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INTERNET | Noah Brier

Diverselessness

While things may look rosy and diverse, under the surface the web's functionality might not actually support diversity.

April 5, 2009 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 14 COMMENTS

A few months ago I was having an email back and forth with Chandler from The Barbarian Group about my postmodernism/economics post. One point he made in particular has been sticking around in my head ever since. I wrote, "As the site [brand tags] illustrates, everyone has a different idea of what a brand is, shaped by an infinite number of factors (when they were introduced, how they were introduced, whether they've actually experience it, etc.) and every single person, no matter how different their perception is, is equally right."

His response to the whole post was great, but this part in particular stuck out for me:

I disagree that what brand tags shows is that "everyone has a different idea of what a brand is", but rather that most people have the same idea of what a brand is (at least to the extent to which they hired a good agency), despite the fact that there is no authority for what a brand means, you can't look these things up in a dictionary. This is why folksonomy works, because it leverages the discursive nature of concepts, or if you will "reality". Maybe this is an easier pill to swallow when thinking about something amorphous like a brand, but again the crux of postmodern thought is that this is how all "truth" works, even the truth about planets and air.

His point is a good one, the easy way to explain these things is that everyone has a different take on them, but the reality is that most people have the same take. In fact, it kind of reminds me of something my friend Abe wrote a few years ago about the long tail:

But the long tail, is not a neutral description, rather much like the stances of both sides in the abortion debate it is a deep ideological one. Much the way the abortion warriors are fighting to control the terms of the debate, the long tail is about controlling what the power law distribution is about. "Pay no mind to the 20% with all the power, what's really interesting is what's happening over here under this long tail..."

I think both Chandler and Abe's response include two important similarities. First, they both point to the importance of the way a concept is framed to your understanding and reaction. But secondly, and maybe more importantly, they point to the way we've been trained to assume the power of diversity on the web, when in fact what we're experiencing is actually a lack thereof.

Just recently Michael pointed to a super interesting piece of research highlighting the actual diversity of products offered up by recommendation systems like those at Amazon and Netflix. These systems, of course, have been made famous by the likes of Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail which pointed to their ability to drive individuals to super obscure titles (this is what Abe was referring to in the quote above). When comparing the actual diversity customers experience in an offline and online shop, you'll be surprised to find out that the offline actually wins out. Here's the gist of it:

While each customer on average experiences more unique products in Internet World, the recommender system generates a correlation among the customers. To use a geographical analogy, in Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone. In Internet World, a lot of the ground cannot be seen by anyone because they are all standing on the same big hilltop.

In other words, the web is actually working against the diversity with it's networked functionality. The ability to quickly generate massive amounts of attention in a single direction means that while we're seeing more, we're also moving far more in lock-step since we're dependent on the decisions of others.

So, what does this have anything to do with anything? Well, to be honest I'm not entirely sure. I was having lunch a few weeks ago with Tim from Roflcon and we were talking about a bunch of stuff, including the idea of success and failure on the web. Tim made an awesome point, which was that everyone always uses the same few examples for every question about successful internet companies (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix at the moment). This happens in every industry, actually, just ask someone to name the best brands and I'll give you $1 if Nike and Apple aren't on the list. But let's put brands aside for a second and focus on the web. The number of successful large scale communities out there is quite small. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but it's the reality of the situation. So maybe, just maybe, that's not what the web is built for. Maybe it's built for small scale communities. Maybe we need to reframe the way we think about this stuff and worry less about "scalability." (I would guess that there really isn't any such thing as scalability within a community since culture is bound to change as the size increases, meaning you are left with a totally different community which you hope is only somewhat less good than the original.)


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COMMENTS

1Adrian Ho

Great post Noah, I did some thinking about this a while back for a client and this problem is partially structural to the Internet. Almost every organisation tool in use whether it's pagerank, authority, followers, diggs, etc. is based on popularity. Therefore things will always tend towards the norm.

Here's that post: http://www.zeusjones.com/blog/2007/the-taste-of-crowds/

April 5, 2009

2Matt Daniels

The last point is really sticking with me (especially now, as I'm reading Wikinomics .

Perhaps the web is only proving the Dunbar number", that communities are optimally small at around 150 people. I suppose that you could attribute this to the ease of communication, lower barriers to entry, and social nature of the web.

