Nice Fringe

Chris Anderson has been discussing the noise level in The Long Tail with John Hagel.

The latter is a self-confessed long-term escapee from mainstream taste, who claims that "the signal to noise ratio decreases as I move up the tail", and that "the real point...is that the sheer quantity (rather than the quality) of items increases as we move down the tail and the ready availability of information about these items diminishes - that's what increases the difficulty of connecting with relevant resources as we move down the tail."

Anderson has responded with the results of some desk research on his own and his friends' music collections and found that "In the big picture of the Long Tail, there are so many items that even today's niche looks relatively popular. For instance, the average sales rank in my own collection was 25,000. That may sound super-fringe, but it still puts my average in the top 5% of Amazon's offerings. You've got to pull back and see the whole market. And at that resolution, the falling s/n ratio curve I originally described emerges for almost all of us. "

It seems to me that there's a class of people in the marketplace for whom the distinction between the product and information about the product is usually fairly clear. For these people information technologies give the rational consumer a better chance of making the connection between taste and target. And most probably, they sought personal definition through distinction long before the new tools emerged.

But just how representative are they? And are the new technologies converting more and more consumers into fringe activists?

I think it remains the case that for a large number of people the information content of the product and information about the product tends to blend at a semiotic level. So, instead of the indexical relationship between them (such as all this talk of signal and noise suggests), you often have a symbolic one instead.

The Long Tail may just be one aspect of a two-pronged phenomenon:

• on the one hand the scope of the information index is being widened
• on the other the scope of dense semiotic connectivity is spreading beyond what used to be the more contained mainstream.