More on The Long Tail: Welcome to the Microculture Era

I was thinking more about the long tail idea and its relation to Western culture. I came across this article from CNN Money: The Extinction of Mass Culture.

While I was extolling the virtues of the long tail as it relates to culture, the author of that article makes the case for this being a bad thing:

The interesting question is whether all this choice along The Long Tail is an unalloyed good. "I think it's a net positive, but there are definite tradeoffs," Anderson told me, when I called to ask him. "Do we lose something as a society if we have less in common? How do we define ourselves as Americans if we are not sharing the same culture impacts?"

This is a really important question, and one which I hadn't considered. I'm big on culture and tradition. I believe that we all lose something when we don't work together as a whole, and history has shown that the intermixing of culture inevitably leads to the decline of an empire.

But isn't this inevitable? By definition the only nations at risk of overtaking the US are the same ones who have the level of industrialization that might cause the very problem we're discussing (the fragmentation of core culture), which would (in time at least) have the same effect on them.

The Hive and The Return of the Tribe

I see two things happening here. The first is the advent of the hive culture. Yes, we may all decide to listen to disparate music and favor niche entertainment, but we progressively cleave tighter and tighter to population centers, where jobs are available and entertainment is plentiful. Wal-Mart and Starbucks pop up everywhere while Ma & Pa coffee shops struggle to turn a profit and Jack Handy hardware shops go under. A continually greater percentage of the population is online, and those who are online are spending more time online. (I promise a whole blog post soon on the nature of the internet as it relates to the hive culture. Yay - lucky you.) The point is that while we fragment in proclivities we are actually coming together physically and starting to share the same modes of communication.

The other thing I see happening here is the return of the tribe. Most Americans are so dissociated from their roots that they just call whatever concrete and chipboard apartment they find themselves in "home." We live thousands of miles away from the people we grew up with, and our slightly mitigated freedom allows us to prosper without the support of our elders and peers. But human nature is implicit in our lives; we can strain against it like the sea kelp against the tide, but it will always push us the way it wills. Most of us feel happiest and most secure in a tribe; be it your little family and close circle of friends or your clan of Warcraft players or the IM buddies you met at the furry convention. So we find online clans of game players, communities of regulars on the messageboards popular sites like Slashdot, Fark, and Kuro5hin.

These are our new tribes, and I believe they will become an increasingly important part of our post-industrial information age lives. It is natural for us to want to cleave the the safety and enrichment of the hive; it is also natural for us to seek out individuals like us who we can scheme and commiserate and laugh with. A mass of niches indeed.