A week or two ago I heard an NPR show with Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame, and for awhile it was all “long tail = awesome” (which was my initial response as well). Then somebody called in and got hysterical about how long-tail marketing would destroy the local bookstore and all that. I don’t think I’d go that far, but it got me thinking about what the implications would really be.
Today, via Marginal Revolution, I found this very interesting post on that very topic: “self as niche-market”, by Rob Horning. I’m not sure how much I agree, but I like the way he looks at it.
The rarity of the physical object once lent fascination to otherwise mediocre relics. Long-tail marketing (which makes copies of ultra rare stuff available immediately to whoever hears of it—which itself is easier through search engines and the Internet’s harvest of links and filters) ultimately will destroy the significance of the content of collector’s items; make them more like baseball cards or beanie babies—objects with no relevant use value. As bigger companies begin to market to the niches, the small players who used to service that market—little record stores and book stores and antique stores and so on; Dave Hickey’s cherished cultural underground—will be squeezed.
I don’t really see it as a problem that mediocre stuff would stop being attractive to collectors once it’s easy to get. People who like things just because they’re obscure or unpopular are obnoxious, and I’d be happy to see them have to find a new hobby.
To be more serious, not every collector’s item is vulnerable to this sort of thing. Unpopular music used to be scarce because physical copies of LPs were limited; now that it’s digitized anyone can get it immediately. So it won’t be impressive to track down obscure recordings. And the stuff that’s valuable to some collectors and junk to others (old dishes or whatever) will be easy to transfer, so that won’t be exciting anymore either. But there are some things that are truly scarce, and just making the transfer easier isn’t going to make the items less valuable. For example, one of the things I’d love to collect some day is medieval manuscripts. The outstanding ones are museum pieces, but there are enough mediocre ones floating around that they can be affordable for normal people. But there already are as many manuscripts as there are going to be - new ones aren’t the same thing at all. And nobody has them in their attic just waiting for the time when it will be profitable to sell them on eBay. Of course, once people realize that collecting old Beanie Babies is pointless maybe I’ll have more competition, which would be unfortunate.
Paradoxically, the vastly increased access to underground cultural goods may make the cultural underground itself disappear altogether, since people will need no longer such stores to buy these things, stores that also served as places to congregate and swap interests and develop networks that fostered the emotional support required to resist the mainstream.The Internet makes such resistance easy and trivial. It also isolates you in your rejection rather than unite you with like-minded malcontents. So rather than find an alternate society where people are more discriminating and demand more and bring more intellect and passion to the things that inspire and entertain them, you end up alone in front of your computer, gorging on loads of esoteric information suddenly made meaningless.
I’m not sure about this. I think the people who like things because they’re obscure are people who aren’t going to be happy with buying them from Amazon. People enjoy the experience of going to a little store and hanging out with other people who are weird in the same ways as they are. Resisting the mainstream isn’t always something that requires support, it’s something plenty of people do on purpose.
Also, I think the internet actually serves as “an alternate society where people are more discriminating and demand more and bring more intellect and passion to the things that inspire and entertain them.” Not always, obviously, but there are plenty of pockets like that. It allows people who wouldn’t otherwise find each other to meet and create community. Personally, I’ve found that it’s difficult to discover like-minded people in real life. It happens, sure, but the weirder you are, the harder it is. But I’ve found plenty of them (including my wonderful boyfriend) online. Just to take one particular interest, I know maybe a handful of foodie types in real life. Online, there are lots - and it’s great to hang out with people who have similar interests and learn from them.
This actually brings up what I think is probably the biggest negative consequence of making the long tail accessible - the possibility of greatly increased stratification. Don’t get me wrong, I love stratification - going to college and finding a bunch of people like me, heading out post-college and discovering an even smaller self-selected group of kindred spirits, being able to assume that my friends will know what I’m talking about if I bring up what I’m reading - this makes life very pleasant. But I think it’s probably harmful in the long run, because diversity is important. Being cut off from the life experiences of a huge pool of people can’t be healthy, and communities need mixtures of people to allow everyone to succeed. If intelligent, educated people are forming their own closed communities, what is happening to the people who aren’t as lucky? And if we’re used to interacting with people just like ourselves, will we even be able to take advantage of small opportunities for human connection, like chit-chatting with the checker at the grocery store?
The last portion of the post deals with targeted advertising:
…you allow advertisers to craft ads precisely pertinient to your needs, your vulnerabilities. You become your own niche of one. The perfectly targeted ads won’t even seem like ads anymore; it will seem like just-in-time information for the consumer. …
So one won’t be able to escape the sense that everything he wants has already been sold to him, that no desires originate from inside (if that’s not already true). The illusion that you have resisted marketing by buying this instead of that will become even more untenable. Maybe this will end up pushing people out of the market for individuality and into the realm of actual activity.
I’m all for targeted advertising. Just this weekend, I happened to be walking by a store I like and noticed that they were having a huge sale. That’s information I would have liked to have. Sure I could sign up for mailing lists, but for one thing that requires me to already know what stores I’m interested in, and then I get pieces of paper that I forget about. Ads targeted to my interest would be great. I post at a forum that does this quite well already (mostly manually) - ads for cooking utensils show up in the cooking threads, clothing in the clothing threads, computers in the geek threads. I buy from there pretty often, frequently because I know I want, say, sheets, but I don’t want to go looking for them. When they show up in the decorating thread, I think “sweet” and go buy them. I’d love it if this happened elsewhere on the internet, rather than seeing ads for stupid TV shows and online college degrees.
I don’t think I’d feel that “no desires originate from inside” though. There are plenty of things I want without ever having seen an ad for them; that’s why the targeted ads are good - because they tell me where I can find the things I want!
But (as Horning says) to the extent that easily being able to find things causes people to define themselves less by what things they have, that sounds like an excellent development. People can be defined instead by what they love, what they believe, what they do. And surely exposure to more options can only help those dimensions to become more authentic.