How to Spot a Fad
I was thinking about this topic today because of a discussion on bubbles and putting “current-day” things in contemporary or near-contemporary books. How can you predict what’s still going to be around so your novel doesn’t feel too dated too quickly?
Well, the quick advice I have on that is . . . really, don’t worry about it. You can’t predict future changes at all. Not in an accurate way, anyway, which is why the more vague you are the more prescient you seem (and thus why the original Star Trek communicator gets associated with the flip-phone even though the only similarity is the flip).
But the real impetus for writing this is because I brought up a comparison of one of the first authors I did a consultation for . . . technically, anyway, but it was the year before I became a professional editor so I don’t really count it. But I remember her insisting that she didn’t want to include something in her contemporary novel because she thought it was a fad. She thought this popular thing would go away in a year or two and her book would be too dated.
I tried arguing that no, it was going to stick around and you could tell because of how people were using it. But I was young and inexperienced and didn’t convince her.
Before I tell you what that was, let me explain how I’d explain it today. This applies to every other thing that I’ve seen that people have argued was or was not a fad. I don’t say it’s foolproof, but it’s at least a good rule of thumb.
A fad is when people are using it primarily because they like it. This most obviously applies to entertainment tastes — the singers, the artists, the TV shows that show brief popularity and then persist only in viral memes. But it also applies to hot toy trends, genre popularity, cool new gadgets, populist political figures, and more. A fad isn’t based solely on popularity.
On the other hand, when people like it or at least tolerate it primarily because they use it, it’s sticking around. This is especially true when people complain about it. When only the people not using it are complaining about it, then it’s a definite sign of fadness. But think about all the things people use even though they complain about it, like a commonly-used website, or a computer program everyone defaults to, or a TV show more popular in its cancelation than when it was in production.
You probably thought I was referencing a single example for each of those and just being coy about it. I can think of several examples for each one. And if I were to list every one that I can think of, someone would say “You forgot this obvious one.”
This is why I’ve laughed when people keep saying AI is a bubble, and why I was wrong when I thought the self-pub explosion of 2013 was a fad too. Even the ones where something did well, but was then replaced by something that did it better, doesn’t show the first one was a fad; it showed demand, and someone came along to do it even better.
This rule of thumb has held up with every “is it a fad or not?” argument I’ve ever heard, including all the retrospective ones.
(Well, except for the first season finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation when Data told a twentieth-century human that television was just a fad and they don’t use it anymore. That was the first time I’d ever encountered the term as a kid, though, and while it took me years to understand that it was just a tongue-in-cheek way to explain why the characters weren’t ever shown watching TV because that would necessarily raise the already razor-thin production budget, this is also what got me thinking about the nature of fads in the first place. It stuck with me all through the 1990s and 2000s as technology rapidly changed around me.)
In summary:
If people mostly use it because they like it, it’s probably a fad.
If people like it mostly because it’s useful, it’s probably not a fad.
So, all that being said, what was it that this author I mentioned didn’t want in her contemporary novel because it was clearly just a fad and couldn’t possibly sustain itself?
It was 2009. She didn’t want to even reference her characters using social media.