Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
I also like to think that between the poles of the open (free) and the closed (paid
for), there might be a compromise position which is known as: reasonably open
(inexpensive). When the artist or producer has cut out the 'middle person' such as a
publisher, they can make the same amount of money by charging far less for the
product, as in the argument for 'Latte-priced ebooks' (Dunleavy
2012
; Gauntlett
2012
) which suggests that topics can both be cheap for readers and still provide a
modest return for their authors.
The internet, then, forms the basis for a new set of technologies, which enable
people to converse, exchange, share, and trade in ways which are closer to ancient
and traditional ways of interacting than the monolithic technologies of the previous
century, such as television and supermarkets. Even when conducted via proprietary
platforms (such as Google services, Pinterest, or Etsy) - which they often are, but
don't have to be - these exchanges are still much more healthy than the one-way,
mass-market kinds of product and communication that had otherwise become the
norm.
2.2.2
A World with Lots of Interesting, Creative Things
Is Always Better than a World Which Offers a Small
Number of Popular, Smartly Finished Things
The slightly longer formulation of this is: 'An ocean of interesting, creative things,
regardless of their professionalism or audience size, is always better than a small
box of popular, smartly fi nished things'. Let me explain.
Way back in 2006, Chris Anderson published
The Long Tail
, which became a
successful and much-cited analysis of one of the big differences that the internet
makes. 'The long tail', you may recall, refers to the kind of graph where the vertical
axis represents popularity (measured as number of readers, or viewers, or sales) and
the horizontal axis represents a row of particular items (such as specifi c topics,
songs, videos, blog posts, or whatever). When these items are sorted by popularity,
there is typically a peak of popular items on the left - that's the 'hits' - and then the
graph quickly curves down and along to an apparently infi nite number of little-
loved, not-very-popular items bobbling along the bottom of the graph - which is the
long tail.
Much of Anderson's topic was concerned with highlighting the striking differ-
ence in what you can sell when you're not limited to shelf space in a physical shop.
So whilst a physical bookshop might offer, say, 20,000 titles - all the current best-
sellers, some classics, and a scattering of everything else - an online bookshop
could have literally millions of titles on sale. Apple's iTunes did the same for music,
Netfl ix for movies, and so on. Anderson highlighted the fact that although any
single item in the long tail was apparently not-very-successful - in physical shop
terms, it was
literally
a waste of space - when all these long tail items were taken
together, they added up to a huge market. The demand for obscure and back-catalogue
