Your “Three-And-A-Half-Minute Sweet Spots of Web-Time”
We live in a digital environment characterized by increasing information overload and attention deprivation and, like it or not, we are captives in an evolving web-based and web-defined pop culture from which few can escape. The notion of social capital generally refers to the value of our human relationships but remains largely a default metaphor for the value of networking that can’t be quantified. Social capital wants to be measured, but we don’t know how to do it. Why is measuring social capital according to “sweet spots” important? How we deal with these sweet spots may well change our lives, both individually and collectively.
Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, observed several decades ago that information that wants to be free, becomes free. And Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, presents a compelling case in his recent Wired magazine article (to become a book in 2009) that in a world driven by ”freeconomics”, music that wants to be free, becomes free. Likewise, social capital that wants to be measured, becomes measured; and we can harness all of these accelerating forces of self-organization to our advantage if we can identify and use the full power of our most effective sweet spots of time on the web.
Before we can measure social capital in our digital culture, at least three elements–networks, content, and time–must work together in harmony so that social capital can be easily created, stored, and exchanged. On the web, time is the element most taken-for-granted in the exercise to establish measurable values. The web is basically a series of network connections between transmitting and receiving nodes. Every second that you are on the web, you are receiving or transmitting signals and noise. It is likely that more than 99% of the time, from your perspective, you are on the receiving end of mostly noise and only occasionally content that is relevant to you. You create social capital on the web only when you transmit what is considered relevant content by a defined number of receivers in one or more interconnecting networks.
Time is the only true common denominator that we all have in equal measure and value most in life. During your entire life, your effective web-time will likely be less than a million minutes (say, an average of 1 hour a day X 365 days X 40 years = 876,000 minutes). Although we often hear predictions about the profound impact that the web will have on our lives, very few actually calculate how much time we, as individuals, will actually be on the web based on reasonable assumptions. In both receiving and transmitting web content, 876,000 minutes of web-time is not a lot–so use those minutes wisely
Clay Shirky, a long-time student of web-dynamics, suggested in his widely read and discussed article on ”Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality” that the web cascades according to a power law, largely driven by supernodes. Supernodes are connectors of networks (rather than individuals), who replicate content according to a multiplication table rather counting fingers and toes. The filtering function of supernodes creates by design or result a selective pattern of web-usage that has now become known as “the long tail”. In order to participate in nature’s ordering of her complexity, you should strive to be a supernode yourself or attract other supernodes as often as possible by creating relevant web-content using the “sweet spots” of web-time that I propose are best positioned to pass the de facto filter test of our time-constrained pop culture.
The sweet spot of digital data that “wants to be” multiplied (rather than discarded as noise or merely added in onesy/twosy fashion) through network connections is content that can be experienced in discrete units of time during a unique web session. I suggest that 30 seconds is too short and 10 minutes is too long to maintain your attention on the web when you are in “time-conscious” mode. Because your total lifetime experience on the web(!) is probably less than 900,000 minutes as demonstrated above, you want to do everything in a hurry (to just get the gist and move on, maybe return later, more likely not, always chasing the new, new thing). Based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, a more reasonable period of time to transmit and receive web-values in our fast-paced digital culture is somewhere between 2 and 5 minutes. Let’s split the difference, for now, and say that 3.5 minutes may be the “optimum” period - to listen to one song or read a blog that has the potential for “accelerated self-organization” (which is just another way to describe the operation of power laws in nature). Web-content packaged in short sweet spots of time that are just long enough are amenable to multiplication rather addition (geometric vs. arithmetic growth).
