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The Urban Long Tail

Like many of you, I suspect, I'm eagerly looking forward to Chris Anderson's upcoming book, The Long Tail -- partially because his pre-book blog has been so interesting, but also because Chris is one of the sharpest and least doctrinaire thinkers that I know. I've been following the Long Tail debates from afar, in much the same way that I followed the original power law debates that Clay Shirky started. But I've put together a new column for Discover that looks at the long tail question in the context of cities. This is an angle that I haven't seen explored to date; up to now, in fact, I think the long tail premise has a tacit anti-urban bias to it, since it used to require big city scale to find obscure long tail books or albums that are now readily available to anyone with an Internet connection. But some long tail services can't be Fedexed or downloaded -- people, for instance. I started thinking about all of this thanks to the ingenious Dodgeball service, created by two former students of mine. (I had nothing to do with the idea for the company itself, which is too bad for me, since it's just been bought by Google.) At any rate, you can read the whole article, but the main argument is this:

Dodgeball suggests an intriguing twist on long tail theory. As the technology increasingly allows us to satisfy more eclectic needs, any time those needs require a physical presence –– whether it's sipping your cold soup or meeting your crush in a bar –– the logic of the long tail will favor urban environments over less densely populated ones. If you're downloading the latest album from an obscure Scandinavian doo-wop group, geography doesn't matter: It's just as easy to get the bits delivered to you in the middle of Wyoming as it is in the middle of Manhattan. But if you're trying to meet up with other fans of Scandinavian doo-wop, you'll have more luck in Manhattan.

Six Feet Under, 2001-2005

One of the weird ironies of the past six months is that I've never written or talked so much about television before in my life, and yet -- thanks to the "content agnostic" argument of Everything Bad -- I've had almost nothing to say about the aesthetic or cultural merits of any of the shows I've been discussing. But I can't let the series finale of Six Feet Under on Sunday night pass by without a few closing thoughts about the show.

I've felt since season two that Six Feet, at its best, was just about as good as anything that's ever been on American TV. I sometimes felt that the show suffered slightly from its creators not being fully aware of what made it so good, a perspective problem that led it down some unnecessarily dark alleys. (Literally in the case of the notorious torture episode with David.) Because it was first and foremost a show about death, I think Alan Ball et al. assumed that people were tuning in because of all the darkness. But I think the true beauty of the show was its weird hopefulness in the face of all that darkness. What kept me so attached to the show were those little glimmers, like the evolving friendship between David and Nate in the first seasons. When the show faltered, I think its problems stemmed from its growing too dependent on the gloom -- on the madness and murder and suicides -- and losing that very careful balance between dark and light that it had at its best moments.

A few other thoughts on what made it so original:

Death. Obviously it's a show about death, but I think some of the commentary about this has it slightly wrong. You always hear that Six Feet was so refreshing because the rest of the culture is so resolute in its death-denying ways. But I don't think that's right exactly -- death is far more common on your average television drama than it is in most of our lives. (Think CSI, Law and Order, Sopranos, etc.) What's rare is the willingness to think about the aftermath of death, which is the world that Six Feet explored so powerfully. People are always dying on the screen. What you never see is what their surviving family looks like two months later.

L.A. I've always thought that it was a brilliant and hugely original portrait of Los Angeles, though I've had a lot of resistance to the idea when I've made that argument to people in conversation. Part of the problem seems to be the Fisher house itself, which is so perversely non-L.A. that people can't seem to get around it. But so many of the other details seem exactly right to me, and entirely fresh -- aspects of the city that never make it into the standard Beverly Hills cliches: Claire's art school scene, Brenda's burned out, vaguely cultish psychologist parents, the sixties holdouts around Ruth's sister, Rico's middle-class hispanic family. Six Feet's relationship to LA is particularly striking, because HBO now has three (!!) separate shows set in the exact same agents-and-cell-phones milieu that we've seen a thousand times since Tony Roberts moved to LA in Annie Hall. So I was pleased to read Alan Ball's comments to Heather Havrilesky in Salon this week: "... we tried very hard to capture the kind of surreal, hazy air, baked-out existential feel of Los Angeles instead of the palm tree one that you see in movies, but also all the back roads where the paint is flaking, and most of Los Angeles is really, really ugly. We tried to capture that, and just the weirdness of living in Los Angeles, especially the weirdness of living in L.A. if you're not in the entertainment industry."

