The BBC has recently featured two thoughtful takes on how the Net is altering people’s experience of popular music. What’s particularly interesting (to me, anyway) is how the two articles examine the same phenomenon – the ability to listen to pretty much anything that’s ever been recorded, immediately and for free – but see very different consequences.

In an article that appeared a week or so ago, John Harris proclaimed a new “golden age of infinite music.” And he made a compelling case:

I [recently] had a long chat about music with the 16-year-old son of a friend, and my mind boggled. At virtually no cost, in precious little time and with zero embarrassment, he had become an expert on all kinds of artists, from English singer-songwriters like Nick Drake and John Martyn to such American indie-rock titans as Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. Though only a sixth-former, he seemingly knew as much about most of these people as any music writer.

Like any rock-oriented youth, his appetite for music is endless, and so is the opportunity – whether illegally or not – to indulge it. He is a paid-up fan of bands it took me until I was 30 to even discover – and at this rate, by the time he hits his 20s, he’ll have reached the true musical outer limits …

As the great digital revolution rolls on, bands are no longer having to compete for people’s money. Instead, they’re jockeying for our time. And the field is huge, crossing not just genres, but eras. Who do you want to investigate today: TV On The Radio or Crosby, Stills and Nash? Do you fancy losing yourself in the brilliant first album by Florence And The Machine, or deriving no end of entertainment from how awful The Rolling Stones got in the 1980s? Little Richard or La Roux? White Lies or Black Sabbath?

As one of my music press colleagues use to say, there’s no longer any past – just an endless present … Really: what’s not to like?

Today, the BBC is featuring an equally compelling article by John Taylor – yes, the Duran Duran bass player. “Something the internet has most definitely done,” he writes, echoing Harris, “is bring more music from more places and more eras into the hearts and minds of us all, but young people in particular, which is great … My stepson is at New York University (NYU) and he was telling me how he’s currently into Cole Porter, music from the 1920s and swing music from the 40s. So the availability and accessibility of music on the internet today is truly incredible, and I applaud anything that can inspire interest or curiosity in anyone.”

But rather than simply heralding this as the arrival of an endless and endlessly bountiful “present,” Taylor takes a more nuanced view. He wonders whether such easy abundance doesn’t lead to a flattening of experience: When everything’s present, nothing’s new.

He recalls a formative experience from his own youth:

In September 1972, Roxy Music appeared on prime time TV in the UK. It was their first national TV exposure, a three-minute appearance performing their first single. And the way they looked and sounded stunned me, and a generation of mes.

But we had no video recorders, and of course there was no YouTube. There was no way whatsoever that I could watch that appearance again, however badly I wanted to. And the power of that restriction was enormous. The only way I could get close to that experience was to own the song. I lived in the suburbs, so I had to ride my bike for miles before I could find a store that sold music, let alone one that had the record in stock. It was a small trial of manhood and an adventure.

But once I had that song, I could play it whenever I chose. I had to go on a quest of sorts to get it, but my need was such that I did it.

The power of that single television appearance created such pressure, such magnetism, that I got sucked in and I had to respond as I know now previous generations had responded to Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show, or The Beatles, or Jimi Hendrix. I believe there’s immense power in restriction and holding back.

That “immense power,” which in an age of abundance can easily be misperceived as mere constraint, is draining from culture.

I have sympathy for both views. Like Harris, I appreciate, and certainly indulge in, the ability to leap easily from song to song, artist to artist, with no temporal or physical limitation on the experience of music. There is a sense of liberation in being able to be everywhere now – to be able to indulge in what Harris terms “completely risk-free listening.” But I have also shared Taylor’s experience of, quite literally, going on a ten-mile bike ride to a record store to purchase a yearned-for record, which would then spin for weeks on my turntable, pulling me ever further into the depths of the music. Taylor’s right: it was “a quest of sorts.” And as with all quests, there were risks involved.

There are those who, in their desire to sell themselves and others an idealized version of progress, are quick to dismiss all fond personal memories as nostalgia. But some of those memories are not sentimental distortions of the past but accurate records of experience. Taylor argues that, when it comes to music or any other form of art, the price of our “endless present” is the loss of a certain “magical power” that the artist was once able to wield over the audience. I suspect he’s right.

