Chris Anderson in Conversation with Lawrence Lessig September 28, 2006

The New Ecomonics of Culture & Commerce or Does Size Matter?

The term “The Long Tail” was first coined by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of WIRED Magazine, in an article that was to become one of the most influential business essays of our time. It was Anderson’s way of explaining how our culture and economy is shifting focus away from mainstream products and markets called “hits” toward an ever-expanding universe of niche products and businesses. Now we see the Long Tail everywhere—politics, education, sheet music, fashion, and beer—and the phrase has entered our cultural lexicon and appears in boardrooms around the world.

Join Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, as he discusses Anderson’s current predictions of our new power as consumers in his book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Together they will look at the “long tail of time”—the cultural and economic riches that are locked up in the world’s collective archives—and consider new ways to tap that market.

Official Website: http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/pep/pepdesc.cfm?id=2372