Grunge. This is a subtler element, but I've always felt that Six Feet was one of the very few popular narratives that internalized whatever cultural shift happened with Nirvana in the early nineties. Both Nate and Claire always seemed like distinctly post-Kurt-Cobain characters to me -- outsiders intrigued by drugs and contemptuous of mainstream society who were at the same time resolutely NOT hippies. This seems to be a somewhat conscious theme for Ball as well -- when we meet Nate in the first episode, he's working at a health food co-op in Seattle, and one of the last flashbacks we see of him is his giving Claire her first joint while grieving Kurt Cobain's suicide.

Drugs. Has there ever been a show with such constant drug use, and so little moralizing about it?

Finally, Nate. Heather Havrilesky is hands down my favorite TV critic right now, but it seems to me she has a bizarre vendetta against Nate. I loved the exchange in the Alan Ball interview where she asks a few questions that work under the assumption that Nate is a loathsome bastard, and Ball responds with what I think is a much more accurate assessment of what was so striking about his character: "I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for Nate and his desire to get to the root of things and be authentic. And I think he is always [Pauses] he's difficult to describe because he's so complicated. Probably what is at the root of a lot of his less than noble actions is that, while not serving those who he's committed to well, there's something admirable, on some level, about still having this childlike hope of finding the right thing. Because there is the notion of, you know, you grow up, you lose your illusions, whatever, and you have to do that to become a functioning adult in society, but there is something fundamental that gets lost, a kind of joy. So I find him to be a deeply tragic character and a deeply romantic character. Whether I would say he's just a garden-variety asshole, no, I don't think so at all." That mix seems totally original to me (particularly when you factor in the post-grunge specifics), just as David's character, in its different way, seemed totally original. You watched those two and thought: I've never quite seen someone like this on television before. Claire was equally hypnotic to watch, but I always felt that her character had evolved out of My So-Called Life, so it was just a tad more familiar.

There's more to say, but I should probably just let go. I had a genuine feeling last night watching the finale that I was going to miss these people, which I can honestly say I've never had with a television show before. I suspect I'm not alone in feeling that way.

Speaking News

Just a quick update on some news around here: I have switched lecture agents, and will now be represented by the Leigh Bureau. Giving talks is steadily approaching 50% of my job, and it's something that I really enjoy doing, so if you're putting together a conference or doing some kind of corporate event that you think I could be helpful with, drop Wesley Neff a note at the Leigh Bureau. His email is WesN at Leighbureau dot com. (But please -- only contact Wes if you're interested in having me do a speech somewhere -- for media interviews you should contact the Riverhead publicity department, and if you want me to write something, you can just email me directly.) Between now and November, I literally have about fifteen speeches to deliver, some of which are open to the public, so I'll try to keep the site updated with news about these events as they come up.

In terms of media appearances, I'm going to be on Charlie Rose sometime this week or next. (We taped a very fun conversation last week.) I'll try to post a note when I know the exact air date, but we're going to be away for most of the next week with spotty net access, so I might not get a chance.

Finally, it's very satisfying to see more mainstream publications coming around to the "games might be good for you" argument. The Economist cover story from last week has this subtitle: "Critics of video games say they encourage addiction and violence, but research does not support the claim." And Tara Parker-Pope's health column in Tuesday Wall Street Journal ends with this very sensible piece of advice:

Play the games yourself. Parents who do take the time to learn about the games children play will be surprised at how much skill it requires -- and how much children enjoy watching their parents struggle to play. "It's no different than anything else children do, a parent should be involved," says Dorothy Salonius-Pasternak, a Harvard research associate who has studied the impact of videogames on children. "And it can be a really positive experience for children to develop a level of mastery that their parents don't have."

Two Things I Would Like

Anybody out there know of an easy way to export my MovableType blog entries to text files? I would like a nice big Spotlight-friendly folder of text files, each one being a blog entry. I'd like the title, date, and primary text included, but have no interest in all the other info -- categories, comments, trackbacks, etc. (It'd also be nice to have the title of the document by the title of the blog entry, not some weird numerical thing.) It seems like the only default export option from MovableType itself gives you a giant file with all the info included. Surely there's got to be an easy way to do a more streamlined version?

Speaking of Spotlight, I never got around to doing a writeup on OS X Tiger given all the early Everything Bad craziness I was dealing with. The short report is that it's very nice, though a little less stable, but Spotlight is everything it's cracked up to be and more. It is easily the most profound change in the way I explore my personal information since the original Mac OS came out -- I basically just search for everything now: files, messages, applications, etc. I spend almost no time browsing through folders.

The one thing that's missing that I think would be pretty easy to do, and would make a big difference, is the ability to Spotlight your browser cache. I'm constantly thinking to myself: where was that article I just read yesterday about, say, teen drug use stats? Right now, the easiest way to retrieve it is to just reconstruct the original search I did in Google, which is sometimes easy to do if I remember the search query exactly and the page was one of the top results. But it would be just so much easier to do it through Spotlight. Those cached files are just sitting on my hard drive anyway -- why isn't Spotlight searching them?

