-time. As with other industries this treasure trove of ‘big data’ is of great interest to Hollywood (Hadida, 2009), it’s analysis promising to resolve problems that have long been lying at…show more content…
Examples include, for instance, large sets of Twitter messages or data extracted from Wikipedia. In their definition, boyd and Crawford (2012) further include the capacity to ‘to search, aggregate, and cross-reference large data sets’, further noting that big data, besides from its technical aspects, entails a cultural ideology, circulating around the notion that the accumulation and analysis of large datasets offers a new form of a more truthful, accurate and objective knowledge of the world (2012: 663). No less contested than the term big data is the question of what is meant by ‘Hollywood.’ For the sake of this essay, the term ‘Hollywood’ serves as a metonymy for the American motion-pictures industry. As Scott (2005) notes, Hollywood as a term has come to stand in for ‘the largest and most influential cultural-products agglomeration in the modern world’, though it is by far not the only one (2005: 10).1 Yet, Hollywood has become the centre of the international film industry. Thanks to a strong pre-existing cluster and agglomeration effects that reinforce its position, the United States role as one of the largest film markets, the ability to create products that appeal to both a domestic and international
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