The typically fantastic On The Media covered the phenomenon of “cyberchondria” this week. That is, the pernicious tendency to “escalate” one’s web-enabled self diagnosis of what, from a clinical perspective, are trivial health issues.
(via Microsoft research)
(via Microsoft research)
When Chris Anderson delves into the “power of collective intelligence,” he asserts that the web-based amplification of word-of-mouth communication has serious implications for the trading of recommendations and popularizing of content. In his model, aggregators and filters place genres, categories and ideas into neat contextual buckets that give their relative recommendations meaning and substance. This is instead of making an apples to oranges comparison between, say, a bag of tube socks and a power drill, the relative ratings of which would tell you nothing about either. But this position omits the key fact that – more than ever – content exploration is not driven by a linear, taxonomy-powered long tail experience but powered by search and recommendation engines that instead of driving us to the margins, more often than not consolidate users around popular, “mainstream” products to satisfy unavoidable economic constraints.
Popularity and obscurity, as Anderson points out, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Even the most obscure music genre, for example, can have relatively popular artists or albums that have generated the strongest user affinity for that particular subculture. But this popularity, which is usually defined as a discrete value such as a rating or rank in the online space, is not merely an agnostic tool for the user. It represents an incredibly valuable business tool that is increasingly used to turn users into customers, to take someone from an entry point to a sale as quickly and as authoritatively as possible. The seminal long tail example of Touching The Void illustrates this functionality and is touted as highlighting the surfacing potential of these new tools.
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I'm a digital strategist and producer for PBS.org. My career started in broadcast convergence, media theory, and web development and my work has widened to include journalism, content development and a wide range of new media competencies. I'm also an M.A. candidate in the Interactive Journalism and Public Affairs program at American University. I received my B.A. from Carleton College in Art History and Cinema Studies. You can learn more about me in my resume, or by visiting me on LinkedIn or Facebook or following me on Twitter.
