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Quick Summary: Read about how the long tail doesn’t only apply to culture and commerce, but also to relationships.

In my earlier post about the Long Tail of Pain, I just drew a diagram of how social media allows us to experience pain anytime, anyplace, in any form, but didn’t elaborate on the idea adequately.

In this post, I’ll explain what a long tail is and how digital media has changed it. I’ll also explain how the long tail doesn’t only apply to culture and commerce, but also to relationships, specifically pain, via the Three Laws of the Long Tail of Pain.

Let me first explain what a long tail is.

A long tail curve is a statistical distribution in which a small number of data points have disproportionately high values compared to a large number of other data points that have progressively low values. If you rank these data points and plot them in the decreasing order of their values, you get a curve that first falls very sharply (forming the almost vertical head) and then falls more slowly (forming the almost horizontal tail). The Pareto Principle (the top 20% contribute 80% of the total) is an example of a long tail curve.

The Long Tail doesn’t only define the new economics of culture and commerce; it also defines the new economics of relationships.

My new favorite idea is The Long Tail of Pain - how social media allows us to find pain anytime, anyplace, in any form. (Twitter)

By the way, are we friends on Facebook or Twitter yet?

People like us who understand social media, or pretend to, often spend all our time with other people like us. Which means that we often forget that we are part of a very niche sub-culture and most other people are not like us, and don’t understand the references we often take for granted.

I was reminded of this reality when I was reading chapter 11 of Chris Anderson’s brilliant book ‘The Long Tail‘. To prove the point that snippets of culture that are ubiquitous to us are often obscure to everyone else, Chris lists down 10 famous Internet viral memes and wonders how many people have heard of them. I had heard of 4 out of 10, but could be sure about only 2.

- Ellen Feiss
- The Star Wars Kid (original video)
- Dancing Baby
- Bert is Evil
- Bonzai Kitten
- Tourist Guy
- MC Hawking (website)
- 1337
- Subservient Chicken (website)
- First Post

Do leave a comment and let me know how many you have heard of. I suspect that most of you would have heard of less than 5, and it won’t be the same 5 either.

Michael Banks is a brilliant man! He interviews thirty top bloggers, packages the interviews into a book called Blogging Heroes with a few paragraphs of his own, then offers the bloggers the opportunity to give away the chapter they’re in as a free pdfs on their site! So far, Chris Anderson at The Long Tail, Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing, David Rothman at TeleBlog and Steve Garfield have bitten the bait, but I’m sure more bloggers will follow suit.

By the way, I had the same idea as Michael when I started my Desi Blogging Cafe series (and yes, the series will be back soon with the dozens of interviews I haven’t published yet).