Edge is featuring, in “The Age of the Informavore,” a fascinating interview with Frank Schirrmacher, the influential science and culture editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.”The question I am asking myself,” Schirrmacher says, “[which] arose through work and through discussion with other people, and especially watching other people, watching them act and behave and talk, [is] how technology, the Internet and the modern systems, has now apparently changed human behavior, the way humans express themselves, and the way humans think in real life … And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on.”

Tell me about it.

Later in the interview, Schirrmacher wonders what the effects will be as companies collect ever more behavioral data and apply ever more sophisticated predictive algorithms to it:

You have a generation — in the next evolutionary stages, the child of today — which [is adapting] to systems such as the iTunes “Genius”, which not only know which book or which music file they like, [but] which [go] farther and farther in [predicting] certain things, like predicting whether the concert I am watching tonight is good or bad. Google will know it beforehand, because they know how people talk about it.

What will this mean for the question of free will? Because, in the bottom line, there are, of course, algorithms, who analyze or who calculate certain predictabilities … The question of prediction will be the issue of the future and such questions will have impact on the concept of free will. We are now confronted with theories by psychologist John Bargh and others who claim there is no such thing as free will. This kind of claim is a very big issue here in Germany and it will be a much more important issue in the future than we think today. The way we predict our own life, the way we are predicted by others, through the cloud, through the way we are linked to the Internet, will be matters that impact every aspect of our lives. And, of course, this will play out in the work force — the new German government seems to be very keen on this issue, to at least prevent the worst impact on people, on workplaces.

It’s very important to stress that we are not talking about cultural pessimism. What we are talking about is that a new technology which is in fact a technology which is a brain technology, to put it this way, which is a technology which has to do with intelligence, which has to do with thinking, that this new technology now clashes in a very real way with the history of thought in the European way of thinking.

The interview has drawn many responses (including one from me), the most recent of which is from John Bargh, who heads Yale’s Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation and Evaluation Lab. He picks up on Schirrmacher’s comments on prediction and describes how recent research in brain science is opening up powerful new possibilities for manipulating human behavior:

Schirrmacher is quite right to worry about the consequences of a universally available digitized knowledge base, especially if it concerns predicting what people will do. And most especially if artificial intelligence agents can begin to search and put together the burgeoning data base about what situation (or prime) X will cause a person to do. The discovery of the pervasiveness of situational priming influences for all of the higher mental processes in humans does say something fundamentally new about human nature (for example, how tightly tied and responsive is our functioning to our particular physical and social surroundings). It removes consciousness or free will as the bottleneck that exclusively generates choices and behavioral impulses, replacing it with the physical and social world itself as the source of these impulses. …

It is because priming studies are so relatively easy to perform that this method has opened up research on the prediction and control of human judgment and behavior, ‘democratized’ it, basically, because studies can be done much more quickly and efficiently, and done well even by relatively untrained undergraduate and graduate students. This has indeed produced (and is still producing) an explosion of knowledge of the IF-THEN contingencies of human responses to the physical and social environment. And so I do worry with Schirrmacher on this score, because we [are] so rapidly building a database or atlas of unconscious influences and effects that could well be exploited by ever-faster computing devices, as the knowledge is accumulating at an exponential rate. …

More frightening to me still is Schirrmacher’s postulated intelligent artificial agents who can, as in the Google Books example, search and access this knowledge base so quickly, and then integrate it to be used in real-time applications to manipulate the target individual to think or feel or behave in ways that suit the agent’s (or its owner’s) agenda of purposes.

The Web has been called a “database of intentions.” The bigger that database grows, and the more deeply it is mined, the more difficult it may become to discern whether those intentions are our own or ones that have been implanted in us.

Google held a one-day conference on cloud computing in London last week, called Atmosphere, and they asked me to give a talk on the historical and economic context of the development of the cloud. All the presentations from the event are now up on YouTube, including mine, which if you have a half hour to kill you can watch here:

The other presenters included Werner Vogels, Marc Benioff, Geoffrey Moore, and various Googlers and their clients.

I’ve completed my next book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and the manuscript – actually, the wordprocessingscript – is with the publisher, W. W. Norton, for editing and production. (The cover image below is provisional. It will be used in the publisher’s catalog, but probably won’t be the actual cover of the book.) The Shallows is slated to be published in North America on June 1, 2010, and if you’re antsy you can preorder a copy from Amazon today. The English version of the book will also be published in the UK by Atlantic Books, and translations are currently in the works from Blessing in Germany, Seido Sha in Japan, Chungrim in Korea, Ediouro in Brazil, and CITIC in China.

