aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
The Long Tail today
Today marks the debut of the book. I’m glad Chris got around to answering critics, in his way. I read John Cassidy’s New Yorker review las week and found it less ”largely positive” than Chris did, but I’ll quote the same part:
[T]his is snappily argued and thought-provoking, if not quite as original as Anderson’s publishers would have us believe. Back in 1980, another futurologist, Alvin Toffler, anticipated the “de-massifying” of society in his best-selling book “The Third Wave” (Bantam; $7.99), which is still in print. “The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation and entertainment,â€Â� Toffler said in a 1999 interview. But no longer: “The era of mass society is over. . . . No more mass production. No more mass consumption. . . . No more mass entertainment.”
You might imagine that I was a fan of Tofler’s then and, given that I believe everything’s derivative, I give Anderson more credit for his insight than does Cassidy. I tell students all the time that I’m not the slightest bit interested in an orginal idea, I want an original mix, iteration or synthesis of ideas.
The Long Tail is one brilliant synthesis!
The real novelty of Anderson’s book is not his thesis but its representation in the form of a neat, readily graspable picture: the long-tail curve. For decades, economists and scientists have been using this graph, which is formally known as a power-law distribution, to describe things like the distribution of wealth or the relative size of cities. By applying the long tail to the online world, Anderson brings intellectual order to what often looks like pointless activity. The teen-ager who spends his weekends updating a blog that nobody reads and shooting silly videos to post on YouTube.com? He is, as Anderson’s chapter on “The New Producersâ€Â� tells us, a valiant citizen of the long tail.
The least convincing part of Anderson’s book is his treatment of what he calls “the short head,” the part of the curve where popular products reside. Although he acknowledges that best-selling books and blockbuster movies won’t vanish overnight, he suggests that demand for them will gradually decline: “the primary effect of the long tail is to shift our taste towards niches.â€Â�
Cassidy goes on to argue that the success of hits today and “giant, exploitative firms” dominating the network is evidence disputing the theory. I haven’t read the book, I’ve just ordered it, but I’ve been following along on Anderson’s blog for a good long while.
My understanding of the theory is and always has been that yes, hits continue. Not only do they continue, they play an important role as a stepping off point for all of us to find our niches. When I bought The Long Tail I was interested to note the suggestion of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom so I might follow that path from suggestion to suggestion down deeper into my niche.
My conservative blogger friend Basil may have been more interested to follow An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths down deeper into his.
In that way the hit that Chris’s book is bound to be can lead both Basil and me, and you dear reader and those that follow, each into our respective niches. Only to come together again for the next hit. Hits aren’t dead; it’s the rise of a new kind of hit.
