Let me tell you a story about the tyranny of choice.
If you’d dropped by my Facebook page a couple months ago, you might have read about my first-world problem: i.e., having watched my husband flip aimlessly through cable channel lineups only to conclude that there was nothing to watch, I decided to try out a Roku. See, I had this idea that since I have Netflix and Amazon already . . . why, then, he could wander around those apps and find all these movies or shows he’d like to watch. In other words, I wanted to give him more choices. What I discovered, in very short order, was that our TV was so old that even with an HDMI splitter streaming in through DVI, we’d get video but no audio.
So then it became about choosing a new TV—and all of a sudden, a relatively simple early Father’s Day gift was becoming a bit of a chore. So many choices! Go with a smart TV, in which case I might not need the Roku, or do a regular LCD LED with as many HDMI ports as possible, or maybe buy a plasma since a lot of companies were getting out of the biz and so I could pick up one, with a ton of ports, for a song . . . In the course of all this, the husband read about OLEDs and Ultra HDs and blah, blah. Sure, a boy can dream, but for the price of an OLED, you could buy a small country.
Anyway, we choose a tube. We decide on a size; there wasn’t a TON of choice involved in this, so that went fairly smoothly.
Then we go to the store, and we zero in on the TV. We’re about to buy it, when the husband asks, Say, you got any Ultra HDs around? Why,yes, they did, and they just so happened to have last year’s Samsung for half price because some woman had bought it two days ago only to return it unopened, and would we like to see it and . . .
You know where this is going. Boys, and their toys . . . but, you know, the picture was gorgeous, and it was his Father’s Day gift.
So now we’ve got this brand-spanking new ultra-HD smart TV (that I set up and got working). We’ve got a new Bose sound plate to go with it (that I set up and got working), and of course, we now have a new stand (which I put together) because the old stand was too small. We still have the Roku, too, because while there are a few apps we would use (Netflix, Amazon, maybe Skype), a) Samsung isn’t a software company and b) Roku has a much wider selection of apps. What started out as about a hundred buck adventure became, well . . . expensive enough that we’ve used up the anniversary and Hanukkah and my birthday. S’okay because I really wanted my hubby to have some more choices after a grueling day of sweating over a hot genome.
Oh, and we still have cable because, so far, there aren’t apps out there that will let me watch college and pro football. (Although WatchESPN promises . . . maybe.) What can I say? I like sports. Sad but true. Aereo TV isn’t available out here in the Wisconsin boonies, so that’s another reason to keep basic cable for the time being.
But this is a blog about your brain and choice, not an expensive TV. So let me tell you what’s happened.
Like I said . . . Roku offers a blizzard of apps. I’ve loaded and used quite a few: old-time radio, big band, etc. I’ve taught the husband how to access all this.
So, last night, we watch an episode of “House of Cards.” Then I turn the remote/Roku over to the husband to let him have at it, find something fun he’d like to watch. But what does he do?
He begins to channel-surf through basic cable—and that’s all he does. When I asked why he didn’t go to at least Netflix or Amazon Prime, he said, “Too many choices.”
In other words, when faced with a ton of choices . . . he pretty much shut down. It got too overwhelming for him, and he reverted to old, rote, learned behaviors. Choice became a burden, and he then paradoxically chose not to choose–or, rather, not to choose to do anything new.
Can he/this behavior change? Sure . . . but change is tough for people. Change makes people anxious. So my husband will change only if he makes the time for it–that is, if he turns this relaxation time into a new task. In other words, if he turns it into work and gives it time. Now, time is one thing he doesn’t have in abundance. Wait, let me rephrase that. We all have the same amount of time in a given day. When we say we don’t have time, what we’re really saying is that’s not a priority. And why, for heaven’s sake, would anyone hoping to relax want to have to work at it?
See the problem?
For the husband, becoming comfortable with and wading through even a relatively few new options . . . that’s not a priority. It’s too much additional work to be fun–and so he is happier living with less choice because less choice equals less stress.
