Economies of Clichés: Toward a Free Market Approach for Describing and Measuring Literary Archetypes and Tropes

This research proposes a free market approach to describing and measuring popular culture archetypes and stereotypes that result from the contemporary political culture of digital communications and an economic system of transmedia narratives. First, an historic overview of libertarian literary theory is given. Three existing systems of measuring archetypes and tropes are then described: crowd-sourced wiki projects (e.g., TV Tropes), academic classification systems (e.g., Aarne-Thompson index), and corporate marketing research (e.g., Neilsen PRIZM). Each system is evaluated based on (1) division of labor, (2) voluntary exchange, (3) gains from trade, and (4) openness to spontaneous order. A dynamic combination of aspects of these three types of systems can evolve toward a systematized study of archetypes that is flexible enough to accommodate the varied needs of academic researchers, advertising metrics, and pop-culture entrepreneurs. The suggested result would be a compact, economic, rigorous, and predictable system that allows for both qualitative and quantitative measurement, as well as discussion of narrative story units that combine economics, rhetoric, and aesthetics from a libertarian perspective.