Median-omics: Living With Celebrities, Politicians, Extremists
Medianomic Celebrities and the Long Tail
Chris Anderson has made a profitable study out of his “Long Tail” scenario. But he missed the most profitable point. The dull middle, where it’s really the most profitable. At one end, the “tall head”, you have celebrities and fads. Where a few people dominate one or two items and most of the advertising dollars to keep them there. For books, this means they have a steep curve up and just as steep down right after. They are blips on the radar. So any profit is made quickly – get in and get out. And too many are one-shot wonders – feast and then famine.
The Long Tail is the reverse. Very little profit made as you have to sell a lot of some very small-time sellers. Just as much total money changes hands, if not more – it’s a whole lot of hands, though. If you were running a bookstore, you wouldn’t keep a lot of these around. A brick-and-mortar store couldn’t afford to keep hundreds of thousands of books available at any one time. The aggregate sales wouldn’t keep the lights on. And so long tail books usually do best as print-on-demand.
What keeps stores restocking are the evergreen products which continue to sell, regardless. You’ll find every bookstore in America (well, the bulk of them) sells some version or another of the Bible. Because people are always buying it. It’s the hands-down all-time bestselling book in history. Because is appeals to the middle, the median consciousness of English-speaking peoples. No, it’s not on the #1 spot every week. It just routinely sells. And sells. And sells.
So the real income to be made in book sales are authors like Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie, whose books just continue to sell, regardless of whether they are marketed or not. These aren’t Stephan King’s, or J. K. Rowlings’, or Dean Koonz’ – they are really more the William Shakespeare’s, Agatha Christie’s, Barbara Cartland’s, and Dr. Suess’s. No flash in the pan, but a consistent output of regular sellers – or one really good book based on common sense that just keeps selling regardless.
And if you look in any bookstore, you’ll find that the latest fad sellers are out front and hyped up. But the bulk of their stock is in books who just continue to sell routinely at moderate amounts. Anything that doesn’t sell is remaindered or discounted to get rid of it. Top-bottom-middle.
“Big Name” celebrities are mostly at the big head of this Long Tail. And you’ll see them mostly burn-out and fade from the scene. Some of them are smart, like Fess Parker (Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett), and Alan Hale Jr. (“the Skipper” on Gilligan’s Island) bought restaurants and lived comfortably. Others, like Jimmy Dean traded their fame for their own brand-name foods. The evergreen actors and actresses (as well as musicians) continue to have a nice living off of this. Dylan continues to churn out well-recieved hit albums, while infomercials are a nice income for those TV celebrities who were on for a very long time. What is normal for the stage and screen wouldn’t be normal for you and I – but it can be a regular living like anything else. And the really long tail of celebrity-dom has people returning to their car sales or construction jobs after their one quasi-hit.
Medianomic Extremists, Gays, Acorn and Everyone Else
This study also embraces the extremists as necessary. Without them, life would be a bland bowl of lukewarm, un-salted oatmeal. Diversity is the spice of life.
But there is a caveat – don’t expect because an extreme view is tolerated that it will ever be accepted. Homosexuals (Gay’s, Lesbians, queers, fags, etc.) have never been and will never be mainstream. Nature has basically seen to that. And while there is every reason to give these their legal rights, they need to stay out of the mainstream in order to preserve those rights.
That seems odd, but it’s true. Their main problem is that they aren’t being allowed live a normal life in terms of hospital visitations, insurance, and so on. Otherwise, they’ve gotten everything they want, as long as they don’t step on anyone else’s toes – like dressing funny or scandalously, or playing loud music that keeps the neighborhood awake. Their real problem is that government and religion are too closely connected. Government took over the function of saying what a “marriage” is, which is actually Religion’s function. If they would simply drop the marriage moniker and simply be honest, saying that they are just actually licensors of civil unions, then this whole scene would go away. (Then, if you wanted to be married, go find a church that agrees with you, that you can be average in.)
But “don’t ask, don’t tell” is another policy that won’t disappear soon. Because the vast middle is straight. And that’s they way they expect people around them to act. (If you notice what happened with this in the news lately – Obama had to fulfill at least one political promise. The head of the military and the Secretary of Defense said, “Yes, yes – but, we’ll need a year-long study before we do anything with this.” So they effectively tabled the motion. Have your political cake and eat it, too.)
The majority only rules as long as they also listen to the extreme edges. That’s Medianomic politics defined.
You’ll find an interesting thing happening with the old Civil Rights movement. They went mainstream, got nearly everything they wanted corrected, and now are busy turning conservative and building their own “good old boy” networks. When some flock-less “Reverend” tries to start a protest rally for some imagined “right” that was stepped on, you’ll see only a handful turn out. The extreme became part of the middle and now has little to complain about overall.
Now, when some extremists get into power, they often find themselves isolated. Mostly where they don’t quickly learn to become mainstream in their actions. Especially in this Internet Age. Acorn is a poster-child for this. Better get respectable if you are in the spot light – or you get defunded. If they’d studied what happened to the National Endowment for the Arts, they would have known. An example of doing this right was former-president Bill Clinton, who quickly learned to turn everything the Republican Congress approved into his idea. And we got the excesses of Welfare corrected, plus some other stuff. The worst presidential example so far was Millard Fillmore, who wouldn’t listen to even his own party – a real extremist, elected because he looked and sounded “Presidential.”
