Long Tail
Just a couple of points to wrap up our discussion of the Long Tail effect from class in Friday...
It's an interesting phenomenon, in short. It's weird to me that it seems so simple yet the author of the article (who's expanding that article into a book) could make it seem so complex. The phenomenon reminds me of piggybacking in the Senate (when legislation is attached to unrelated proposed legislation so that when the original passes, the other thing -- like a tax break -- passes along with it). The example of Touching the Void and Into Thin Air -- the latter is one of my favorite books, by the way -- best illustrated that. The other thing that it reminds me of is network TV lineups, in the way that sometimes the success of one show depends on where it is slotted and on what night, what programs it is before and after and what programs it is up against on other networks.
Another point: I keep thinking of the Long Tail couched in the example of Britney Spears on Rhapsody. You can get from Britney to an unknown '80s punk band in a couple of clicks (kind of like the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon thing). Most major e-commerce sites -- Amazon, Borders, Eastbay, others -- have some sort of feature like that, where it offers recommendations on what you might like or shows what other customers who have bought a certain product also bought. This led me to say in class that, eventually, everything could be connected via the long tail effect, as demonstrated by the music industry. However, what if it isn't? If the long tail takes a more and more visible role in our increasingly digital lifestyles, what happens if we get tracked into a certain group and can't break out of it? For example, take the music industry: If I buy a Disturbed CD online, I'll only get recommendations for rock bands, then maybe get from that to country, etc...but would I ever see classical music? I know that we're way far away from a situation like in Beta where the computer basically tells us what we like, but could that happen? Could we get to the point where one simple choice places us into a track that we have no way of getting out of, due to the oppressive influence of computers on our lives?
Food for thought.
It's an interesting phenomenon, in short. It's weird to me that it seems so simple yet the author of the article (who's expanding that article into a book) could make it seem so complex. The phenomenon reminds me of piggybacking in the Senate (when legislation is attached to unrelated proposed legislation so that when the original passes, the other thing -- like a tax break -- passes along with it). The example of Touching the Void and Into Thin Air -- the latter is one of my favorite books, by the way -- best illustrated that. The other thing that it reminds me of is network TV lineups, in the way that sometimes the success of one show depends on where it is slotted and on what night, what programs it is before and after and what programs it is up against on other networks.
Another point: I keep thinking of the Long Tail couched in the example of Britney Spears on Rhapsody. You can get from Britney to an unknown '80s punk band in a couple of clicks (kind of like the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon thing). Most major e-commerce sites -- Amazon, Borders, Eastbay, others -- have some sort of feature like that, where it offers recommendations on what you might like or shows what other customers who have bought a certain product also bought. This led me to say in class that, eventually, everything could be connected via the long tail effect, as demonstrated by the music industry. However, what if it isn't? If the long tail takes a more and more visible role in our increasingly digital lifestyles, what happens if we get tracked into a certain group and can't break out of it? For example, take the music industry: If I buy a Disturbed CD online, I'll only get recommendations for rock bands, then maybe get from that to country, etc...but would I ever see classical music? I know that we're way far away from a situation like in Beta where the computer basically tells us what we like, but could that happen? Could we get to the point where one simple choice places us into a track that we have no way of getting out of, due to the oppressive influence of computers on our lives?
Food for thought.
posted by Jeremy and Ashley Wood at 2:36 PM
1 Comments:
oh, we could learn much discussing how network tv tries to figure out what we're all watching. it's the opposite of the long tail effect, of google, and of transparency. it's a couple of people in iowa with a diary they fill out for a dollar. that's what determines what lives and, like my beloved Scrubs, what dies. if there is any medium crying out in despair for something like long tail intelligence, it is network TV (which, not coincidentally, is dying)
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