April 5, 2009

3Michal Migurski

I was writing a comment, but it got long and turned into a blog post.

April 5, 2009

4Gavin Heaton

We think, at least in part, that scale is important - mostly because it is the accepted frame through which we view all media. Communities and community reach are only useful where we are hoping to build some kind of affinity with people. Where we just want to inform, then digital communications are much more effective.

I think you are right - that we need to refocus and look not at scale but perhaps at polyphonic influence - the way that websites can influence behaviour across multiple community groups (think interpretation of meaning rather than broadcasting of message). Maybe this is where diversity really lives on the web - on the fringes, where it has always been.

April 5, 2009

5Paul

I must admit, that research made my brain hurt a bit.

I guess there are multiple issues on multiple levels. First thing, most of the goal of those recommenders are to help you find new things yes, but new thing that you'd like based on your own likes and dislikes, not just the community's. Less so maybe in the case of Digg or Techmeme, but particularly in the case of netflix and amazon. So I'm not sure the standing from the same hilltop analogy works for me.

Second thing is that satisfaction is a key piece of that goal. So if people tend to try out new stuff offline, are they necessarily more satisfied with it? If you accept the premise that the internet is causing less diversity, do they try more things because their decisions are made with less information? Not sure...

And last thing, I'm not sure the internet really works like that in practice. Sure - there are those megahits, but those tend to be few and far between in a vast sea of content. I'm pretty sure those moments of collectivism, the water cooler-type happenings, are probably lessened by the internet, not increased by it. Really, with youtube for example, a million people might see a video - and that might mean success in some communities, but that’s low enough that most people still wouldn’t know what you meant if you reference it.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t buy it. Recommendation engines help you to stand on many different hilltops at different times, based on your own actions combined with community information. And depending on where you are on that hilltop, you might find it at different times. More like a cascading sunrise than a snapshot of a view. And there’s plenty of research about how infinite choice without additional filtering paralyzes us, so doesn’t really cause you to choose more. So those engines are vital to the choice.

Which leads me to this – can we test Netflix without recommenders vs. with them? Or Amazon? Do renters at blockbuster rent more titles than a netflix user? If you listen to Netflix, they call the reccomender their secret weapon to extend diversity of titles.

Or maybe I saw a bunch of dots and got confused. :)

Okay – rambling done.


April 5, 2009

6Christian Hughes

Hey Noah, just found your blog and absolutely lovin' it. I've been completely captivated for the last 30min or so and I had to drop you a quick comment to say cheers! :)

April 6, 2009

7Chad

I find this a very interesting and useful blog! I definitely agree that the framing of the brand is incredibly important. I also thought I'd mention I recently came across this company that seems like an excellent tool - they provide a link for your website where your customers get to personalize your own branded calender - I think they're worth checking out: http://micalendar.ca/online-calendar-builder.html

April 6, 2009

8Ana

ha. if you don’t mention the same brands as examples, how would another person know what you are talking about? (i may think that Skills Division does an awesome job on the web, but that means nothing to you if you haven’t heard about them, right?)

there’s a reason why people gravitate towards similar things. some of them are social coordination (just watch/listen/do what others are doing); conformity; and community -- there would be no community if we, um, did not have something in common.

neither of which has anything to do with the “networked functionality” of the web. the problem is us. we are working against diversity by using “popularity” as the main “discovery” tool, for the above reasons. we rarely ever behave, or make decisions independently from decisions and behaviors of others - and we created tools on the web that are helping us to coordinate our behavior with that of others.

i find it funny how everyone was celebrating the Internet as technology that introduces the greater individualism in consumption (as compared to mass media, that are all about mainstreaming our choices). In fact, the web does just the opposite: precisely because there is too much diverse information, it amplifies our copying each others’ choices.

Which makes me wonder: is individual preference a myth? Example: some people are real or imagined superstars of Twitter as they have thousands and thousands of followers. Is that because they are really more interesting and talented than others, or it's just that we are simply doing what others are doing? (and I bet that all people here follow at least 10 same people, just because everyone else does).

