You see, if you just use the web interface, it’s easy to ignore Twitter even if you’re signed up and actively following other users. You have to physically hit the refresh button in order to see new updates, and it occupies its own browser window which means that if you switch tabs you’ll hide Twitter. But Twhirl is different. It sits in a corner of your desktop, separate from any other programs. By default, it sounds an alert whenever a new tweet comes in. And like your email client, it updates by itself, without any prompting from you. Well, if you follow more than about a dozen people, those updates will be coming faster than you can handle them individually.

I can’t even begin to describe the feeling that came over me the first time that I got myself into a Twitter conversation and found myself basically chatting with another user about my favorite subject, arts philanthropy, with other unrelated flotsam shooting past us in the aether, all while on deadline for a school assignment the next morning. It was this totally incomprehensible mix of can’t-tear-myself-away interest and sheer, unadulterated panic.

It may sound silly, but that experience really shook me. A little context may be in order: Two springs ago, I did not own a personal planner. I didn’t have Outlook on my computer. I didn’t have a Blackberry, Palm Pilot, or other personal digital assistant. I didn’t need any of that, because I literally kept all of the appointments I had in my head. And believe me, I had a lot of them. I was handling the bulk of the scheduling work for the collaborative chorus I had founded, organizing the second of two world premieres extravaganzas with my experimental rock band, dating, looking for apartments in New Haven, and working full-time to boot. Now, I put appointments into my Outlook calendar and forget about them two minutes later. My brain just can’t handle all of that and the neverending torrent of information flowing my way.

When I started Createquity a year and a half ago, I read on a regular basis maybe three or four blogs. Basically, Sequenza21, Daily Kos, and sometimes PostClassic and/or Sandow. As of today, I’m subscribed to 67. If my two years in business school have taught me anything, it’s that skimming is a really, really important skill — and as of October 2007, I was not a good skimmer. So, as each fun discovery of another blog would lead to yet another entry in my RSS reader, I would find myself getting stretched thinner and thinner, and then I would eventually adjust, and then I would add more blogs, and the cycle would repeat again.

I was finally convinced to join Twitter by Sean Stannard-Stockton’s exciting-yet-terrifying post “Information Filtering.” In it, Sean takes on the problem of information overflow directly:

It used to be that if you were a smart person who wanted to be “in the know” and make good decisions, you were best served by seeking out as much information as possible. When I say that “it used to be,” I mean from the beginning of human history until about four years ago. The video points out that more information will be generated in 2009, than was created in the past 5,000 years. That a weeks worth of the New York Times holds more information than most Americans living during the 18th century were likely to encounter in a lifetime.

How is it possible that we operate when the amount of information is growing at an exponential rate? The key is filtering.

Today, smart people who want to be “in the know” need to figure out how to filter the information fire hose. The challenge is not finding information, but finding trusted “filters” and then absorbing information through them while ignoring the rest.

Of course, this is easier said than done. As Sean highlights later in his post, “you need to evaluate [your filters] constantly while always keeping an eye out for new filters. Otherwise you run the risk of simply limiting your world view and missing the shifts that are occurring around you.” So it’s kind of a catch-22. On the one hand, you can keep your information flow manageable by limiting the sources you use for input. But of course, by doing this, you’re pretty much guaranteeing that you’ll be behind the curve with respect to finding out important new information. On top of that, if everyone in your “trusted network” pursues this strategy, it’s not hard to imagine your social media interactions becoming a kind of echo chamber — a small group re-blogging and re-Tweeting each other’s content, while other developments take place around them and under their noses. Since you never know where exciting new information will come from, it’s sort of impossible to be meaningfully open to new things in a limited way.

So for now, I’m trying to follow Sean’s advice while still casting a relatively wide net. On the advice of @AdamTheHutt, I switched to TweetDeck, which allows you to organize your network into distinct groups more easily. I’ve turned all alerts off so that I can ignore it when I need to. I’m still adding new blogs all the time. So far, this approach has worked well for me. I feel so much more on top of things than I ever have before in my life, and blog traffic has essentially tripled since I started using Twitter. I feel more and more like one of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Mavens” every day. If the price for that is a little occasional insanity, for the time being at least, I’m willing to pay it.

I think.

In my last post, I talked about how suppliers of creative content are (for the most part) declining to exit the industry despite extremely strong competition and unfavorable odds for financial self-sustainability, to say nothing of massive success. The standard explanation of this is that artists, writers and the like are “driven to create”—they can’t imagine doing anything else with their time. That may be true at least in some cases, but a class from my business school core curriculum provides a more interesting way of looking at it. The dean of the school, Joel Podolny, and my Competitor professor Fiona Scott Morton co-authored a study of California wineries and found that hobbyist suppliers—basically, rich people that wanted to run their own winery—concentrated so heavily on the high end of the wine market that they collectively made it less profitable for businesses that were interested in maximizing profit. As a result, businesses that wanted to make money would concentrate more on lower-end wines. Podolny and Scott Morton called these hobbyist suppliers utility maximizers and suggested that these winery owners consumed the quality of their own wines (in other words, were willing to accept a lower profit level in order to possess the identity of a high-quality wine producer). Another study found that investment banks with the best reputations actually did not need to pay top dollar relative to their competitors to attract their targeted employees, because the employees to some degree consumed the status of their employer (and were willing to accept less money in exchange for the prestige of working for a top firm).

