"He said I have many mansions
and there are many rooms to see
but I left by the back door
and I threw away the key.U2, The first time
I listen to a lot of music, most of the time. I have hundreds of records and thousands of mp3 files. There are styles I prefer (le trip-hop), labels I cherish (Mo'Wax), there is no particular style I'm focused on but one can tell that I love music. However, I cannot say, as so many people can nowadays, I love all kinds of music
. Statisticly, I can tell that I don't like some style/genre of music but that doesn't matter, it's not significant. In my collections, you will find few records/files considered as popular in a statistical understanding.
I've been doing some really serious thinking about ways to answer so simple a question such as What kind of music do you like ?
and I couldn't find a decent answer. If I say that I don't like popular music in the classical understanding, I'll be considered as an elitist that I don't think I am, and I really enjoy some mainstream stuff (even though the idea of paying for it hurts my ethics but that's another topic). If I was to tell that I like special music, I might as well keep my mouth shut. I haven't found a way to answer this basic question, when so many people don't have a problem to do so.
Philosophically, one may say that I'm a baroque in my acquisition policy (buy / download) but then again, the figures betray me. I have some sort of idiological cult for the random because part of me is nihilist but if that was to define my approach of music, I would listen to anything and I wouldn't be as selective as I am.
I give away, for mediatic and cultural ecology's sake, the records than I don't listen anymore, and I delete, because of disc space constrains, the mp3 files I don't think I'll ever listen.
If you consider all these elements of my behaviour towards music, one can tell I have a precise policy. There has to be a way of describing it. I am conservative and liberal, modernist and classic, alternative and mainstream... frankly, I don't know.
You can study my playlists to judge by yourself and if you find a pathern or a simple way to describe it, please let me know.
Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them - and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire.Brian Eno, A year
Long Tailparadigm
October 2004, I read this fascinating article in Wired 12.10, The Long Tail written by Chris Anderson, and I engage you to read it too if you haven't done so yet. It leads to meditation and is, I believe, fundamental to our era. I'll try to sum up here what I think I understood :
In the forthcoming world where everythings tends to be available, most notably thanks to the internet, the way we understand mass behaviour has shifted to a new commercial paradigm, from best sales to marginal sales. The interest in hit sales was linked to the fact that the number of available items was limited. Online vendors such as amazon do more than half of their sales on item you wouldn't find in a Barnes & Noble brick and mortar shop. It's a real issue because it goes further than limited inventory because you make less money on popular sales where the market is so competitive. Popularity doesn't rule profitability. Then the article goes into developments about new strategies, behaviours in social networking, publishing policy and commercial attitude.
The Long Tail comes from the graph drawn of the interest of people for items, that is not a straight linear descending line but an infinite hyperbolic slope. The XXth century was completely focused on the begining of the curve, meeting it's paroxism by the 80s. The internet introduces us to a hyperbolic long tail that is starting to take shape.
Like a bird on a wire
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.Leonard Cohen, Bird on a wire
We'll talk about the internet, and we'll take one poor but easy to study guinea pig, the server logs of habett.org. I would hae liked to have more significant data to analyse but it's a good starting point to a demonstration. We'll consider the november 2004 logs with 200 000 successful requests. Here are a few observations :
439: sex 285: ass 230: naked 210: girl 170: image 135: white 134: de 130: black 105: beautiful 98: women 95: the 90: breast 86: of 85: images 84: and 81: woman 78: jacob 77: irene 74: love 72: boris 72: vallejo 70: haircuts 70: terrorism 65: recette 61: i 61: lady 58: aigre 57: body 56: la 53: recettes 8497: [unlisted others]This means that the 30 most frequent keywords (and some of them are empty linguistically) amount for 3309 when the others are 8497. So, 28% of the keywords are in the top 30.
The figures are extracted from a small site on a limited period of time and partially indexed on search engines but still the pathern emerges. The part of the web that is invisible to search engines is at least 40 times larger. It's the tip of the iceberg that you can query through serach engines. This site may include marginal items that become searchable keywords by the magic attractor of the mass but it's true content is elsewhere. The queries show, in a way, what people expect to find and not what is offered to them. These wayfaring strangers arrive in this microcosm for irrelevant and various reasons.
If my aim was to be more popular and get more hits on this site, then I would focus and expand content on this top 30 but that's not my personnal strategy. I won't be the prophet of spamdexing but I want to engage you into thinking beyond the visible web. This top 30 is annecdotic to me and I'm convinced that it's statistically disgusting. If one tries to understand what this website is about from this part of it's log, he'll be led to so wrong a conclusion that's it's funny.
Sorry Bill. I was just doing it the way I wanted to.Johnny Cash
Computer science can lead to some observation with reservations. We imagine the future under a single operating system with a classic ideology but the baroque tide isn't far. Marginal internet browser forging their identity to fake compatibility, the explosion of the number of flavors to linux in distributions and the huge harvest of viruses targetting the most popular softwares and systems, show then again our point.
Personally, I have a small Iyonix workstation under RISC OS because of my tastes and history, a Windows PC to open up to the world and regular operations and an Apple iBook under OS X for eclectism and support of nice design. I handle my mail where there are no viruses, I deal with a great variety of file formats under their native environment, I play computerized schizophrenia to take what's best of one world or another, taking the best out of each one where it is special. Having marginal convictions, being part of the stream, have a value-added behaviour.
