Netflix queues by zip code 

 The New York Times has put together an awesome  data visualization on the geography of Netflix . For each zip code they have the top 50 rentals of 2009 and they use these ranks to draw heat maps for each movie. There are all kinds of interesting patterns that point to both how preferences cluster and information spreads. My favorite two maps are the following, which I reference after the jump (darker colors indicate more rentals in that areas): 

  Mad Men , Season 1 Disc 1: 

     

  Paul Blart, Mall Cop : 
    
 


 First, an Oscar nomination seems to put you at the top of everyone's list, regardless of geography. Thus,  Slumdog Millionaire ,  Benjamin Button ,  Gran Torino  and  Doubt all have high ranks. Second, box-office blockbusters do fairly poorly across the board, seemingly because most people saw those movies in the theaters ( Wall-E ,  Dark Knight , etc).  

 Finally, the remaining movies show a great deal of geographic variation. There is a fairly pronounced difference between urban centers and the suburbs. Unsurprisingly, movies that have high Metacritic scores do very well in the urban centers, whereas they seem absent from the outlying areas. Reversely, movies that critics consider terrible (and are usually marketed toward teenagers) mostly ship to the suburbs.You can see this in the stark difference between the critically acclaimed TV show  Mad Men  and the slapstick comedy  Paul Blart: Mall Cop  (full disclosure:  Mad Men  was on my queue last year,  Paul Blart  was not, and I live in Cambridge/Somerville). 

 The other obvious divide that arises is race. Tyler Perry's two movies were only on the top 50 lists for a handful of neighborhoods that predominantly African-American. In Boston, for example, the movies cluster heavily in Dorchester and Mattapan. 

  Tyler Perry's The Family That Prays : 

     

 How people form preferences is one my favorite subjects and I love visualizations like these. My instinct is that there is a lot of preference clustering happening, based largely on age, class and, to a lesser extent, race. But above and beyond this, I imagine the information networks vary by geography--urbanites may hear about movies from certain blogs, while folks in the suburbs (who probably have more children and teens) might rely more on national TV advertisements. The Oscars tend to cross geographic and social lines because they are a widely-visible, low-cost indicator of movie quality. All of this points to a key fact: how information gets into and flows through our social network(s) is an important aspect of how our preferences come to be.  

 Also, this is begging for someone to put together a list of "Democrat" movies and "Republican" movies based on party affiliation in each zip code.