Basically, I think that the reason we don’t see more exit from creative industries is because most creative content producers are also consumers of their own status as such, and are therefore willing to put up with a boatload of bullshit—including a very high likelihood of making next to no money—in order to be able to call themselves composers or directors or actors or artists. Because, let’s face it, being a creative professional is fun. It’s virtually guaranteed to get people’s ears perked up at parties, and can serve various aphrodisiac functions (though the whole poverty thing can just as easily kill the mood). The undercurrent of ego is strong, particularly for something like composing—you’re getting other people to pay their own money for the privilege of experiencing something that you created for the fun of it. Not only that, many creative professionals retain a massive degree of control over the final feel and execution of their vision, making the satisfaction level at the end of the process that much higher.

There’s a cultural shift going on in which more and more young people are graduating from high school and college and wanting to do interesting things with their lives, something that reflects who they are and what they think about the world. In previous generations, most young adults would end up working in agriculture, manufacturing, or other labor-intensive mega-industries and form their professional identities around a career that might have been set in stone before the child was even born. Now, having been weaned on a Baby Boomer-influenced education emphasizing self-expression and -actualization, Millennials want creativity to be a part of their professional identity, and more and more that means working in some kind of creative industry.

That leads in to the other side effect of this shift: as more and more people decide that it’s not enough to be an audience member or a reader or a listener and decide to express themselves as well, they have less time to consume the work of others. In other words, as the number of suppliers of creative content increases, their average audience decreases (even if the total audience might be increasing dramatically). Andy Warhol’s prediction that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes is proving ever more prescient in the Internet age. As universal awareness becomes more and more difficult to achieve and a minimal level of awareness easier and easier, the lines between amateur and professional content creators are becoming increasingly blurred. It may be that we are all pursuing vanity projects to some degree.

Some kind of massive aggregating system will undoubtedly pop up to organize all of this content for us and keep it manageable. What I’m less sure of right now is what it will look like. Until then, I’ll try to keep up with my RSS reader.

Let’s think for a moment about why this might be the case. There aren’t a lot of full-time, salaried staff positions for composers—essentially none, unless you count the advertising industry (and even then it’s heavily commission-based) and university faculty positions. What little money organizations do have available to pay musicians for creating new work tends to be concentrated in the hands of a very few highly successful individuals, because only those with established names and reputations can really help drive sales or put butts in seats. To put it another way, the market—even taking subsidization from charitable sources into account—only really supports a limited number of serious musicians, i.e., the ones at the very top. It supports those few quite generously, to be perfectly honest (I’m sure Lorin Maazel isn’t complaining about taking home $2.5 million a year), but once you get past the very top of the ladder, the pickings become very slim indeed. Barriers to entry for new artists are low; competition is so fierce as to practically commoditize the music, making a middle-class existence as a non-superstar composer an extremely difficult goal to achieve and highly vulnerable once it has been attained.

In an industry with so many undesirable attributes, an economist would expect suppliers (i.e., the composers) to exit—stop composing and do something else with their lives—until the overall supply was reduced enough to affect the overall dynamics of the field. This is especially the case since the costs of stopping (barriers to exit) are essentially zero. And yet, what we see is the exact opposite. It’s an accepted truth in the new music world that there are more composers today than at any previous point in history. Music schools are churning out graduates at record rates, and new departments and conservatories are established on a regular basis. Not only are there more artists than ever before, but because of the intense competition and extensive training available, the quality of those artists (or at least those at the top of their field) is arguably at an all-time high as well. Meanwhile, technology and the Internet have combined to make it very easy not only to create content like this, but also to ensure its ongoing survival in the public sphere even at an extremely low level of visibility. Thus, new content not only competes with all of the other material newly created by this unprecedented population of artists, but also the entire back catalogue of recorded material created in the past—a collection that can only increase in size and scope over time. Which is all to say that it’s a completely amazing time to be a composer, as long as you don’t care about making any money or getting more than a few dozen people to listen to your music.

One thing that’s become clear to me since starting business school is that composition is far from the only industry that is experiencing some variation of this phenomenon. I blogged last month about commonalities between symphony orchestras and the newspaper industry: the Internet is driving an explosion of interest in “citizen journalism,” yet full-time, salaried journalist positions are steadily disappearing across the country. Meanwhile, journalism schools are thriving, dutifully preparing students for jobs that don’t exist. We see similar patterns across all of the arts, including dance, theater, visual arts, literature, film, and so on, not to mention commercial analogues of these fields (such as the mainstream music industry). Generally speaking, it’s a good bet that almost any endeavor involving content creation is experiencing more freelancing, lower average salaries, and an intense level of competition for the good jobs.

That’s why I expect that we are going to start seeing more and more of the kind of “semi-professional” approach and cost structure that Fractured Atlas is using in its RFP for online courses. Such an approach is aimed squarely at the middle of the long tail of content creators in a given field: bypassing the superstars and their reputation-inflated price tags/egos, while employing incentive and filtering systems to identify the best of the rest and secure their services at a considerable savings. It sounds coldly capitalistic, but I actually think it could be a very good thing for the field in that it fights the increasing stratification between the superstars and the nobodies. It helps to create a middle ground where it’s possible to make something doing what you love even if you’re not famous. Given the realities discussed above, would that not be preferable for those who don’t already have it made?