Truly, it has never been so much fun to be a naysayer.
Take, for instance, the curious curtailment of the “Long Tail.” Remember the Long Tail? It's one of the most hopeful ideas to bounce around this hopeless decade. It refers to the notion that the Internet would make it profitable to sell a greater variety of products in smaller quantities. Instead of everybody continuing to buy the same blockbusters and chart toppers like so many pop-culture lemmings, individuality was to flourish as the Internet laid out an endless buffet of offerings in a way that no bricks-and-mortar store ever could.
The term was popularized in 2004 by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and it made so much intuitive sense that it quickly became received wisdom. (Anderson went on write a book called The Long Tail, start a Long Tail blog, and give Long Tail lectures hither and yon.) It was a genuinely appealing concept. It promised a reprieve from mega-hits and mono-culture, and instead offered up a future in which consumers had more choice and niche companies would thrive.
The theory always had its doubters, but lately the tide seems to be turning against this hopeful view. A string of studies showed that, even in venues like online music stores, patrons gravitate overwhelmingly toward the latest hits, and don't seem to be taking more of a shine to back-catalogue items as time goes on. It seems that individuality is all well and good, but when a James Bond movie comes out, everybody wants to see it NOW.
Last week, Anderson himself posted yet another faintly defensive entry to his Long Tail blog, and finally conceded that “it's hard to make money in the Tail.” So much for that.
Meanwhile, there's ennui in the land of the blogs, which – as a Wired blog put it with only some irony – are starting to look “so 2004.” Blogs, which used to be the hot new world-changer that would rule all media, have been supplanted themselves. In 2008, everyone's gone flocking to microblogs like Twitter, which has become the latest bauble to endlessly fascinate the press. (And it is, I confess, a lot of fun.)
It's not as if blogs have disappeared. No, it's worse: They've become successful. Blogs are big business now. The popular ones are respected media outlets, some even doing what respected media outlets in 2008 do, which is lay off staff and fret about the future. Never mind the fact that some of the most enthusiastic bloggers are found at newspaper websites. When the pioneers of new media set out to stick it to the man, they didn't expect that the man would make such a good blogger. Hand-wringing has ensued, even if there is still no shortage of places to post a cat photo.
Over in the faintly shimmering district of virtual worlds, reality has started to encroach. Google has announced that it's shutting down its stab at entering the virtual-world game 41/2 months after it launched it. Its venture, something it called “Lively,” let users customize virtual spaces for their avatars to inhabit, and then invite other avatars over to chat. Google advised its users to “capture your hard work” by taking screenshots.
News organizations, meanwhile, have been slowly waking up to the fact that virtual life is not as endlessly fascinating as they seemed to think it was. Reuters and CNN, for instance, had both set up shop in Second Life, only to discover that it really is a virtual suburb: There's an awful lot of it, and there's nothing there. CNN's elaborate virtual studio, from which locals were to file their stories, has vanished from the game. Reuters eventually pulled their reporter, Eric Krangel, who wound up writing about the experience on one of those sell-out successful blogs.
“As part of walking my ‘beat,' I'd get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I'd right-click the dance floor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer,” he wrote. “It was about as fun as watching paint dry.”
Even the tenets of the blogging revolution are being questioned by proponents. One of the most listened-to voices in the new-media circuit, entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, made a startling pronouncement this month. “The age of crowd-sourcing your way to success is over,” he wrote, “and we're heading back to the age of expertise and curation.”
This he wrote in the e-mail newsletter he publishes; he gave up blogging a little while back, but demand for this particular mailing was great enough that he posted it to his website anyway. In the note – in which he discusses the state of online start-ups – he dismisses such crowd-sourcing triumphs like Wikipedia and Digg as one-offs that might not be able to be replicated.
Naysaying has a long and proud tradition in online circles. For all the wonders it has brought us, the new-media revolution has been characterized by hype, utopian visions and a healthy dose of belligerence – aided and abetted by excitable media that have trouble distinguishing a fad from a trend. That has created a market opportunity for skeptics.
Is Web 2.0 over? Is blogging finished? Are virtual worlds kaput? Are crowds really useless? Of course not. They all have roles to play in a big, fascinating online ecosystem. But with any luck, we've seen the end of the hype that, over the years, has promised that each of these would overrun the world. Welcome back, reality. It's been a while.
