Welcome to Niche Nation

Long Tail author and Wired editor Chris Anderson on infinite markets, the death of the Top 40, and the birth of personalized politics.

Nick Gillespie from the November 2006 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

Reason: Some social critics, such as Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, talk about the paralyzing effects of too many options. They argue that people become alienated, even depressed, by the proliferation of possibilities in a Long Tail world. Are they right?

Anderson: Barry's a smart guy, and what he describes is a real effect. However, in the real world, we don't actually have the situation that he describes very often. What he describes is a situation where you have sort of an overabundance of choice and really no idea how to begin to make a decision. The famous example he talks about is where you offer people six kinds of jam. [They respond more positively than when they have 30 kinds to choose from.]

The problem is not that there's too much choice but that there's not enough help in making that choice. This simple act of helping people to choose, of ordering the marketplace in ways that make sense, turns choice from a chore into a pleasure. Think of the Internet before Google: It was a random overabundance of crappy pages; you'd get lost and you wouldn't find anything. Google has the effect of snapping a disordered marketplace into order. The first-page results are usually relevant, and you pretty much ignore the 4 million other pages that it didn't show you on the first page.

And on the Internet, you've got what other people do. If nothing else, the ability to measure, to be able to tap the collective intelligence of people who've come before you—which is what Google does in the form of links, what Amazon does in the form of ranking by top sales, and what Netflix does in its collaborative filtering—is huge.

The answer to the paradox of choice is help.

Reason: Is there a Long Tail for people as much as for products?

Anderson: There is absolutely a Long Tail for people. I talk a lot about the Long Tail for talent and I usually start by quoting media bigwig Barry Diller at the 2005 Web 2.0 conference saying, "People with talent won't be displaced by 18 million people producing stuff they think will have appeal."

Is there any better description of MySpace than that? Is there any better description of YouTube than that? Is there any better description of the blogosphere than exactly that? Eighteen million people producing stuff they think will have appeal. What we're realizing is that talent and expertise and knowledge and writing ability is much more broadly distributed than our previous forms of identifying it revealed. The old model was if you want to make a movie, you had to get your foot in the door in Hollywood. If you want an audience for your music, you've got to get signed by a label. If you want to write a book, you've got to have a publisher.

The old model said: We control the factory, and you have to go through us. Now everyone's got a factory, and we find that there are more people who have talent and, more important, they're making things that our filters haven't previously recognized as having appeal. They're making stuff because they want to make stuff and because they can. Most of it's crap, but a surprising amount of it is not crap, and you're getting these grassroots, bottoms-up hits that are resonating with subcultures that we traditional gatekeepers would never have bothered with.

Reason: What's your favorite example of that?

Anderson: YouTube is the phenomenon of the moment. Look at the viral videos there; look at the things that are competing with television for attention and viewing time. It's Chinese kids lip-syncing Backstreet Boys songs. Flash animation, snowboarding stunts, things like that. This is sort of America's Funniest Home Video on steroids. What's amazing about it is that there are 100 million streams a day, something like 65,000 videos submitted every week. The mob has completely stormed the gates.

Reason: What are the political implications of that sort of storm-the-gates dynamic—and of the Long Tail generally?

Anderson: Political sentiment in this country is more diverse than just two poles; a two-party system is a reductionist simplification of the diversity of views actually out there. There are probably as many views as there are people, on some level. And it suggests that in a marketplace of opinion where there are ways to have political actions that don't involve conforming to the two-party system, you would see more diversity and more variety in both politicians and policies.

Does that mean that the Long Tail of political opinion that we can see in the blogosphere might some day result in things like an independent party or a third party? I don't know. Hope springs eternal. But we're seeing a clear Long Tail in the political conversation.

Reason: Though whether that can be translated into political action is open to question. Simply because of the first-past-the-post electoral system in the U.S., which doesn't reward small parties or coalitions, there may be structural limits on the number of choices we'll ever have in terms of major parties. What did Henry Ford say about cars? You can have any color you want, as long as it's black.