Rarefied Abundance

As I was reading Maria Popova about how accessibility v.s. access to the digital form of information has change our notion of "rare," I began to wonder if this notion might also be applied to other commodities in our changing culture. 

In her article of Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance she delineates two obstacles to discovery. The first is obstacle is lack of awareness that something exists. The second obstacle is a lack of accessibility which means that we may know about it but have no way of finding it.  Digital convergence had solved the lack of accessabililty to a great degree, as things are now at our fingertips in the computer age.

Indeed the amount of things available to us has increased to such a degree that the rare has become abundant and we find ourselves confronted with too much to choice. Consequently Maria has articulated a third obstacle to discovery, lack of motivation. Since we lack the time and place to interact with the subject, be it information or some other commodity, we have difficulty making the choice to actually access it. In other words we lack motivation to go after it.

So when Maria entered the digital library at Flickr Commons to unearth some astounding  photos of  the first Australian expedition to Antarctica from 1911-1914, and she wrote an article placing them into contemporary conversations about everything from photography to climate change, the people motivated to access this content increased from several thousand to 350,000 views within several weeks. 

It strikes me that the online reviews of merchandise at Amazon provide a remarkably similar role for the abundance we find there, as do the rating services like Shopzilla and Pricegrabber. Without some human sorting mechanism shoppers would be left wondering how to make a choice.

Perhaps here lies a concept for the "brick and mortar" shops to work with as well. Ironically, their buyers have performed this same role to some extent historically. As our shopping experience shifts away from them to online, the experience of looking at actual merchandise will be harder to come by, in fact, may be even rarefied. I will have to travel more miles for the experience, and when the providers of the experience develop my trust for their ability to narrow the choice, that helps to motivate me in there.