A different kind of long tail
This morning I was reading a bio of Ezra Koening in Salon’s Sexiest Men Living Series. The bio had a link to an entry about Koening’s band, Vampire Weekend, in NPR’s Global Hit Podcast. After listening to the NPR entry about Vampire Weekend, I habitually added the podcast to my RSS reader. I was impressed to discover that the feed has 765 entries. That’s five entries a week going back to 29 November 2005; three years of trends in global music culture, right there at my fingertips.
To my eyes, this seems like a wonderful new meaning of “long tail”. It’s something that we’ve seen pending on the horizon but it’s now finally beginning to manifest. Our civilization documents itself so thoroughly that we can grab a detailed background on nearly any topic. This has been true in a cursory way for a while, manifesting in sites like wikipedia, but the internet is quickly reaching an information saturation point and architectural maturity that allows us to view the entire web as a living, self-documenting wiki.
Up until now, the long tail has mainly referred to an economic construct: by reducing barriers to entry into markets, by radically reducing distribution costs, and by increasing the opportunities for direct engagement between producer and consumer, the internet has made it profitable (or at least financially tenable) to cater to the countless minority niche interests in any given market.
I see a different kind of long tail coming to prevalence now. Where the economic long tail is far reaching, the long tail of information runs deep. As with the NPR podcast, we can look back in time and find a wealth of source material. Armed with 20/20 hindsight, we can view and review the many ways that our civilization has chosen to express itself. Published materials no longer die a day or a week after their creation; instead they stay alive for us to find them, or find new meaning in them, in the future. Even better, we have begun to resurrect the materials that might have been presumed dead, destined to spend eternity on a dark dusty shelf.
When I look at that NPR podcast, I see context. I see one thread in a complex history that I get to explore and rearrange at my own leisure. Each of us sees this ocean of information differently, and each time we dip our hands into its depths we return with our own fresh version of the story, woven from the many disparate threads (and the gems upon them) that lie beneath the surface.