The Shellac Sisters and the Long Tail Culture
Did an entirely strange anachronistic-cultural meme emerge without me being aware of it? Having abandoned MySpace for all but occasional music needs I had forgotten how strange and fascinating it could be.
A story about a London DJ troupe The Shellac Sisters, who only spin 78s on wind-up gramaphone in period dress, showed up on BoingBoing. If you head to their MySpace and hop around a bit, you find a MySpace culture that’s developed a network of fake profiles for early 20th-century celebrities. It’s incredibly detailed and complex with an entire emergent 1900s-social-graph, fascinating because of it’s mild interface with the contemporary-timed MySpace.
One begins to wonder if this might be an example of the Long Tail at work in real life. The economic model of the Long Tail can be transferred to the world of sociology and particularly group identification using the same technology that allows Amazon to be so successful and local book stores to go under.
Increasingly immersive and engaging online social experience allow more diverse groups of people to connect in greater numbers in higher quality experiences. Decreasing transportation costs and restructuring human settlement patterns, due to the changes like those outlined in Richard Florida’s Creative Culture works, have also brought these people increasingly closer together. Combine these developments with the economic Long Tail itself — now offering 78s, period-dress, grampophones, or antique photography equipment as could not have been available before — and the ability of these shared interest to develop dense, visible, and distinctive communities, online and off, seems inevitable.
It’s a pattern that’s been seen before, as in earlier Tail-change movements where groups came together on Usenet or IRC, though more loosely and distributed. And the early-20th century music culture alone in attracting cultural adherents. Steampunk has a firmly entrenched and impressively developed cultural following, sparked in part, again, by BoingBoing. While Japan is known for its obscure or isolated cultural movements, a favourite of mine is the country’s gothic-neo-Victorian revival.
Calgary itself has an unusually established rockabilly culture. It is supported both in the physical world at venues like Broken City and A Bar Named Sue and speciality apparel shops; and on the web.
Looking back, it’s fascinating how the web and the concepts of the long-tail have enabled tightly-knit and distinct local communities to form online and off with strong and complex ties to global cultural memes. As we move past the tail and diverse interests can be better aggregated and organized with the web it’s exciting to consider what’s next.
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Wow! I never imagined the name of the Shellac Sisters would appear in the same sentence as “the long tail culture”. We’ve gone all modern!
See you on the dance floor!
Foxtrot Fanny of the Shellac Sisters x
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