We could talk about biodiversity. Studies show the degenerescence of confined environments and that genetic mixes tend to produce new and stronger elements.
We could talk about politics, and how absurd the two party systems are.
We could talk about various surveys that lead to think about reallities that are made up and comforted.
We could talk about geopolitic evolutionism, multiplication of countries, sub-countries, super-countries.
We could talk about the specialization of the human labour force when basic and popular functions are outsources or mechanized.
We could talk about so many things where the pathern emerges but our aim is not only to observe but to find hope on a larger scale.
When you watch movies, read books, about science fiction, the future is most of the time depicted as cold, anonymous and uniform. One global single government, one culture to the masses, people all dressing according to the same codes, generic behaviours ... This vision of a theoretical future have a underground meaning. You can sense the fear of the author to disapear in the crowd. The internet echoes that sound because it's a medium where anybody, even me, can be an author.
The science fiction tale usually involves a hero, a loner, a marginal, an alternative system that comes to the rescue of the particles of the global monolith. The freedom giver hero is, as always, the incarnation of the good. These tales depict indeed a ideal world full of diversity.
Tu viens de perdre ta part du monde à venir.
- Tant mieux, s'exclama-t-il: le salaire étant supprimé, je puis à présent commencer véritablement à servir."
Martin Buber, Les récits hassidiques
The radical view of the thinking leads ultimately to hapaxism. An hapax is a word only found once in a designated corpus, a unique item. Six billions earthlings, all different, so this ideology could spread. Is hapaxist the one who believes that generalisation / globalisation is impossible (nihilism individualist) and turns empirical solitude into a generative system (random willing marginalist).
There are yet more web pages than earthlings. Some play Google Wacking as a sport so there's already an hapaxist culture even though it's obviously a minority that has sadly yet to be stigmatized. There is this deep underground trend that tends to repress creative instincts of the individuals, as shown by the poor reputation of personal pages or blogs as real information source, the expensive cost of self publishing books or the concept of statistically neglectable individuals in studies.
Nietzsche talked about mankind as a group of lost sheeps whose primary instinct, to repress, was to gather in bands or herds, as men are comforted in the fact of being part of a group, society, religion, nation, ... and I've long been a Nietzschean.
Ce qu'il y a de plus méprisant au monde, c'est le dernier homme, qui avachi, avali et asservi, choisit de croupir dans le marécage du bonheur. Bref, l'homme qui se croit malin parce qu'il préfère jouir mesquinement plutôt que combattre en héros.
Nietzsche
Came wisdom, meditation and deep thinking, search you neighbour and distant fellow, one cannot deny the multiplicative power of the aggregation of objects. The tendency of to form group finds it's jusstification in the individual pieces of a huge puzzle. Fear is the instinct that leads us at first sight but it can evolve in the acceptation that we are not an omniscient god on our own. In individual pragmatism, I don't know everything but to collaborate will help me to know more.
The Open Source movement in it's maturation is an epi-phenomenum of this tendency. States divide into countries, then sign treaties, meet in federations, collaborate and end up in a global world without loosing their identities. The group can be seen as a way to make one's opinion reach a broader audience and give more weight to one's arguments.
The Long Tail demonstration leads us to kill the concept of statisticaly non signifiant. In a way or another, you are being ignored by some systems when there's so much value and potential in you.
The more you are different, the higher is the incentive to interfere and react. Marginality est infinite but it's the farest that is found the greatest of all profit, as found in the economic model of the Long Tail. It's in the community, however tiny and miserable, that you can cultivate your differences.
We are unique, the first one of our kind. Even though we have trouble to integrate into communities, we have a value to add to mankind. Live by the margin and have different ideas is not a sign of not-being. The future belongs to what seamed neglectable. What matters is to get involved. The future needs each one of us.
In the Chaos theory, we learn, empirically and then doctrinally, that the smallest things can lead to the hugest consequences. Our inner fractality is nothing compared to the universe but it wouldn't be such without us, according to this model. The strange attractor is the global conscience of the universe, if we are ready to accept such an idea.
One death, it's a tragedy; One million deaths, it's a statistic.Joseph Staline
If you feel like a boring person in an uniform world then it's up to you to step out of the rank and live your life regardless to the social consequences. There always something inside of you, even a seed, to feed the universal syntagm. Mathematically.
If you have self confidence that you are unique and of great value, ask yourself what you've done, not to you closest friends but to you farest stranger. How did you participate to god's kingdom or civilization improvement to it's full extent ?
You mau believe that this is out of your range but we hope we have made our point that it's all down to simple math and stats. Wealth is in diversity. The farer the richer.
It starts with simple things. Do you vote with your conscience ? Do you say out loud what you think when they want you to believe you're wrong ? This is tiny little actions but they are vital.
If you want to go further and have an active attitude : Do you formalize in a systematic way your ideas towards the anonymous audience ? Do you publish your knowledge ? I've create quite a few personnal web sites and published some papers in journals. Narcicism, egocentrism, media-terrorism, indecency, nihilism, ... or simply, a step towards reconciliation with the world ?
He was like a man who had lost his way out of the forest and who picks up wood just in case he might find his way out.William Faulkner