I am about 60% through The Long Tail now and, whilst I have doubts about writing a post on a book before I've finished it, I just wanted to start a place for my thoughts on something which is coming into mind more as I progress through the pages.
So, apologies if Chris does go into this more later on (past page 138) but I keep thinking back to the stuff we discussed during my college years regarding postmodernism in a societal context.
The big issue was always, at the time, how postmodernism as a cultural movement was bringing about a collapse of boundaries between everything we experienced. One of the ways I used to think of this was how things like television, radio, film, music, etc. would eventually be regarded as a single item, moving closer and closer to each other at all times. 12yrs on since Uni and it's pretty obvious to see how that's definitely happened, and whether you argue that we're still postmodern, or post-postmodern, it's hard not to see that a collapse on so many levels has and is occuring all the time. (I seem to remember this being something to do with Verfemdung, but a google just now throws up a lot of Brecht references, so perhaps I have my courses mixed up?) but the notion of distance between objects, audience, and all elements in between is effectively disappearing.
Now, if you think of this in terms of a key point of The Long Tail, that of the tail part being empowered through the easy availability of technology tools to enable user generated content and lower the boundaries between production and consumption, then that distance, the gap between us being one side and not the other, is falling down all the time. Yet I don't see any mention of this on the blog circuit of in his book (so far) - and there may be a good reason for that, in that it's far too obvious?
The other thing that keeps "bothering" me (might not be the right word, but it'll do) is that on one hand, post modernism is helping to bring everything closer together, to create this enviornment in which we can consume and create all at the same time, whilst at the exact same moment, the long tail effect is making us a more disparate as a consuming body - non-hits and the opposite of the head - we don't all like the same thing.
Postmodernism brought us all together and collapsed all the boundaries - and at the same time throws us all apart and destroys the collapse, bringing us back to a world of infinite choice and distance from one another.
Howard
technorati tags:postmodernism, collapse, disparate, long, tail, verfremdung
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