A Close Reading

Given the extended debate going on here about violence and games, I thought it might make sense to take a closer look at one of these studies, and walk through the problems that I have in more detail. Thanks to Mike S. for pointing towards this 2004 study from the Journal Of Adolescence, "The effects of violent video game habits on adolescent hostility, aggressive behaviors, and school performance."

Now, at first glance, this looks like a pretty convincing case: they looked actual kids playing actual games at home (not in a lab) and tracked instances of actual aggression -- in-school fighting, or arguing with teachers. They also tried to get some sense of levels of hostility in the kids irrespective of their gameplay. Turns out that gaming didn't really impact teacher arguments, but there was a statistically significant relationship between violent video game play and fighting in school. You can slice it a couple of different ways -- and I welcome comments from folks better trained at interpreting multiple regression models -- but it basically looks like a kid who has a heavy exposure to violent video games is about 10-20% more likely to have engaged in a physical fight over the course of a school year.

Now, is it possible that the study is just picking up on the fact that kids who like to fight in schools also prefer violent video games? Here's what the authors have to say:

Are young adolescents more hostile and aggressive because they expose themselves to
media violence, or do previously hostile adolescents prefer violent media? Due to the correlational
nature of this study, we cannot answer this question directly. Some studies have suggested that
there is a bidirectional relationship (see Donnerstein, Slaby, and Eron (1994) for a review). GAM
predicts a bidirectional effect, in which personological variables such as hostility affect media
habits, which in turn reinforce and can modify the personological variables.

On the other hand, they do point out that in their findings kids who have low hostility ratings who nonetheless play a lot of violent video games are actually more likely to engage in school fights than a hostile kid who has little exposure to games. So it would seem from those numbers that the games are contributing something to the likelihood of school fighting.

Now, if you stop right there, and assume that -- as the authors do -- there is at least some pre-existing selection criteria that causes hostile kids to seek out violent games, what's the study really telling us? I'd say it's this: if you're a parent of a teenager, and you dramatically reduce his exposure to violent video games, you're reducing the odds of him getting into a fight over the next year by about 10%. That sounds plausible to me -- good to know, but certainly not cause for a national moral panic about video games. And as always, the authors don't tell us what other forms of aggressive recreation -- football, cops and robbers, hockey -- would look like if they were subjected to the same scrutiny. (They do have comparisons to TV watching and reading, however.)

But here's where it gets really interesting. The authors also looked at the question of "parental involvement" -- whether parents oversaw the purchasing of games, evaluated ratings, and monitored the amount of time spent playing the games. As you might expect, the authors found that this parental oversight had a positive impact, or as they put it:

Parent involvement in video game habits appears to act as a protective factor. Parental limits to
violent video game play are negatively correlated with fights and arguments, and positively
correlated with school performance.

Sounds intuitive enough, right? If violent games lead to school violence, then if the parents reduce the amount of violent game exposure, school violence will go down.

But that's not all they found. Here's the key passage:

In fact, statistically controlling for respondent sex, hostility, weekly amount
of video game play, and video game violence exposure, the frequency with which parents monitor
their adolescents' video game habits added a significant amount of predictive power when
predicting physical fights.

Read that one over again just to get it right. Imagine you have two groups of kids: they're playing the exact same number of hours each week, with the exact same levels of violence in the games. Only one group has parents who helped select and monitor the games, and the other didn't. The group with involved parents is significantly less likely to get into fights than the group with uninvolved parents. Even though the games they're playing are exactly the same.

This is where the whole study starts to unravel for me -- or rather, it starts to look like a study about the connection between parental engagement and school violence, instead of a study about video games. Think about it this way: these kids who have heavy exposure to violent video games -- their parents are letting them play at least 3-4 hours of these games a day. Isn't it reasonable to assume that there might be something else going on in a household where the kids are left unsupervised to play violent games with that frequency?

This is like doing a study of kids who have to make TV dinners for themselves each night because their parents or caregivers are never home. I suspect you might find that TV-dinner-making kids are also more likely to get into fights at school. Does that mean that TV dinners are a cause of school violence? Of course not. TV dinners are a sign that something else is wrong in the household, just as excessive violent gameplay is a sign that something else is wrong the household.

So what's the bottom line of the study for parents? Given that the authors concede that some of the connection between violent gameplay and school violence has to do with pre-existing personality, and given what they say about the importance of parental involvement, I'd say the general message is: if you're an involved parent with a kid who doesn't have any major aggression issues, then playing some violent video games isn't going to make much of a difference either way.

But somehow I doubt that's what they put in the press release.