One more cool cousin for the family picture of a blogseries begun-ish with Monday's post on user innovation: the same illustrious Ms. Postrel that sparked that think-think has recently updated her blog/site a bit to include a category for her writings on a related topic, VARIETY AND CHOICE:
The "variety revolution" is one of the biggest business stories of the past decade. Thanks to production and distribution innovations, consumers now have access to far more choices for all kinds of goods and services, from fresh vegetables in the supermarket to DVDs from Netflix. I am exploring the management practices that have made the variety revolution possible, the psychological challenges it poses for consumers, and the opportunities it presents for both future business models and personal pleasure and meaning. The variety revolution is an economic story, but it has much broader implications for how we think about pluralism and individual differences.
Users modifying products to suit their specific needs is, and will increasingly be, a major driver of this variety - user innovations are as diverse as the needs they serve, which are diverse as the users themselves. Not only does it have implications for how we think about pluralism and individual differences, but for how we deal with our own craaaaazzeeee choice-filled lives -
Sometimes people just can't handle the extreme selection and succumb to what Barry Schwartz calls 'choice fatigue' in his recent-ish book The Paradox of Choice:
Like Thoreau and the band Devo, psychology professor Schwartz provides ample evidence that we are faced with far too many choices on a daily basis, providing an illusion of a multitude of options when few honestly different ones actually exist. The conclusions Schwartz draws will be familiar to anyone who has flipped through 900 eerily similar channels of cable television only to find that nothing good is on. Whether choosing a health-care plan, choosing a college class or even buying a pair of jeans, Schwartz, drawing extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us. We normally assume in America that more options ("easy fit" or "relaxed fit"?) will make us happier, but Schwartz shows the opposite is true, arguing that having all these choices actually goes so far as to erode our psychological well-being.
Ugh, I mean I obviously am not feeling this guy's negativity, but that Devo reference is just extra ridiculous, is that in the book? The Devo project was so much more than that... Anyway, the other day Rupture linked to a recent essay from the Telegraph offering a personal account of one man's attempt to deal with too much to choose from-itis that cites Schwartz's book:
We have reached sensual overload. To introduce another theorist to the argument, it’s what the psychologist Barry Schwartz, speaking at the Royal Society of Arts, calls “choice fatigue“, namely, the brain beginning to seize up under the number of options laid before it. Schwartz cites the example of shoppers who are 10 times more likely to buy jam when there’s only six choices of item on display as when there are 24.
The conclusion is inescapable: less choice makes us perform better and, consequently, feel happier.
Well, I can obviously sympathize with the experience of choice fatigue - who can't? - but the conclusion seems a bit, you know, extreme? Like, extremely lame? Schwartz's book, and this study in particular, was addressed a couple months ago by, yes, Ms. Postrel, in Forbes, in the context of rather ballsy comments that the psychologist Schwartz has been making on the recent social security debate (which may or may not still be going on? I really have no idea):
The book is a lucid overview of the psychological literature, and within its pages Schwartz, a professor at Swarthmore, sticks to personal advice. He urges readers not to fixate on finding the very best alternative but rather to set standards and accept the first choice that meets those criteria...
"Whether people are choosing jam in a grocery store or essay topics in a college class, the more options people have, the less likely they are to make a choice," he writes in an op-ed on Social Security. But the jam-and-essay study included a third experiment--the only one of the three that included a Social Security-style no-choice alternative--which he conveniently omits.
In that experiment, subjects were shown a group of Godiva chocolates. They were asked which chocolate they would buy for themselves, based on the name and look of each. Half chose from 6 chocolates and half chose from 30. Half of each group was then given the chocolate they'd picked. The other half got a different sample, selected by the experimenter.
People who picked from 6 chocolates were more satisfied than those who selected from 30. A bigger group seemed to make people more likely to worry that they hadn't picked the best chocolate.
...Subjects who ate a chocolate selected by the experimenter, rather than the one they'd picked, were much less satisfied than either group. Too much choice may cause regret, but no choice is worse.
