Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

With RSS, my virtual finger is on the pulse of the A-list blogs. Real Blogger Phil Ringnalda linked Clay Shirky’s article on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, in which the power law is applied to blogging and most of us end up at the skinny, low-audience end of the hit distribution.

I read a couple of other articles on Shirky’s site: The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can’t Get Up and Weblogs and Publishing, both of which deal with the devaluation of the electronic word when the market is, essentially, glutted with blogs.

Here’s a section from the original article:

Note that [the power law] model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for “solidarity goods”, things best enjoyed by a group). It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.

I thought first of LiveJournal, in which the tendency is toward short, name-dropping entries aimed at one’s friends:

LiveJournal had this figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their friends, rather than some impersonal audience. Publishing an essay and having 3 random people read it is a recipe for disappointment, but publishing an account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it feels like a conversation, especially if they follow up with their own accounts.

Then I thought, fanfic! This explains it all: Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for “solidarity goods”, things best enjoyed by a group). Some fic is actually good (quality), some is famous or recommended (marketing), and the rest is cranked out to satisfy the voracious and undiscriminating appetites of subgenre fans (solidarity goods).

In another sense, all fanfic is solidarity goods - best enjoyed by the fannish group. Non-fans don’t even understand the concept, never mind value the results. Anyone, within reason, can read an A-list blog, and anyone, within reason, can read a sci-fi novel off the bookshelves. On the other hand, you have to be in a certain group to follow most LiveJournals, and you have to know and love Star Trek to read Trek fanfic.

I’m not much of one for solidarity. I’d rather write original sci-fi than fanfic. I’d rather read an A-list blog essay than a LJ about last Saturday night. I tend to write essays like this one, no matter how low my power-law standing. That’s not a matter of audience but of author preference.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 10th, 2003 at 12:38 am and is filed under Meta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.