The web-time needed to listen to an artist’s album or a fan’s playlist with appreciation, or to read a detailed article with understanding, is too long and, let’s face it, this will rarely happen. Why would this be so? Even utilizing three-and-a-half-minute “optimal web-units” means that you only have time to check out about 250,000 sweet spots of comprehensible content (both good and bad) on the web during your entire life! [876,000/3.5 = 250,286]. I’ll wager that because cyberspace is infinite, you thought you would have boundless time to explore it and find all the good stuff to your heart and mind’s delight. If more than 99% of your time on the web is receiving noise or content not relevant to you (see point 2 above), the sweet spots of the “good stuff” may be even a small fraction of these, say, 250,000 optimal web-units during your entire life. Holy Smoke! How do we change the math?
As a transmitting node on the web, you have only about three-and-a-half-minutes to have your music heard, blog read, or media presentation absorbed to hook a receiving node to repeat it, save it, or pass it on. Clearly, just saying “check out my stuff” is not enough. At the same time, “hooking” a receiving node or two does not trigger the multiplier effect initiated by supernodes. Supernodes perform a key role in measuring social capital by acting as de facto filters for the good stuff that comes packaged in sweet spots of web-time.
Due to the dynamics of networks, all these sweet spots of content that “hook” (think, X) are being transmitted and received simultaneously in mind-boggling complexity with the “opposite of X” (that is, web-content that is essentially noise to be filtered rather than replicated). In this milieu, what web participants connect and replicate in actual fact are the “sweet spots that hook.” These sweep spots are capable of being measured as optimal web-units and, thus, are measured. This process of accelerated self-organization seems to be circular, but don’t worry about it. Just remember that the optimal elements of social capital on the web (based upon the constituent framing elements of time, content, and connectivity) self-emerge and we will deserve the future that we create.
Your job on the net, if you choose to accept it, is to find your own sweet spots–both as a creator and supernode filter.
My three-and-a-half-minutes are up. Unless, of course, you choose to re-read this, save it, or pass it on.
Craig Finn of the Hold Steady once remarked that “everyone’s a critic, but most people are DJs.” He was right then and even more so now, as the potentially unqualified force their musical tastes on everyone within earshot.
DJing used to be a thing that required a good bit of skill, and most of all, the time, the taste, and life experience to gather a decent enough record collection to get started. iPod mixers, laptops, and Serato put an end to that, and now, with Pacemaker, even the basic requirements for multiple pieces of gear are gone. This handheld device, currently available in Europe, makes it remarkably easy for anyone (with $825 USD to spare) to get into the grind within minutes.
A color digital display, two-channel mixing, and a 120GB internal hard drive are just some of the features the Pacemaker offers, not to mention the ability to allow users to change the pitch, beatmatch, loop, cut, stutter, and add a variety of effects to regular old MP3s, all on a device roughly the size of a TV remote. Pacemaker.net, the website of the product in question, allows owners to upload their own mixes to the site directly, in a social networking interface that connects users with one another.
The potential for Pacemaker to be a revolution in public performance as well as DJing remains to be seen, but it does recall the UK television series “Nathan Barley”, and its titular hipster predicting this piece of gear by about three or four years. Although his was a cell phone as well. No word on whether Pacemaker will offer voicemail capabilities, but the thought of forcing anyone who calls you to check out your latest techno mix is either the next best thing, or a reason to start writing letters again.
Google Me When I’m Gone
If you’ve ever gone back as an adult and visited the place where you grew up, it is usually different somehow, in the immediate physical state, from the place in your memories. Google Maps Streetview raises the possibility of eliminating some of the discrepancies between your memory of a place and the actuality of it. Rather than you having to deal with only a few of these instances of there being two versions of the same place, there is now street after street of evidence that contradicts your memory–irrefutable images that signal the uncertainty of the pieces of your life that you think back on to realize yourself.
So, if Google tampers with your memory and makes you call into question the certainties of places and occurrences that you reference in order to form your identity, is it possible they can show you who you will become or what will happen next? They have already reached in, by altering elements of your self, and meddled with your time-space chain. Given their higher vantage point, shouldn’t they be capable of seeing further down the road?
