Call it taking a village, but it is an interesting modern societal observation to note that, when I have gotten together with parents of other kids, whom are not familiar with my parenting style, I am sure to mention that I am ok with them telling my child that their behavior is not appropriate. It usually is met with relief and a reciprocal request and subsequent accord between parents of kids that do what kids do. This is the village and, regardless of my meta communication providing permission to shout at my kids when they are misbehaving, the village has a number of unspoken agreements and normative behaviors that contribute to what has been also called a social contract. Many folks, much smarter than I am, have tread on highbrow topics such as the nature of man, social contracts, comity and related works. Mine is not a contribution to this, per se, but an extrapolation and incorporation of these concepts into our current moment.
For a moment let’s talk about our current times. There are a number of signals in our society and the American political environment right now that would indicate that the two party system is polarized and there are particular actors actively driving this wedge. There is a lot of truth in that and I can scarcely keep pace with the coverage in print, digital and conversational, who are attempting to trend-splain what’s happening.
In my posts I usually take a break and recommend some reading… PS that’s outside the intellectual giants that I alluded to earlier, but also to some other contextual reading like Robert Putnam’s, Bowling Alone, arguing the decline in social fabric of our participation in civic, social and associational forums, and Our Kids, that talks about inequality and opportunity in the US. Also contributing to the context here is a more controversial figure in American politics, Francis Fukuyama, multiple works but “The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstruction of Social Order”. To borrow an apt description from Wikipedia: “Fukuyama explores the origins of social norms, and analyses the current disruptions in the fabric of our moral traditions, which he considers as arising from a shift from the manufacturing to the information age. This shift is, he thinks, normal and will prove self-correcting, given the intrinsic human need for social norms and rules.”
So now that you’ve read a small library’s worth of texts, we can continue the argument and allow the last wrinkle before my assertion.
It has been a few years since Long Tail Theory was created by Chris Anderson at Wired, Oct-2004, but I posit that the concept of the Long Tail Theory needs to be applied to our anthropological dive. But before all that, let’s do a little refresher on Long Tail Theory. Full disclosure, I’m paraphrasing.
Remember Blockbuster Video… I do, only just, but suffice it to say they were a hit in the 80’s and 90’s with lots of locations where one could rent a video, go home and chill. They made a business of stocking popular videos that didn’t gather dust on the shelves. Stated in another way, they took the latest releases and top 50 movies of a few genres and had them in stock. I didn’t go through their data but it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think that the Pareto Principle applied to their stock to revenue efficiencies. That being said, they were always trying to stock the hits that people could recall from memory and rent, in many ways similar to how Target and others in retail do their buying. To over simplify, this worked well until Netflix arrived. For those old enough to remember, the initial irony of netflix was that they originally shipped DVDs. Yes it was 1997 and the founders, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, knew software was going to eat the world. The bite began with not needing sticks, bricks and labor. Sure they crushed service and subscription models too, but this killer combo of advantages afforded the consumer a new world and a chance to explore beyond the curated “Top 100” of movies.
Enter the elongation of the tail, eventually becoming a long tail. Creating a new user experience that surfaced a sea of options. This made a new market, pushing consumer demand into new genres and pulling an industry out of the dark recesses of the archives. Part of the Long Tail argument is that not only was this elongation created, but the amplitude was enhanced with evidence as to the bandwidth demands placed on ISP providers, in 2015 Netflix consumed 37% of all US internet traffic and as of Oct 2018, 15% of global internet bandwidth. Blockbuster could only have dreamed of that kind of a demand curve.
So that’s a case study in Long Tail Theory, now let’s conduct some anthropological amalgamation.
Here it goes…
Normative behaviors are a implicit, explicit, and constant negotiation between the individuals of a group and these established norms can be looked as the 50th percentile on a bell curve of the spectrum of human behaviors. We are not going to get Freudian or Kantian on this, primarily because I can’t understand even a portion of their theories, but humans are complex beings and therefore hold values and beliefs that are nuanced. We all hold a bit of the light and the dark in each one of us, and, in a healthy society, normative behaviors, are established through a check and balance of interactions between people.
Along came the internet.
We know that there are a multitude of theories in this domain from Google search echo chambers to bias in facial recognition and the horrors social media amplifies. The point is exactly that though. Digital forms of communication have subverted the guardrails of normative behavior establishment and have created the amplification of the long tail in our society. It is not the long tail behavior that is really in question it is the behavior long tail that is driving the wedge in our social fabric today.
If this is the case then we can view the Blockbuster “Top 100” as the major social norms we have accorded to our society. This list adjusts dynamically like the ebb and flow of consumer tastes through geographies, socioeconomic class, religion, macro-economics and the long arc of history, but as humans with natural limits, we live our day-to-day in the Top 100.
Let’s chat about how this plays out. Some benign examples are, why are we quiet in the library? Why don’t we stand still in the middle of a dance club? They get deeper when we queue up in a line to get on a train, or why we wait for the crosswalk signal. How do we address an email to a prospective customer vs a tweet to a group text. And deeper still when we tell ourselves our work is worth more than we are getting paid but don’t ask our boss for a raise. Or, talk about our relationship discord differently to friends versus our significant other. The question is, how has the internet changed this behavior?
We now give and receive signals into the long tail. We curate the information we receive and select the medium we send out. Sure algorithms play a role, but they are really designed to speed up these cause and effect cycles in ways that stimulate monetizable responses at scale. When shelters used to be provided by social circles to encourage good behaviors and discourage the bad, our digital landscape has eroded the uncomfortable. The uncomfortable that comes from accountability to the social contract.
The last statements were purposefully crafted to present the dystopian side of the argument because, while the Top 100 in the arc of history has been bending away from hate, bigotry, racism, bias and institutionalized privilege, we have unleashed a long tail that confirms and amplifies behaviors that should fade in time from our common consciousness.
To pull us out a bit, my general tactic is a simple one, get more analog through dialogue. Go out and realize, as my parenting can attest to, that to be humans together on this planet is to be a bit awkward as we mature and navigate our lives in close proximity.