Ever Get the Feeling of De Ja Vu???

EVER GET "The feeling of De Ja Vu"
EVER GET "The feeling of De Ja Vu"
EVER GET "The feeling of De Ja Vu"

"We are no longer in a period when industry was born. We are in a period of monopolies, trusts and multi-national corporations" - the mainstream effect.

Too often society has fallen victim to the propaganda machine for western ideology. However, it is not just any form of media it is the monopolies hogging mass media (The mainstream). It is manufactured history that is legitimised through popular modern legends told in an industrialised, dominating form of entertainment.

How many times are we as consumers subject to this machine of meaningless, stale, regurgitated consumer crap, simply because anything with any worth or personal interest could not be sort after due to the barriers that were in place before the introduction of open source software???

The development of open source software has opened up opportunities for ALL!

For years, consumers have been spoon feed with what Paris Hilton describes as What's Hot and What's Not, products that are only appealing and available in the mainstream market.

Today consumers are motivated by what Feller describes as a combination of individual and altruistic motivations, contributing to open knowledge (Feller, 2003)

As an example of this, DIY magazine is a group of people who like to create their own products, and have managed to encourage DIYers to contribute to a once barrier restricted culture. Online communities are content creators (Bruns, 2008). By sharing information on "How to", solely created by the users, people from different geographic locations have been able to utilise open source software for more than what they thought.

The long tail is a concept that pertains that society is moving further away from the consumption of mainstream "de ja vu" forms of media, towards smaller subsidiary, lesser known books, films, music and topics. The long tail, as illustrated by Chris Anderson, illustrates the lesser 80% of medias. Participatorty culture, via the use of such sites as Amazon and Netflex has enabled the every day consumer to have access to the long tail (Anderson, 2005)

Open source software programs such as Amazon and Netflex have become household names. Open source software was a concept I was thought to be an idealistic view on the ways in which society and consumers could communicate with each other and source information in an open and transparent environment. This concept, which I was thought to be unattainable, is not proving to be functioning and continually expanding.

Now consider for a moment what it known as the 'long tail market' - information, topics and mediums that are lesser known and acknowledged by mainstream audience followers. Allow me to illustrate the dynamic differences between the long tail and the mainstream mediums commonly used.

Take Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Both are primarily focused on a means of establishing profit in order to remain competitive. Barnes and Noble made it their business to open up a Block and Motar storefront business, so people could purchase the most popular books, from the most popular categories. They had less of the more smaller and niche market books.

Then comes Amazon. They too sold mainstream books of interest, but also Amazon catered to the more delicate and individual tastes of the more niche market interest groups - that obviously, only a few would ever really care to read. Yet Amazon believed that they added value to the customer experience by enabling anyone to use it. This was in contrast with Barnes and Nobles mass market appeal.

Successful open source platforms must be original and able to provide ideas to sustain new and emerging topics and concepts. Open source programs need to empower users to contribute via the creation of new material to add long term value - that is the long tail.

References

Bruns, A. 2007. Produsage: Necessary Preconditions. http://produsage.org/node/12 (accessed April 26, 2008)

Anderson, C. 2004. The Long Tail. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html?pg=2&topic=tail&topic_set= (accessed April 26, 2008)

Anderson, C. 2005. The Long Tail. http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/faq/index.html (accessed April 26, 2008)

Eric, S Raymond. 2003. on "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" in JTS Moore's Revolution O.S