Why am I thinking about this now? Well, let me tell you another story: I was approached by another writer to maybe jump on board a new FB page and blog with other writers to both increase our collective visibility by potentially bringing our fans to the page as well. In other words, we’d cross-pollinate. In the course of our discussion, this other writer said something that didn’t quite compute: that is, that Facebook was making it harder for us to connect with fans by limiting the audience for our posts.
And I went . . . wah? This wasn’t something I’d found, and so I got curious and posted the question to the FB hive-mind. What followed was a really interesting discussion, and you can read it here. But, if you read the fine print there, what Eric Stillwell said is correct: Facebook has to make money somewhere, somehow. So, if you’re a corporation or brand—as if, say, perhaps a dedicated author/self-publishing page versus a generic Facebook page—you can no longer simply use Facebook as your own private advertising space without paying more for the privilege. (This would also suggest that all those little ads you see on FB aren’t really paying the bills either. Be honest: how many of you are really dying to find out what Ellen Degeneres has been lying about all these years? Yeah . . . exactly.)
So that only makes sense. Facebook started out kind of free, but it—like Twitter (that site’s attempt to sell you Twitter for Business, for example)—and probably other social media sites are finding out that viable businesses turn a profit. They make money. They’re not into this out of the goodness of their hearts. So it’s not about FB limiting choice; it’s about their understanding that the Internet is really a vast promotional space–a gigantic billboard–and them saying, Look, you want to advertise to a bunch of folks? Then you have to pay for that privilege if you want to pick and choose and exceed a certain number. Period.
That was easy to understand. But, for me, what really caught my eye was a Forbes article Lauren Stevens referenced about choice and organic reach. You can read the Forbes piece here. I did, and then I went to find the original paper here.
Now, I’m not an economist. I think I understood the gist but wanted to be sure. So I contacted an econ friend of mind, shot him the links, and asked him what the bottom line was.
Here’s his reply (with his permission, of course; he’s asked that I not link to his website because it’s one that’s got partners, and he’s worried he’d have to explain why all these teenage girls are suddenly visiting the site . . . I tried to tell him that no teenagers would because they’re way too busy texting their thumbs off, but there you go):
Organic reach refers to the number or percent of readers you can reach for free, i.e., without paying for placement, promotion, or anything else.
Stripped of all the new-age verbiage, these are standard Econ concepts dealing with market saturation, resource allocation, and statistical distributions.
The market is now so saturated with media outlets and content (good, bad, or indifferent) that the time and effort any individual can put into following it all is declining towards an effective rate of zero. Unless some mechanism (like paid promotion) literally puts the content in front of the reader the odds of him or her finding it is ever smaller, again approaching zero.
In the vernacular, social media and social media content on FB and ultimately every other platform starts out as the only game in town and eventually becomes one of many, so many that no one notices and everyone flounders.
The issue for you isn’t whether it’s a personal page or a corporate page but whether there is a large and growing core of fans so dedicated that they will seek out your page and contribute worthwhile content to the exclusion of other media. This is a very high hurdle to cross since it amounts to the FB version of the superstar effect.
Finally, in statistical terms what FB is saying (and what the economy is moving towards in general) is a power law distribution of outcomes not a standard normal distribution. As with incomes, an overwhelming and increasing proportion of people (or in this case FB pages and pageviews) will be below the median (far below the median) and a small and decreasing proportion will be above the median (far above the median). If you think your FB page would be in the tiny upper tail of the distribution then go for it. If not, then your organic reach would trend towards zero and you’d be like all the others with a dream that didn’t come true.
I’ll give you a second to digest that.
Okay, time’s up.
So WHAT is my econ friend saying? It boils down to this: there is now so much choice that people are beginning not to pay attention. They are becoming a bit like my husband with the Roku: shutting down because there are so many outlets/commodities available, choosing effectively and efficiently is becoming more and more difficult.
