There are only so many movies opening every weekend, right? When the world in which your work might appear seems finite, there is a big bouncer at the edge of it, deciding what might be allowed in. This bouncer could be Jeffrey Katzenberg. This bouncer could be your high school newspaper editor. This bouncer has been wrong and right so many times, that it's dumb to give him any credit for recognizing either quality, or stinkiness. This bouncer would be called a Pre-Filter by Chris Anderson.
When the world in which your work might appear seems infinite, there is no bouncer. Anybody can come in. Anybody can throw down their movie, like Jason Scott did. It's not guaranteed that everybody will see it. But if people talk about it, then a chain of ideas and communications might lead others to it, or away from it. This would be called a Post-Filter.
If a filter allows or denies a piece of work or product access to a market, then it's a Pre-Filter. If a filter labels, endorses, compares, rates, or critiques a piece of work after it's been introduced to a market, it's a Post-Filter.
In Pre-Filters vs. Post-Filters, Chris Anderson says that "soon everything will make it to market and the real opportunity will be in sorting it all out."
...where distribution is cheap and shelf space is plentiful, the safe bet is to assume that everything is eventually going to be available. The role of filter then shifts from gatekeeper to advisor. Rather than predicting taste, post-filters such as Google measure it. Rather than lumping consumer into pre-determined demographic and psychographic categories, post-filters such as Amazon's custom recommendations treat them like individuals who reveal their likes and dislikes through their behavior. Rather than keeping things off the market, post-filters such as MP3 blogs create a markets for things that are already available by stimulating demand for them.Equally interesting stuff comes from the comments section of the same post.
Actually, from the point of view of the user, they are all pre-filters, they are just pre-filters of varying levels of authority...
...If you are talking about what producers create, then you have a true pre-filter, since a consumer cannot find what does not exist, and instead must find some way for the item to be created or substituted for.
Your list of pre-filters really just consists of high hit "authorities". That is, information sources that have developed a general level of respect in the community, sort of like Thompsons, Edmonds or Moodys. The post-filters are just lower hit information sources with a higher variance in reliability.
The commenter has a point. When "everything" is available, it is almost as difficult to find stuff as when very little is available, so the filters, no matter how they are labeled, aren't conceptually that different from eachother. (Though I disagree that they "are all pre-filters." I'd say "they are all post-filters.") That said, the commenter must recognize the vast difference in participation-level between an unpublished author who lives in a world without boutique, niche publishing, who has been rejected by Doubleday, and a self-publishes in a hypothetical Amazon-less universe, and the emerging zine-crazy, blog-crazy, Amazon-embracing public. That rejected author has a lot more options now. Technically, yes, just more filters of varying degrees of authority. But meaning of authority is totally being reworked. Authority itself seems to be owned by more people. There is a huge change going on. Maybe Chris's two-filter paradigm isn't the ideal description of "it," but the idea he describes with Pre and Post Filters is definitely undeniable.
- Original grass fight photo appears at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bombardier/19817485/, taken by Flickr user Bombardier. Creative Commons License Attribution 2.0.
