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Shopping listd, waiting lists, mailing lists, black lists, guest lists, price lists, and of course top-ten lists.
During the last 15 years or so, lists have proliferated and become one of the most popular ways in which, web content is packaged. There are lists produced by the mainstream players: “Rolling stones list of top 500 albums of all time”; Forbes’ “list of the richest”, or the Guardian's list of “best 100 novels written in English”. There are also lists produced on blogs run by ordinary people. There is a top 10 list on almost any cultural, commercial, or industrial product that you can imagine. There are even lists of the best “top ten lists”. This is known as a meta-list: a list of lists.
Ranker.com is a website dedicated to user-generated and user-ranked lists; a democratic space in which even smallest matters are regularly listed, voted on, and ranked. You can check out the list of “the best dystopian novels”, “the greatest discontinued snacks”, “the funniest names to give a pig”, and hundreds and hundreds of serious or funny lists.
Listverse is a list-blogging platform. You can submit a list, the list is “fact checked” and if it is published you get paid. Listverse’s latest post at the time this thread is being written is “10 terrible realities of life at sea in the golden age”. It is an interesting text about the difficulties sailors faced, during the age of exploration.
Of course, making lists is not a new idea. One of the oldest lists to be found, is a 5000 year old clay tablet. It is a list of professions and titles. The website on which I read about this list, says many similar examples made during the next centuries have been
found.
But, why do we over-produce information in this format? Perhaps there are cognitive reasons behind it. Perhaps our minds, prefer to receive information ordered, numbered, and bite-sized. Of course it is also less work to make a list than a narrative.
Can you think of a list that has not been made yet? Think of one and then google it. If Google does not bring up a result, you have won this game.
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