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Friday 9 January 2009

The new seekers

The new seekers

David Jennings says that Web 2.0 will enrich our cultural lives immeasurably.

No matter how much the new generation of intermediaries between goods and consumers seek to refine their recommendations, they will not be able to dictate our cultural agendas, collectively or individually. On the contrary: the way the internet works today increases the scope for making discoveries in different ways. We can try out pieces of music and trailers for film and television programmes; we follow links from the familiar to the unfamiliar via critical reviews and reference sites; and we are often swayed by word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, community sites (such as Facebook and MySpace) and blogs. In this context, the prompts and nudges from the likes of Googlezon are merely more grist to the mill.

Far from herding us all in one direction, the ultimate value of these nudges may be that they bring into view — when relevant to individual tastes — the more obscure margins of our culture that have historically been overlooked by all but tiny minorities. This is the thesis known as ‘the long tail’ outlined by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name, which involves expanding markets by selling less of more. Each marginal item, in the ‘tail’ of the charts, individually sells in low volumes, but the cumulative effect of these items may account for a surprisingly large proportion of overall revenues.

In the old market of records and video-cassettes, and limited choice of TV and radio channels, media producers wanted everyone to want the same thing, because that made distribution easier and maximised profits. In the age of infinite choice they have come to realise that the best way to get us excited is to tap our latent desire for myriad different things — and with digital distribution they can meet that demand without sacrificing their margins.

The culture we choose to explore makes us who we are. So we should care deeply about the means available to discover new work. It’s fair to say that much of Web 2.0 is still a work in progress. But it offers the promise of reconciling the vested interests of creators and distributors with the free expression of different audiences. Discovery can become even more exciting and enriching, charting a course that steers well clear of either cultural totalitarianism or chaos.

David Jennings is author of Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll: How Digital Discovery Works and What It Means for Consumers, Creators and Culture (Nicholas Brealey Publishing).

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