Places that have dwelt in your memory over long stretches are not necessarily replaced when exposure to the current reality doesn’t mesh with your memory. You simply remember them as separate–one place that dwells completely intact and safe in your memory, and the new place that conflicts with that memory but that you are obliged to acknowledge. So you make two places for the same house. Even if after twenty years you were to move back into a childhood home to live, the version of that house in your memory would still remain, as well as a version of the house on the ground where you live now: two distinct places that are both derived directly from the very same matter and of identical geographic coordinates.
Subjective personal memory is a diminishing entity. People will remember things from exactly the same angle. You are rock climbing and something happens–somebody falls or drops the bag of energy bars. Your memory of the event from your subjective angle will be challenged by the video from the hat camera of your tech-nerd climbing buddy. Services such as Streetview can provide our subjective memory for us; the problem is that it will be identical to everyone else’s. Visuals are over-recorded, but there is a trade off. While video of seemingly every event on earth is available, snapshots from digital cameras are preserved on a highly selectively basis. Concerned with disk space, we erase shot after shot that is not framed just so, or where somebody made a face, or thinks they look too fat or whatever. With film, however, these outtakes live on for posterity and there is sometimes something to learn from them. For instance, those two creepy guys sitting in the car outside your house in Omaha last night are also in the background of this picture, where you look fat, taken on the beach in Mazatlan.
Looking at my small row home from behind a telephone pole I have to cursor right to see around the pole to my front door and left to see my front window. At first, the pictures on Streetview (judging from the dearth of traffic and the sun’s low position in the eastern sky) appear to be shot in the early morning. But now the images are from a later part of the day and my street is well into the dark of night. There’s no one anywhere on the street.
Now someone is in the corner of the frame, to the left, a few houses down the block. He wasn’t there two nights ago. And tonight he is closer to my door than last night. If I lean right again to peer around the pole I can see he is now at my door. His arm is reaching toward it. I hear knocking downstairs.
If this has already happened, if the pictures have already been taken, is what I do next even optional? If I start tearing along the Streetviews of my neighborhood, can I find the van this guy got out of? If, when I get back to the view of my house, I am laying dead across the threshold of my front door, is that now how I have to remember my house, and my self? Am I already dead and don’t know it, and Google is that little kid in Sixth Sense who keeps trying to tell Bruce Willis that he’s dead and it takes him forever to get the message?
Long has written about sports, news, music and travel under various names and for various publications, including the Buffalo News, The Beast, Blue Dog Press, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the New York Sports Express, among others. He served a short stint as the guitar player in the Philadelphia metal-hop band, Incognegro. He also played guitar and sang on recordings of the Laughing Hyenas and The Unsane. He has dabbled in documentary and music video. He is a veteran of the US Navy and a graduate of the University of Houston. He lives in Philadelphia. You can google the rest.
Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, consistently adds insight on how to cope with our rapidly evolving digital culture. Since survival in the “long tail” environment is a major concern of indie artists, it is not surprising that Kelly’s web-article on “1000 True Fans“, first posted on March 4, 2008, has gone viral in the blogosphere. If you are not part of the group that caused this phenomenon, you should certainly read the article now because it is relevant to you as a passionate stakeholder in the future of music.
I view with wonder both the adulation and controversy created by Kelly’s article. Its title, “1000 True Fans”, is only a metaphorical benchmark, yet it is precisely because it is a powerful and easy to grasp symbol that many fail to get Kelly’s basic premise, which is reflected in his simple and true statement, “Direct fans are best.” The key word to tag here is direct.
Kelly frames his 1000 True Fans formulation as follows: if your True Fans (and 1000 is a feasible number) spend one day’s wages per year of, say, $100 in support of what you do as an artist, that sums up to $100,000 per year–which is a living for most after deducting modest expenses. Kelly stresses that the key challenge for an artist is to maintain direct contact with their True Fans who can provide them with a living through multiple revenue streams if they “cultivate” the “direct support using new technology”. These “diehard fans” will be surrounded by “concentric circles of Lesser Fans.”