Anyway, it's not quite 'no choice', but the aforementioned dude from the Telegraph basically advocates an abandonment of choice:
Yet, faced with an infinity of choice, I’ve discovered there is still hope. It boils down to simple mathematics. Anything we watch or read or listen to can’t possibly make the slightest dent in our backlog, since our backlog is infinite. Far from causing despair, this knowledge should liberate us to abandon the quest and revel even longer in what we have immediately to hand.
To put it another way, whether you choose to re-read Great Expectations or read for the first time the latest Margaret Drabble makes not the slightest bit of difference. You’ll be no nearer completion, so you might as well settle for whichever you really prefer. You can, if you wish, take all your unread books and unwatched videos and throw them out. Or you can choose not to buy anything new and stay in and arbitrarily select from what you have.
What a pussy! "I'm so scared of having so much to choose from, I'm just going to stay home and watch my old videos"! This is, obviously, not our only 'hope' to be saved from this 'inescapable' 'problem'. Learning to accept your necessary human limits on the amount of whatever seemingly-infinitely plentiful resource (information, music, beer, &c) you will 'consume' in your lifetime is an essential part of growing up and dealing with your shit in a reasonably adult-like fashion, but that isn't some new thing, and it's definitely not a respectable way to make decisions about your consumer-life, watching reruns and whatever random culture-detrius washes up on your info-shore.
Wired editor Chris Anderson is keeping a 'blog on its way to becoming a book' on The Long Tail, a useful concept for thinking about an internet-enabled world o' plenty in which the growth (and profits) have shifted from the big blockbusters that everybody sees down to the "millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream." It's kind of hard to explain and only indirectly relevant to this already-diffuse post, so check out this introductory piece from last year for a more in-depth explanation, it's probably worth your while...
Anyway, Mr. Anderson believes that a key characteristic of the long tail is that the internet is kind of full of shit, and in this shit he finds the solution to our dilemma:
The Long Tail is indeed full of crap. But it's also full of works of refined brilliance and depth--and an awful lot in between. Exactly the same can be said of the Web itself. Ten years ago, people complained that there was a lot of junk on the Internet and, sure enough, any casual surf quickly confirmed that. Then along came search engines to help pull some signal from the noise and finally Google, tapping the wisdom of the crowd itself to turn a mass of incoherence into the closest thing to an oracle the world has ever seen.
On a store shelf or in any other limited means of distribution, the ratio of good to bad matters because it's a zero sum game. Space for one eliminates space for the other. Prominence for one obscures the other. If there are ten crappy toys for each good one in the aisle, you'll think poorly of the toy store and be discouraged from browsing. Likewise it's no fun to flip through bin after bin of CDs if you haven't heard of any of them.
But where you have unlimited shelf space, it's an infinite sum game. The billions of crappy web pages about whatever are not a problem in the way that billions of crappy CDs on the Tower Records shelves would be. Inventory is "non-rivalrous" and the ratio of good to bad is simply a signal-to-noise problem, solvable with information tools.
Which is to say it's not much of a problem at all. You just need better filters, such as recommendations and good search engines. The fact that screens 10 and beyond of your Google search results are unhelpful doesn't matters because screens 1-3 are so useful. The noise is still out there, but Google allows you to effectively ignore it. Filters rule!
Filters aren't just Google, Amazon, Googlezon, whatever - blogs are one of the finest group filtering tools going right now, allowing blog-writers and -readers to effectively develop personal filters reflecting their own idiosyncratic interests that can be shared and linked to those of overlapping netizens. I find the personal aspect of blogs-as-filters really compelling - while the aggregated interests of a larger, anonymous group (a la Google or Amazon) are obviously useful, I love getting my filtering 'through the eyes' of other individuals, like me. There's a lot of unwritten information you can glean from seeing someone develop an interest/theme on a blog, from how it fits in with previous interests/themes, from how the arguments interact with competing views, &c, &c, &c, &c...
Oh, gotta get some lunch, sorry if this seems a bit scattershot - more blogging reflections later tonight/tomorrow - May 26 is a 'special day' for this little blog here!