Long Tail Quotes

“Yes, apocalypse. We've had that over and over. But we always survived. We're still here. And we'll still be here, even if the power and the radios don't come back on and we never see any white people again.”
― Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow

“Today we’re not so much fragmenting as we are re-forming along different dimensions. These days our watercoolers are increasingly virtual; there are many different ones; and the people who gather around them are self-selected. Rather than being loosely connected with people thanks to superficial mass-cultural overlaps, we have the ability to be more strongly tied to just as many if not more people with a shared affinity for niche culture.

Although the decline of mainstream cultural institutions may result in some people turning to echo chambers of like-minded views, I suspect that over time the power of human curiosity combined with near-infinite access to information will tend to make most people more open-minded, not less.

As much as the blockbuster era seems like the natural state of things, it is, as we’ve seen, mostly an artifact of late-twentieth-century broadcast technologies. Before then most culture was local; in the future it will be affinity-based and massively parallel. Mass culture may fade, but common culture will not. We will still share our culture with others, but not with everyone.”
― Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

“I believe the beachhead and the long-tail will collapse on each other. I’m calling it the log-mill strategy. One thing is cut down to create many little things until the little things become many big things.”
― Richie Norton