145;Tail146; Tale

It used to be that taking a break from work to fill up at the water cooler was a ritual accompanied by harmless conversation about a predictably limited number of pop-culture subjects. We had access to only a few television stations. We listened to the same songs on Top 40 radio. We all read the local newspaper. So there was always something obvious to talk about.

Now some people are saying that water-cooler talk is impoverished8212;or even endangered. Because the digital age lets us indulge our individual passions, the argument goes, we8217;re losing the shared experience that fuels workplace chatter. The Internet in particular has transformed a world from one of bounded choices to one where we can get anything imaginable. Increasingly, we8217;re eschewing the blockbusters to pursue our own quirky interests. A good percentage of the vast inventory on e-commerce sites like Amazon, iTunes and Netflix isn8217;t popular enough to be offered in brick-and-mortar stores. But online costs are low. In the aggregate, selling one or two units of many obscure items can reap big bucks. Example: the music service Rhapsody offers subscribers more than 2 million songs; in any given month, users stream 90 percent of the tunes. And a third of Amazon8217;s book sales consist of tomes that you won8217;t find on the shelves of even the biggest real-world superstore. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, has dubbed this phenomenon 8220;The Long Tail,8221; in honor of the shape given to the curve resulting from a graph plotted by sales on these sites. There8217;s a huge bulge at the 8220;head8221;, representing best-selling products, and an extended, tapering tail at the end, wherein lie many niche products that are suddenly easy to find via search engines, blogs and filters.

But as e-commerce and entertainment sites become more successful in allowing people to indulge their idiosyncratic tastes, what happens to the mass-culture touchstones that dominate water-cooler conversation? Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore professor who8217;s written a book called The Paradox of Choice warns, 8220;People will have nothing to talk to each other about.8221; Anderson himself isn8217;t worried. The Long Tail might drain some common conversational topics from the workplace, he admits, but we8217;ll spend more time on virtual gathering places where we can dish online with those who share our peculiar niches.

At broadband speeds, it8217;s just as easy to gossip with someone a thousand miles away who shares your interest in anime as it is to dish with a co-worker two cubicles down who thinks anime is a perfume. 8220;The water cooler is a commonality of geography,8221; Anderson says, 8220;But these days geography doesn8217;t define culture.8221; My guess, though, is that traditional water-cooler fodder will survive.8221; 8212;STEVEN LEVY