The evolving perception of controversial movies

Luca Amendola, Valerio Marra and Miguel Quartin
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Luca Amendola: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
Valerio Marra: Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Vitória, Brazil
Miguel Quartin: Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Palgrave Communications, 2015, vol. 1, issue palcomms201538, 15038-

Abstract: Polarization of opinion is an important feature of public debate on political, social and cultural topics. The availability of large internet databases of users’ ratings has permitted quantitative analysis of polarization trends—for instance, previous studies have included analyses of controversial topics on Wikipedia, as well as the relationship between online reviews and a product’s perceived quality. Here, we study the dynamics of polarization in the movie ratings collected by the Internet Movie database (IMDb) website in relation to films produced over the period 1915–2015. We define two statistical indexes, dubbed hard and soft controversiality, which quantify polarized and uniform rating distributions, respectively. We find that controversy decreases with popularity and that hard controversy is relatively rare. Our findings also suggest that more recent movies are more controversial than older ones and we detect a trend of “convergence to the mainstream” with a time scale of roughly 40–50 years. This phenomenon appears qualitatively different from trends observed in both online reviews of commercial products and in political debate, and we speculate that it may be connected with the absence of long-lived “echo chambers” in the cultural domain. This hypothesis can and should be tested by extending our analysis to other forms of cultural expression and/or to databases with different demographic user bases.

Date: 2015
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