the tail that wags the tail

Fascinating article about the “long tail” in the Harvard Business Review that I picked up from Siva. Anita Elberse contents that the digital world actually favors the blockbuster. The reasons that people go for the hyped book, music, film – because it’s higher quality, it’s what everyone else is doing, and it’s abundant – are actually amplified in the world of digital choices.

Chris Anderson (not surprisingly) disagrees, but mostly over the methodology. Had she defined the head and tail differently, the conclusions would be closer to his – that the long tail has an advantage in a digital world.

What seems to me the two critical issues are that publishing still bets on the blockbuster. That’s where their resources go, and that’s where their profits come from. Second is that social urge to read what everyone else is reading and – failing a reliable source for ideas about what to read next – what everyone else is reading is a very common way of making a decision. If everyone’s reading it, it must be good. I can discuss it with others, and I won’t have any trouble finiding it. It’s probably at Wal-Mart, on discount.

This made me think about how I decide what to read next. When I started reading mysteries as an adult, I didn’t know people who read them, and I mostly relied on reviews in PW and the NYTBR. It was hit and miss, but better than the best seller lists, which proved absolutely useless. (The “quality” argument, above, fails, at least in my experience.) Marilyn Stasio introduced me to Dennis Lehane, and pretty soon I had a few names of writers I could count on. But I didn’t have a good method of straying outside that circle of known authors until I joined an online community of mystery readers. Now I don’t have any trouble at all  knowing what to read next, other than a slight feeling of panic that I’ll never have enough time to read them all before I die.

What one needs to take advantage of the long tail is a deep well of knowledge AND a good sense of which source of knowledge matches yours. For me, choosing a mystery is easy because I know what I like, and I know who else likes the same kinds of books, and we share our reading lists so each of ours gets bigger.

I don’t have that for other genres. I don’t have that for movies or music or restaurants, so I might fall back on buzz. (Actually, I’d ask my kids. They know.)

A problem with digital communities as wells of knowledge where you can learn about good stuff is that they can easily become polluted with BSP (blatant self promotion). Even more so, they’re polluted by subtle promotion, circles of authors who promote their buddies, circles of fans who promote their friends, and very little authentic reader response.

There are a lot of things that make my reading group – 4MA -  work, but one of them is that there is absolutely no promotional activity. None. Zero. Zip. And there is a ton of discussion about books, which oddly enough promotes books far more effectively. We have the advantages that hype supposedly provides: we know we’re getting recommendations of high-quality books, we have a social experience, and we know how to get our hands on the books we want because members have shared information about where these books can be purchased, even from abroad. In a pinch, we mail our copies to each other.

None of this works when trust goes out the window, when we aren’t sure if the recommender has ulterior motives. If the community of consumers is infiltrated by sellers. And the din of voices telling creative people they have to sell themselves is absolutely deafening.

That is the tail that wags the tail. Unless consumers can trust what they’re hearing, it won’t work. And right now, who’s wagging the long tail? It’s very hard to tell.

facing Facebook

Quite a lot of recent chatter on my Internet lists concerned a Guardian article critical of Facebook and its management. The A-Librarians list, in particular, had fascinating discussions about identity as a form of intellectual property. It had my head spinning, so I tried to put my thoughts together in a piece that ran in Inside Higher Ed this morning. Here’s a sample:

Corporations like Google and Facebook are worth a lot of money, which is a bit odd. They don’t create their content, and what’s there, they give away for free. They mediate the space where we go to express ourselves, and where find out what others think. Sure, we have to put up with a bit of advertising, but that’s just a minor irritant for something that’s free.

But there is a cost.

These corporations provide us with a space to play, engage with others, and make connections. We get to build our own identities in a public way. In return, we give them (perhaps without realizing it) a panopticon view of our lives, a chance to gather data on what we think, do, read, say, enjoy, and with whom we associate — our “communities of interest” in the parlance of the FBI, or “friends” in Facebook’s lexicon. It’s exceedingly valuable information because it can be sold to companies who want to follow trends and focus their advertising dollars on just those individuals most likely to respond. The more people involved, the more valuable the data . . .

. . . And, let’s face it: we have selfish motives, too. Social networking blurs self-expression and self-promotion. The idea of property and its exchange has so infiltrated our culture as a defining concept that many people do, in fact, think of their public persona as their brand. It’s important to “be out there.” Their lives grow more valuable as more people recognize and acknowledge their ideas, their tastes, and their interests . . .

You can read the whole thing, or just catch up on what’s going on in higher education, over at IHE.

got my guitar

I was cracked up by this video, found via Karen Schneider’s blog. I’ve only bumbled around briefly in Second Life and, I have to admit, the point of it escaped me. It seemed to be Wal-Mart with pervs. It’s a weird parody of our capitalist society – “you get to buy a shitload of stuff, and it isn’t even real! How cool is that!” At the moment, as the government throws money at a recession that seems to have been highly influenced by a losing gambling streak of a single French banker, making his bank scoop up its chips and leave the market fast, the economic system looks like a proprietary virtual reality game that, sadly, has real consequences in First Life.

Of course, what this video is really addressing is social networking that is about the commons, not about commerce. Proprietary systems only thrive if the members give up their creativity freely to a corporation that can exclusively and secretly mine information about social relationships and individual expression in order sell us more stuff. (This is how Facebook and Google work. We provide the content, they take notes on what we all do with it.) What the video suggests – and I hope it’s right – is that the commons will triumph. But given the power of corporations like Facebook and Google, and given how firmly commerce is embedded in our understanding of self and society, I’m worried.

We’re at the crossroads, and we got ourselves a guitar. Unfortunately, we didn’t read the terms of service very closely and didn’t even realize who gave it to us.