April 7, 2009

9Gavin Heaton

@Ana - this is what I am calling "social judgement" - where we make decisions based on our personal trust networks. So if we cultivate a diverse network, we open ourselves to serendipity - but if we connect only with folks "like me", then we end up in an echo chamber. It's just the same offline - just bigger.

April 7, 2009

10Joel Connolly

First up, great post! Very interesting ideas.

I think diversity on the web has always been a problem. If you ask me the Internet actually works to make the world much smaller. Our language is becoming more and more common and our culture less diverse (if you think about culture as the system we all use to descibe and understand our world). Sure, we've got access to a lot more material (books, movies, ideas etc) but if the paradigm is uniform across a much great area (say, Earth) then it's stands to reason that the artefacts will become less and less diverse.

What concerns me more is the replication of reality over and over and over. If the cultural space within which we learn is becoming less diverse then the ideas being born from it will only become more and more artificial. Less flavour, more cardboard if you know what I mean. Until eventually the replica will become reality and then the world will fall apart and we'll all have to start again. Ha.

Seriously though, I hope I've made sense. I've not had a coffee yet. Great post though. Adding you to my RSS.

April 7, 2009

11Taylor Davidson

Best point you bring up: is the web built for large-scale or large-scale communities?

The underlying question: are PEOPLE "built" for large-scale or small-scale communities? Are we just re-creating the human condition on the web?

Humans tend to stretch systems to the breaking point until changing; will the "realtime web" stretch the systems of friends and followers that we have created, forcing us to re-create small groups (in order to deal with the deluge of information), leading to less diversity of exposure to experiences and viewpoints?

April 10, 2009

12David J Carr

I think this post is great at challenging some of our preconceptions and the recommendations engine research is great. I think it definitely has other implications, especially with regards to the idea of Nodal Points and interactive creative work.

If we can think of a Nodal Point as a (potentially distributed) collection of content, conversations and links that spread a meme/concept and cause the ideas and journeys around it to be reshaped and dragged (just like a planet’s mass influences the passage of time around it), then it is a key point in the narrative of the net. I think this research points to why Nodal Points arise in the first place.

Often we have seen brands approach the internet like hedge-funds playing the stock market. So many strategies are double plays that aim to have their cake and eat it, to win no matter what the outcome but have a side order of “social” to round out the meal or case study. The result is expensive and doesn’t reflect the reality of the net.
The internet lets the crowd raise-up the things it likes with links and tags and re-posts, and damn the things it doesn’t like with a pointed lack of attention. Old passive message, big idea, objective correlative creative with a big call to action, and series of key frame proof points doesn’t cut it anymore. There is too much noise: now things have to be good enough to share.

But just because something is good enough to share and inherently interesting doesn’t mean it will catch on and spread through the network. The work that is interesting must be structured for the network, as demonstrated by SharedEgg. It must allow the crowd to create nodal points within their part of the network. It must also contain an idea can be reprocessed and played with, passed on and owned.

This gives us two key challenges, one commercial and one sociological: (1) how do we make things that are good enough to share, and good enough to create or contribute to nodal points; and (2) how do we use creative to help shape the network so that the nodal points it throws up in the future are useful and “the best for society” not just another 4chan/B3ta?

April 16, 2009

13nabeel hyatt

Totally, the web is all about the long tail, the small and deep, and we've been on the hard road away from a collective sense since the mid 1950s.

But I think it's a stretch to say that brands on the web should reframe and think about the small. The really great communities on the web are not really communities, they are enablers of communities. That's what Flickr, Facebook, and Yahoo Groups (in its day) got so right. On Flickr you've got a tight little group of cat lovers and a tight little group of landscape lovers and the tools help them connect and deepen their relationship with each other.

It does, of course, bubble up into a brand called Flickr - but it's not the homogeneous nature of Vice Magazine fans or Anthropologie fans, it's an amalgam of communities.

April 16, 2009

14atul chatterjee

It may be that Tim is right. It may also be that the Web is so young. You need to see how many years it took for a company to become a behemoth in the early stages.
Another thing is that manufacturing lent itself to assembly line production thus allowing lower costs and huge quantities.
My logical faculties say that it is to soon to make any prediction about the web.
My gut feeling is just as social network sites and blogging have sprung up, there will be other formats community based whether large or small.
Whatever will be, will be, the future's not ours to say...

May 19, 2009