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This one is going out late; I was writing it late last night after getting back from a club night, but was too tired, so left it and went to sleep.
The long tail is a situation where in a dataset you have a lot of items a long way from the mean. It's mostly associated with online retailers like Amazon, where they can afford to have a few copies of a huge range of books in stock, and thus be able to quickly ship them whenever someone orders them, whereas bricks and mortar stores have to stock a lot of the things they think will sell regularly and well. There's a lot of sales available to Amazon because they can reach a lot of people, and thus sell a lot of those long tail books.
I think the same is true about the people I socialise with.
There's a certain level of that which is inevitable; as you go through life, your overall social pools grow, as does your control over your life (and thus your ability to spend more time with the people you get on with and less with those you don't).
But there's also a way the internet and other things that make communication easier have increased the potential to do this. If I'm sitting in front of a computer that's connected to the internet (something I spend a perhaps worrying amount of my life doing), then I'm probably connected to several IRC channels. I'm not paying constant attention to them, and there can be hours long stretches when no-one says anything in channel, but if I want to chat with friends, they're there. It allows random little chats about shared hobbies or other things we find interesting, and gives me a bunch of people I can bounce ideas off. There have been other little things that come off of it; I've had a friend from an Exalted IRC I'm part of join a tabletop game I'm in, and enjoyed meeting and drinking cider with an American I was chatting about Exalted with on twitter, when he was in London for a few weeks.
Beyond that, the ease of commmunication makes it easier to organise things. Whilst I'm somewhat failing at actually sorting out who's coming to my birthday party of going to see We Will Rock You, the internet certainly makes it easier to organise that. The growth in both 'fest' LARPS, and what I'd call 'niche LARP' (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dbsurfeit, Bunni and I were trying to come up with good name for them when we were chatting in Oxford recently, and IIRC that was my favourite) — stuff like Death Unto Darkness, 1318, Ornithocracy and similar. They have more specific setting and approach to things than the local linears I've seen or heard about, and they take quite a lot of elements from the fest LARPs and make them work on a much smaller scale.
Those certainly come in large part because of LARPers of like mind meeting at Fest LARPs, and organising stuff together, but I think it's also because of the ease of communicating and organising things, co-ordinating people to all come together in whatever place. Also, because being able to chat with them over the internet reminds us that we have all these good friends that we only see 4-6 times a year, and wouldn't it be nice to see them more often than that?
Speaking of which, another thing with my LARP friends that is aided by this sort of communication is purely social events; there's a monthly London meetup (which due to its timing, I rarely make), and when we've had people coming into London we've organised fairly well attended get togethers with just a days notice. And last night, I was at Shenanigans, an alternative clubnight, run byzeke_hubris and various other awesome people. And lots of people I know were there. Quite a lot of them don't live in London, and came down specifically for it. Again, the ease of communication makes bringing people together for this sort of thing much easier.
So, what am I actually saying in this somewhat rambling post? That the internet makes it easier to find both things and people you enjoy, and to spend as much of your time as possible with awesome people, and doing things you enjoy. Sure, we'd do alright without it; look at all the people that did so. But in the same way you can hunt down those books/DVDs/whatever that you're really after on Amazon, you can find the people and pastimes that you find really awesome via the more connected world we now live in.
The long tail is a situation where in a dataset you have a lot of items a long way from the mean. It's mostly associated with online retailers like Amazon, where they can afford to have a few copies of a huge range of books in stock, and thus be able to quickly ship them whenever someone orders them, whereas bricks and mortar stores have to stock a lot of the things they think will sell regularly and well. There's a lot of sales available to Amazon because they can reach a lot of people, and thus sell a lot of those long tail books.
I think the same is true about the people I socialise with.
There's a certain level of that which is inevitable; as you go through life, your overall social pools grow, as does your control over your life (and thus your ability to spend more time with the people you get on with and less with those you don't).
But there's also a way the internet and other things that make communication easier have increased the potential to do this. If I'm sitting in front of a computer that's connected to the internet (something I spend a perhaps worrying amount of my life doing), then I'm probably connected to several IRC channels. I'm not paying constant attention to them, and there can be hours long stretches when no-one says anything in channel, but if I want to chat with friends, they're there. It allows random little chats about shared hobbies or other things we find interesting, and gives me a bunch of people I can bounce ideas off. There have been other little things that come off of it; I've had a friend from an Exalted IRC I'm part of join a tabletop game I'm in, and enjoyed meeting and drinking cider with an American I was chatting about Exalted with on twitter, when he was in London for a few weeks.
Beyond that, the ease of commmunication makes it easier to organise things. Whilst I'm somewhat failing at actually sorting out who's coming to my birthday party of going to see We Will Rock You, the internet certainly makes it easier to organise that. The growth in both 'fest' LARPS, and what I'd call 'niche LARP' (
dbsurfeit, Bunni and I were trying to come up with good name for them when we were chatting in Oxford recently, and IIRC that was my favourite) — stuff like Death Unto Darkness, 1318, Ornithocracy and similar. They have more specific setting and approach to things than the local linears I've seen or heard about, and they take quite a lot of elements from the fest LARPs and make them work on a much smaller scale.Those certainly come in large part because of LARPers of like mind meeting at Fest LARPs, and organising stuff together, but I think it's also because of the ease of communicating and organising things, co-ordinating people to all come together in whatever place. Also, because being able to chat with them over the internet reminds us that we have all these good friends that we only see 4-6 times a year, and wouldn't it be nice to see them more often than that?
Speaking of which, another thing with my LARP friends that is aided by this sort of communication is purely social events; there's a monthly London meetup (which due to its timing, I rarely make), and when we've had people coming into London we've organised fairly well attended get togethers with just a days notice. And last night, I was at Shenanigans, an alternative clubnight, run by
zeke_hubris and various other awesome people. And lots of people I know were there. Quite a lot of them don't live in London, and came down specifically for it. Again, the ease of communication makes bringing people together for this sort of thing much easier.So, what am I actually saying in this somewhat rambling post? That the internet makes it easier to find both things and people you enjoy, and to spend as much of your time as possible with awesome people, and doing things you enjoy. Sure, we'd do alright without it; look at all the people that did so. But in the same way you can hunt down those books/DVDs/whatever that you're really after on Amazon, you can find the people and pastimes that you find really awesome via the more connected world we now live in.
