Chasing tail

In his defense, Anderson makes his interests clear all along. He came to Wired from the Economist, and it's obvious that following the cultural fault lines created by media fragmentation isn't his bag. As Anderson describes it in his introduction, his main quest is to determine how "long tail" economics will force "content producers" to adapt. His final chapter, "Long Tail Rules: How to Create a Consumer Paradise," is the culmination of that mission -- a step-by-step guide for CEOs to grab on to the tail.

My own interests require full disclosure as well. I'm as big a fan of digital tech as you can find, but I've long wondered, and sometimes worried, about the flip side to the media ubiquity we now enjoy, the paradoxical way in which having access to everything forces you to choose what you're consuming. Indeed, this idea got me so hopped up that I'm currently writing a book about it.

Unlimited choice and easy access shake the world in unpredictable ways, causing people to splinter along the lines of niches they enjoy, and sometimes to lose touch with the world beyond. Today it's possible to stop reading newspapers and instead get all your news from the Fox News channel -- indeed, this is something many millions have done. Surely there are people who've decided that the only source they'll trust for news on the Middle East is a favorite Haifa-based Likudnik blogger. In 2004, we saw huge numbers of people choose to believe something for which there was scant objective evidence -- that John Kerry didn't earn the medals he was awarded in Vietnam. Why did they do so? Not because they're scurrilous, but rather because bloggers and talk-radio hosts they listened to spent months repeating such claims, and selective exposure, confirmation bias and a host of other psychological phenomena took over from there. The tail may go on and on and on, but does that matter if you're only living in a few niches of it?

To put it another way, I worry about the filters. Because the long tail has everything in it, the only way to find anything useful there is by using some kind of filter. Often these filters are software-based aggregators of social thought: The New York Times' "Most E-Mailed Story" list, Amazon's "Customers who bought this item also bought ..." feature, Netflix's recommendations page, and even the Google search engine all enlist your own and others' preferences to shape the world they present to you. But preferences don't necessarily -- and perhaps don't often -- coincide with truth. That's why when you search for pentagon 9/11 you get a whole lot about why you shouldn't believe the official story about what happened on that day. Even though the facts of the matter say something else entirely.

I'm not saying that the digital world will surely corrupt and ruin us. Far from it; I wouldn't trade a world in which you can find BoingBoing for one in which you couldn't. And "The Long Tail" is generally a thrill. People who aren't familiar with how technology is changing the media business will likely find it a crisp introduction to some truly odd economic concepts. But there's a good deal more uncertainty in this new world than Anderson lets on, especially for those of us who aren't CEOs. I'm not looking to create a consumer paradise, and, chances are, neither are you. Yet the long tail is smacking us in the head all the same.

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