This is not a new phenom. If any of you have ever tried to train a dog—or a child—you know that you can’t offer too many choices or demands/commands. If you do, the kid—or someone like Winnie here—closes his eyes and says, GO AWAY! The kid–or cat or dog or husband–shuts down or tantrums.
This is something that’s also extremely well-studied; just plug “psychology of too many choices” into Google and you’ll find a number of articles that tell you what you already know, if you’re honest: that lots and lots of choices create a fair amount of anxiety; that people, when they’re faced with a ton of choice, tend to start not paying attention and—ultimately—opt for more familiar, stereotypical, well-traveled and comfortable paths. Check out a few of these short pieces that nicely distill this down: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7044550/Too-much-choice-leaving-us-bewildered-and-depressed.html; http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/shopping/no-freedom-in-too-much-choice-20120529-1zgbw.html; http://psychcentral.com/news/2011/03/30/is-too-much-freedom-of-choice-a-problem/24820.html.
Or, if you’re feeling ambitious—and not to stress you by giving you too many choices—take a look at Dr. Barry Schwartz’s excellent book (for the mainstream reader) on the subject, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.
Or just listen to the TED talk, and you’ll get the idea:
We shrinks know this; you parents do, too. Heck, we all do. Think about going into a restaurant and being handed a menu with so many choices you don’t know where to start. Bewildering, right? This is one of the reasons why restaurants offer specials; not only do they want to highlight new recipes . . . they understand that choice takes time; that too much choice can slow you down; and in the restaurant biz, one of the things that keeps you in biz is turnover. So the faster you can make or they can steer you to a choice, the better their bottom line. There’s been a ton of new research, too, that suggests too much choice is bad for us (don’t start screaming at me; just think about it a second). I’m not advocating that we shouldn’t have freedoms, okay? What I’m saying is that there’s a reason comfort foods bring comfort: because they are familiar and simple. There is no guesswork involved; you know that your mom’s mac ‘n cheese makes you feel good.
You could call this—and I coin a phrase here from a talk Barry Schwartz gave at the U. of New Orleans—“the tyranny of freedom.” (I include the talk here, but it’s a long one, so . . )
There’s a reason I don’t like shopping malls or a gazillion stores: it’s too exhausting for me. I’m not a huge shopper. I don’t enjoy spending time going through rack after rack. I don’t like the chaos or the trying on or . . . it’s just too much. Me, I’m a targeted shopper. If I do go to a store, it’s like hunting: go out, kill that pair of jeans, and bring it home. Don’t distract me. All those choices . . . you’re stressing me out. In fact, the more choices you might give me, the more rigid my thinking will become, and I know I’ll get grumpier because I’ll feel as if I’m wasting time trying things that may not work out.
That’s what the article on organic reach is trying to tell us: in this age of so much information—and so many places to find it—our very human tendency is to start to simplify. We will not necessarily go looking for information—or new things, like new authors, new music, new . . . whatever. That organic reach has a saturation point, and we’re rapidly getting there: where a decision to add yet one more medium to the mix is a losing proposition and waste of time because people simply can’t pay attention anymore.
If you’re a writer—or run any kind of business—you know this, empirically. You have only so many dollars or so much time to spend on marketing, so you must pick and choose where to focus your time and attention. The problem is that the actual place in the market you occupy is shrinking. There was a really nice piece in some magazine I read several years ago about what it was like to be a midlist author. Well . . . you know, if you think about it . . . midlist authors might be going the way of the middle class. That is, it’s a shrinking demographic, squeezed on either end by an increasingly huge and ever-expanding pool of new and/or less-established authors because the barrier for entry is now low (anyone can self-pub) and that upper tier one-percent that pretty much dominates market share: the JK Rowlings/James Pattersons/George RR Martins/EL Jameses of the world. As my econ friend would put: that, combined with “Amazon taking over commercial publishing, blogs and other ephemeral media taking over people’s time, and so on . . . You are in the disappearing middle of the distribution, where holding on is an accomplishment of considerable merit but making it to the upper 1% or higher is virtually impossible.”