Not everything will move into the cloud, but the cloud will move into everything.

A couple of Wharton professors recently released a study of the distribution of demand for movie rentals at Netflix, based on the data the company released for the Netflix prize. The authors say the data contradict Chris Anderson’s long tail theory; Anderson says the data back up his theory; and Tom Slee says the data do neither.

I wonder, though, whether the Netflix data aren’t hopelessly skewed, at least when it comes to getting a sense of the relative demand for hits as opposed to less popular or niche titles. I’ve subscribed to Netflix for a long time, and what I’ve noticed is that the company has deliberately geared its search, filtering, and recommendation tools to lead customers away from newly released hits. There was a time, I’m pretty sure, when you could find a simple list of the week’s top new releases on the Netflix site. You can’t do that anymore. There is a New Releases tab on the Browse menu, but it brings you to an odd assortment of films that don’t bear much resemblance to the releases that are actually most in demand at the moment.

Here, for instance, is the first set of five movies that Netflix currently presents under the banner “Popular New Releases” (along with the actual DVD release date):

Obsessed (August 4)

The Soloist (August 4)

Confessions of a Shopaholic (June 23)

Revolutionary Road (June 2)

Seven Pounds (March 31)

Here, by contrast, is IMDB’s current list of the five most-rented DVDs in the country:

X-Men Wolverine

State of Play

Crank: High Voltage

Next Day Air

Duplicity

No overlap at all. You have to go down to #16 on the IMDB list before you find the first movie that’s on the Netflix list (Obsessed). In fact, you can scroll through Netflix’s “Popular New Releases” list all day long, and you will never come upon X-Men Wolverine or State of Play. And if you add the original X-Men movie to your queue, X-Men Wolverine will be conspicuously absent from the set of 10 movies that Netflix will immediately recommend as being “Most Like X-Men.”

By fussing around a bit, I was able to coax Netflix into giving me a list of “Movies Released in the Last Week.” Here are the first five I was shown:

Adam Resurrected

Lymelife

Road to Victory

Rage

The Anna Nicole Smith Story

And here are the next five I was shown:

Mr. Tickle: Tickle Time Around Town

Barney: Fun on Wheels

Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins

Mandie and the Secret Tunnel

Ghost Cat

Notable by their absence are the three most popular movies released on DVD this week: Observe and Report, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and Battle for Terra.

Now, to be fair, all the really popular DVDs can be found on the Netflix site, if, for example, you search by their name. But if you add any of them to your queue, you’ll be told that you’ll have either a short or a long wait until they ship. In the meantime, you’ll receive less popular titles from your queue. (You’ll be relieved to know, though, that the Mr. Tickle DVD is available immediately.)

By manipulating the movies it suggests, and by restricting the number of copies of new and popular movies it offers, Netflix shifts demand away from current hits and down the long tail. The reason, I think, is pretty obvious: the latest hits are the most expensive for Netflix to procure.* By manipulating demand, it makes more money (a venerable marketing strategy that’s given a new twist on the web). But it also spreads demand across its inventory in an artificial way that obscures its customers’ actual preferences.

In his Long Tail book, Chris Anderson talks about how the searching and filtering tools on the Net expose niche products that used to be difficult to find. That’s true. What I don’t recall him mentioning is that companies can use their search and filtering tools, as well as their inventories, to manipulate demand, deliberately leading customers, as in Netflix’s case, away from the hits and toward Mr. Tickle and The Anna Nicole Smith Story.** Sometimes we travel down the long tail under our own power. Sometimes we’re pushed.

*UPDATE: As noted in the comments, another and probably larger reason why Netflix tries to hide a popular new release is that it would have to buy a ton of copies of the DVD to fulfill the natural demand for the film, and after a few weeks, when the initial demand subsides, most of those copies would sit idly in its warehouses. By suppressing demand it avoids that expensive inventory overhang.

**UPDATE: My memory is flawed. As noted in the comments, Anderson does apparently mention demand-manipulation in the book.

I gave a guy down the street a 5% ownership stake in Rough Type in exchange for a 30 pack of Natty Light. The beer’s worth $17.59, according to the sign in the window of the liquor store downtown, which gives Rough Type a current valuation of $351.80, or 0.0000003518 Twitters.