Liberia's Long Tail: How Web 2.0 is Changing and Challenging Truth Commissions
Shawn Pelsinger · Human Rights Law Review · 2010
Long Tail theory emerged from a 2004 article by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.1 Anderson maintained that recent technological developments had rendered the Pareto Principle unhelpful with regard to several modern behavioural phenomena.2 His example was the Pareto-inspired idea that bookstores stock the most popular 20% of the market (which account for roughly 80% of all sales), ignoring the vast majority of books that might only attract the occasional buyer. Amazon.com, by contrast, decided to offer nearly every book it could possibly find for sale.3 The results contradicted the Pareto Principle: Amazon found that more than half of its revenue was coming from the bottom 80%. Given the opportunity, the isolated purchaser would pick up an obscure book and nothing else. These purchasers emerged in droves, vastly outnumbering the small cluster that had previously purchased bestsellers in enormous quantity. When the frequency of purchases was graphed, the bottom 80% trailed off to form a long tail that accounted for far greater revenue than the top 20%. The theory has since operated to explain systems that empower mass participation in a way that proves more effective than concentrated initiatives carried out by a small cadre of individuals, and its application extends well beyond the commercial realm: the encyclopaedia equivalent of this theory is Wikipedia, the newsgathering equivalent is Twitter and the first transitional justice equivalent is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia (TRCL).