Recommender systems, search engines and tailored advertising are continuously advancing in technological sophistication. They progress in lockstep with the internet’s evolution, a process which is already inextricably entangled with our economy and culture. One way to look at these simultaneous developments is that they represent opposing facets in the ongoing struggle between signal and noise. As online content, products and services continue to multiply, and their methods for capturing our attention evolve, so too do the available tools at our disposal for manoeuvring our way through it.
Now, what follows is a crude look at the long tail.
One premise is that through findability, we can be teleported directly to the exact object we want from an infinite array of virtual shelves that don’t occupy any physical space. That is, the internet enables us to transcend the distance and spatial limitations of the physical world.
Another premise holds that upon entering this virtual shelf space we’ll know what we are looking for; we’ll point toward what we are looking for and promptly gain access to all available options. Ultimately, what this premise celebrates is the demise of the highly centralised status of pre-internet gatekeepers and the democratisation of consumer-choice.1
I think one aspect that makes this premise difficult to defend is that growth in our ability to choose doesn’t even come close to matching the speed by which our range of options multiplies. What I mean by this is that even if we can, in theory, easily locate what we are looking for, and those who can offer it are not hindered by restrictive gatekeepers, this doesn’t necessarily result in a more effective “separation of the signal from the noise”.
The reason that this is not the case is that there is a trade-off: the more options we have, the more we need to improve our ability to choose; and the more the automated curation systems develop, the more we need to delegate our choices to them, reducing our ability to choose. In the end, the range of options that we can choose from grows exponentially, but the vehicle that can help us navigate this dizzying catalogue will continue trying to read our minds to find the best options for us; we do not have enough lifetimes nor energy to sift through all of it.
It might seem excessive to suggest that automated curation cripples our ability to choose, as we can always complement personalised, automated curation systems with for example search engines to adjust the system so that it takes us where we want to. We might also anticipate the objection that the need to combine different navigation systems adds too much friction to the process by responding that it is still better than having to mould our wishes to a comparatively extremely narrow set of choices. But the key problem takes place before we even enter the infinite shelves of cyberspace in search of the thing that brought us there. It happens when we overestimate our ability to summon up genuinely beneficial intentions to guide our search. In fact, our ability to choose greatly suffers when we don’t even know where we came from in the first place.
What happens is that midway through our initial searches for something specific, we already come across such a vast repertoire of options that we probably will be tempted to choose the most one that is most appealing among the first batch. We will conform ourselves with that choice because of tiredness, fear of wasting more time, being overwhelmed by too much information or simply because it seems good enough. But the reality is that this option might very well only satisfy a fraction of what we were looking for: it might satisfy our need to feel the relief of making a decision, of ending a chase successfully or our need for novelty, that we do something and something stimulating comes from the other side. Still, it is far from the best option out there, not even close to what we were initially looking for.
And here is when our ability to summon up genuinely beneficial intentions to guide our search begins to deteriorate. Once we felt the low friction satisfaction of these other needs such as novelty, our intentions begin to change. We lower our standards for what we are looking for and we settle for something that only fulfils a fraction of our previous requirements, but that carries with it the allure of these other relieving emotions that we begin to seek with more eagerness.
Our intentions slowly shift as new dimensions are added to the thing we seek and what made us seek it in the first place is not primary anymore. And then, since experience informs our next choices by showing us a narrow version of what is available and inspiring our curiosity toward certain directions, we begin to look for new things inspired by these fractions of what we were looking for before.
In a way, we become hooked to a certain corner of the internet: overwhelmed by the range of options we eventually settle for what brings a feeling of closure, then we seek more of that feeling while increasingly forgetting the importance of the more valuable aspect of what we were looking for, then the intentions that drive our searches become informed by what we settled for, and finally the automated systems themselves become informed by our activity and narrow our choices further towards that direction.
Ultimately, the problem of signal vs. noise in the long tail can become very complex when we also consider how the quality of our intentions can deteriorate2. The constant increment of options, of noise, of the ‘flattening of the long tail’ can leave us in a state where not even personalised and automated systems can help, because while they can augment our navigational capacities, they cannot dictate our intentions (and if they did, still they would be our intentions no more than a statistically probable estimation).
Where does that leave us? There is the ‘editorial’ approach where well-informed exponents of a specific niche or area make the effort to curate lists of content or addresses where signal surpasses noise; but the catch is that curators might also proliferate to attain unmanageable numbers and many of them might be led by commercial interests that are not exactly in benefit of their audience.
I still have hope for the role of curators. I think most of the potential of the art of online curation is yet to be discovered, and if enough creative people commit themselves to treating it like a craft, with continuous refinements and a pursuit of excellence, the societal benefits in an era of global informational pollution cannot be overestimated.
- As the internet enables them to be directly connected with niche product or service providers. In the case that there was an intermediary, such as a platform, the aforementioned lack of limitations in shelf-space means that in theory it can offer an unimaginably massive selection of products. It would do this without incurring in much cost, while taking a very small cut from each sale. ↩︎
- With deteriorating, I mean growing further and further away from what in full lucidity we would consider the most beneficial from us, what is more connected with our actual experience of life and the kind of needs that once satisfied benefit us in the long term ↩︎
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