In other words, I see a time coming pretty soon where it will be those guys in the stratosphere and the rest of us trying to heard/seen in an era when people might very well stop listening because they don’t even know where or how to start.
So, what will they do?
People being people will go for what’s less bewildering; they will stick with the moral equivalent of comfort food that is familiar. They may very well allow someone to winnow their choices for them. In other words . . . they will abdicate their freedom of choice and trust that someone else will/can choose better, more wisely, and more efficiently whilst minimizing their stress.
No, no, I’m not going all 1984 on you here. Don’t get me wrong. I’m talking about gradations and subtle changes that will limit your choice (and already do) because efficient businesses understand behavioral economics. (A fascinating field in its own right, by the way.)
Think about my husband a second; he’s let me choose the apps for him—as well as any additional content. He has abdicated that particular freedom to someone else to minimize his stress and because it means less work for him.
Now . . . take this a step further and think about you. Ever been faced with so many choices in a restaurant or something that you finally get tired of the work and say, Honey, you choose. Or think about this: how do you find new content? I’ll bet you stick to only a few outlets/informational sources (a trusted friend, a blog or two, a librarian who knows you, or–maybe–a bookstore). How do you find out when an author you’ve liked is about to come out with a new book? Do you go to their webpage . . . or does Amazon do the work for you? Be honest.
See those teeny-tiny incremental steps?
I don’t see a way around this problem at the moment other than understanding that I’m personally not served by giving people yet one more media outlet to connect—when it’s clear that people are reaching a saturation point. They are beginning not to pay attention because they simply can’t and so they are allowing larger corporate entities to choose for them. It’s a gradual thing; you probably don’t even notice it unless you’re paying attention. You might even believe that these corporations are doing you a favor, and in a way, they are because they–like waitresses in a busy restaurant–are steering you to your next meal in the most efficient way possible that also benefits their bottom line.
These businesses are not evil. They are businesses, and if you want to stay in business, they have no choice but to do this because there is just so much, too much of everything, and they understand that an infinite number of choices will frequently result in no choice at all because their customers will shut down.
What matters is not only whether you notice but if this bothers you at all. It may not, and I’m not sure I’m all ticked about it because I understand the psychology of it all. What I take away is this: the only reason that anyone might pay attention to me at all is not solely because of what social media/platform I’m on—but what books I write. Sure, yeah, I want my work out there to be noticed. But jumping on board every available platform isn’t the only way to do it. I’m not sure what is, and perhaps that is my econ friend’s point: that we’re all drowning in a sea of choice.
What this also suggests is that, eventually/hopefully, the noise will die down a bit simply because people won’t be able to make a go of it, economically, or they’ll get discouraged. This has been going on in publishing forever; you either can get a book out there and enough people buy it to help you go on . . . or you can’t, and you stop because you gotta. So you’ll have dropout of noise . . . but, along the way, you will see a winnowing and dropout in terms of venues and outlets. It’s happening already. Look at mergers; look at consolidations and publishing houses and loss of imprints; look at how Amazon tailors what you see now (or Publishers Weekly, for that matter). Not everyone gets noticed now–gosh, I remember how crushed I was when no one reviewed my first Star Trek book–and even fewer of us will be noticed in the future.
Again, this is not doomsday, folks. The U.S. publishing industry puts out over 250,000 books a year–and as I recall, that doesn’t include self-pubbed folks. But there’s no way to pay attention to all that clamor, and the louder that clamor becomes, the less you’ll hear because you simply won’t be able to. This is why that SNL bit about cheeseburgers is right on: you may chafe at the lack of choice, but when you’re hungry and it’s a cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger or nothing and no Coke, Pepsi . . . you’ll take the cheeseburger and that Pepsi.
You might even breathe a sigh of relief.