While Kelly’s perspective certainly resonates in broad terms, $100,000 per year would be a dream come true for most struggling artists with day jobs and who are on the verge of giving up on their dreams of making any money at all. The contra-Kelly view that $100,000 per annum is not an easy task to achieve (in acquisition or maintenance) is well presented in Scalzi’s article on “The Problem of 1000 True Fans“, which artists and music fans should also read. However, most critics overlook the important point that Kelly uses the “formalized” term “1000 True Fans” to represent a process or path rather than a specific result. As Kelly states, the “actual number is not critical”, it’s the “mid-way haven” where you “make a living instead of a fortune” that is “a much saner destination [for artists-in-the-making] to hope for”.
So let’s take Kelly’s notion of using technology to obtain the direct support of True Fans to find a good “home for creatives in between poverty and stardom” and break it down into some workable baby-steps first. That is, before artists give up their day jobs, let’s look at the process to make, say, $1000 per year, to see if we can find the “sweet spot” of focus as artists try to create aesthetic values that should, somehow, generate a return commensurate with the value created.
First, consider the following range of possibilities on how to make a thousand bucks. All of these formulations are based on some simple mathematics and immutable economics that markets clear according to supply and demand for value created:
1.) 10 fans x $100 = $1000 [this reflects on a smaller scale the “one-to-one business model” of “direct contact” that Kelly favors to acquire True Fans, defined as “someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce”.]
2.) 100 fans x $10 = $1000 [this reflects the “one-to-few business model”, being the inner-circle of Lesser Fans in Kelly’s formulation of “concentric circles” on their way to becoming True Fans willing to part with more money as more value-added direct connections are made. NB: this was the “album-centric model of the major labels (multiplied by millions of fans rather than 100) in the good ol’ days (or bad ol’ days depending on your perspective).]
3.) 1000 fans x $1 = $1000 [this reflects the “one-to-many business model”, being Kelly’s concurrent process of nurturing “many more Lesser Fans” as you acquire True Fans. NB: this is the core of the “one-price fits all” iTunes model currently pushed by Apple (multiplied by millions rather than 1000) but morphing as Apple makes its real margins on iPod sales.]
4.) 10,000 fans x 10 cents = $1000 [this reflects the “many-to-many business model”, that Kelly suggests may be higher up “the narrow and unlikely peaks” of the long tail. NB: this “marginal pricing to zero” is essentially the environment of “music for free” that is currently forcing artists to search for other business models that generate, somehow, returns commensurate with value extended.]
If you have earned your Master of Business Reality, you will note in the foregoing formulations the countervailing trade-offs between generating “high margins” ($100) and “high velocity” ($1) as the primary revenue driver. But, let’s face it, margins vs. velocity is only a theoretical framing exercise for most artists. It is exceedingly difficult to get anyone to part with a hundred bucks, except maybe family and close friends. Equally, when artists are just starting out, it is difficult to get a thousand folks to part with a buck. And we know that even when downloads are free, an artist will likely not get 10,000 people to take them. Where then, indeed, do you find the “sweet spot” of your focus if any and all of the foregoing business models seem to be difficult to achieve for artists just getting started or artists who have always struggled to make a financial breakthrough? I believe that even on a smaller scale of revenue possibilities, Kelly has the right answer.
For indie artists, the key take-aways from Kelly’s article (or what he calls the “gist of 1000 True Fans”) are his observations [emphasis added], “To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly. Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans…the technologies of connection and small-time manufacturing make this circle [of direct contact, feedback, and love] possible.”
What Kelly is saying in his prescient and now famous article is that even within the long tail environment fostered by new technologies, there are practical opportunities for artists to make a living by focusing on “the heads within the tails” rather than the stardom of the “heads within the heads.” This is accomplished by using the power of “the very technology that creates the long tail” to establish direct rather than indirect connections. The reason this sounds familiar is that it is the very same reason we are all here.