Wagging the long tail
October 23, 2006 — When I first e-mailed Chris Anderson, Wired editor-in-chief and author of the wildly successful The Long Tail, I felt as if I were firing into a dark chasm, untouched by mere mortals in the bottom rungs of the long tail: Anderson has established himself as an authority in the world of common information economics, earning a speaker’s spot at the exclusive Entertainment Gathering 2006. All I wanted was a simple interview-by-email for both a journalism class and this article.
At the advice of a friend and journalist, I waited patiently for a few days after I had sent my original e-mail. When Anderson responded with a willingness to commit to an interview in person, I was flattered. After his very successful speech at i-Conference 2006, I sat down with Chris Anderson and interviewed him for forty minutes on everything from technology to social equity. It was one of the most enlightening conversations I had had in a while. Although we move fluidly from question to question and topic to topic, one theme was of greater prominence than anything else we had talked about: never, ever trust your own technology.
No, a 40-minute conversation didn’t turn us both into neo-Luddites; instead, the microcassette recorder I had used to record our conversation recorded next to nothing, innocuously mauling the microcassette instead of taking audio notes for me. No direct transcript. No magazine-style interview. My entire story had gone from an exceptionally rare interview with one of the industry’s “shapers” (to borrow a term used earlier in the conference by John Seely Brown) to an exercise in journalistic damage control. All I had left was a sparse outline, my memory, and whatever quotes I could pick up off of the damaged microcassette.
No concrete data, however, is necessary to say that Chris is every bit as brilliant in person as his writing makes him seem. Anderson possesses a commanding knowledge of many facets of the blogosphere and e-commerce, flawlessly tying in analogies from Amazon.com to NetFlix, filling the mind of the listener with theories on sociology and economic theory, sprinkling everything with a bit of opinion.
When it comes to mainstream media — an industry in which Anderson is firmly rooted, both as an editor of a major Condé Nast publication as well as an author published by Disney-owned Hyperion — Anderson has many predominantly pessimistic opinions. “Mainstream media always has to publish for the common reader, for the ‘lowest common denominator,’” Anderson said, using a term presented by another listener in the past hour’s lecture. “A magazine has a finite number of pages, which must be used to appeal to that denominator. Online, that’s not the case.” Anderson raised an interesting point in support of the long tail theories: although mainstream media is adopting social technology, such as blogs and podcasts, the mainstream will not be able to produce enough narrowcasted, niche content to maintain its global influence, audience, and validity. Such narrowcasted content would require harnessing experts on thousands of subjects, resulting in bigger (and less organised) media institutions.
As current mainstream media suffers revenue losses at the hands of faster, more efficient online methods such as Craigslist for classifieds or nearly instant news updates from aggregation services such as Google News or Newsvine, display advertisers are also shifting their funds to new places where consumers congregate, further reducing newspaper profits — and thus newspaper staffs. This diversion of funds away from mainstream media is inverse to what the mainstream would need to harness niche content. Because of the costs associated with diversifying into the long tail, Anderson argues that “indie” sources, with the low costs required to publish niche information inevitably beat the mainstream at the game. However, the information that newspaper companies produce (and are best at gathering, such as international and business reportage,) will never go away. “I believe in news,” Anderson said. “Just not newspapers. The medium will certainly die.”
I’ve always been a large proponent of the eventual death of traditional newspapers; however, both proponents of mainstream media, as well as new media theorists, see a horrible flaw as the social media culture pushes itself into increasingly smaller niches: culture will isolate and polarise itself, ignoring information that may be greater to humanity as a whole. Economically, the social cost of ignoring such information, such as the human rights violations in the Darfur region or AIDS in Africa, may greatly outweigh the benefits one person may get in consuming more of their niche content. It’s one of my largest criticisms of social media and the long tail theories; how, then, would the creator of the theory respond?
After a short pause, Anderson responded. “It’s like spinach versus, say, pudding, and what people should eat as opposed to what they want to eat,” Anderson explained. “At home, I’m a fascist. I make my kids eat their spinach. But do I think that we should somehow force everyone to eat their spinach? No.”
It’s a very utilitarian concept: limiting the choice of the consumer makes them less happy in general, and forcing certain content upon them that may not yield them any happiness is an unnecessary risk. Anderson feels that information of all types should be freely available to the people, and that it should be only the individual’s choice what to (and, subsequently, what not to) consume.
Anderson did, however, bring up an interesting counterpoint in the defence of the long tail culture: those passionate about human rights violations, for example, have an unprecedented access to the people through social media publishing technologies. The passionate, then, can push even the most minute of issues out to the public; such issues may have never reached a status necessary for publication in a broadcast medium, such as a newspaper or TV news station. In this way, certain social issues may actually receive more coverage than was initially possible.
While this counterpoint may very well hold true, old-school journalists are quick to defend both the right to proper editorial control that the above model destroys, stating that the reputability of a newspaper staff and the informed judgement of editors are necessary to maintain a solid source of information. “What is the difference between reputability and reputation, anyway?” Anderson questioned, annoyed at the concept. Anderson highlights that traditional journalism’s idea of reputation being based on brand names and press passes is a generally indefensible position: “More fact checking is going on in mainstream because of the blogosphere,” Anderson refuted. “Reputation is not from being on the payroll of a major media institution, but is from the validity of the content.”
In his i-Conference lecture, Anderson used a prime example in defense of user reputability: technology site BoingBoing, run by “amateur”, independent journalists, is referenced by more within the blogosphere than major media instiutions such as The Economist and Guardian Unlimited. There has certainly been little controversy in the reputability of BoingBoing’s content; ironically, since the birth of BoingBoing, its authors have been published in mainstream media sources such as Wired News.
With such hypocrisy by mainstream sources, and such supposed treason by one of its own, where do Anderson’s allegiances truly lie: with the mainstream media or with the long tail? “I’m split on mainstream media,” Anderson said. “I can see its strengths, but it also has its weaknesses.” Regardless of his day job, Anderson’s support of the counterculture seems genetic. As I left, Anderson was off to the University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection, one of the largest repositories for anarchist literature named after prominent Detroit-area anarchist Joseph Labadie. “I’m actually a Labadie on [my mother's] side,” Anderson confessed. While The Long Tail may not be an anarchist manifesto, Anderson has certainly become the leader of a marked shift in corporate focus from the broadcast to the individual, and, as far as I believe the blogosphere is concerned, let the revolution begin.
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