Posts Tagged ‘discovery’

A tweet randomly flew through my cascading deck over the weekend, containing a link to a blog I’d never visited before.

Contra the NY Times today, why the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture: http://bit.ly/yZNa2 about 16 hours ago

The blog post is by Stephen B Johnson and articulates a frustration I’ve been struggling with for a long time. I don’t get this idea Web technologies are responsible for a decline in ‘natural’ serendipity.

My uncle Ben described the declinist position in a blog post he wrote some time ago at BBH Labs:

It’s a world of perfect targeting. Optimization. Zero wastage. Absolute utility. Total accountability.

More and more of what I see, hear, read and even taste seems exceptionally cunningly targeted at me. My RSS feeds me handpicked news streams. I get perfect movie recommendations via Netflix, books I’ll enjoy via Amazon, uncannily relevant advertising when using Gmail, weirdly familiar music from Last fm. Satnav keeps me resolutely on the data-derived optimum track. And so on.

Well, these shifts are triggering a smoothing out in our experiences, prompting a reduction in serendipity and introducing a spooky predictability to many facets of our lives. It’s becoming clear that ultra relevance comes with a hidden price. Because if everything’s relevant, then nothing’s unexpected, and if nothing’s unexpected, then nothing surprises you, and if nothing surprises you, then that’s a strange, neutralized, vanilla kind of life to lead. Think John Anderton meets Truman Burbank.

We’re talking about the end of surprise.

Of course, this is all true.

We *do* live in a world that’s increasingly like the one Ben describes, but I haven’t noticed any decline in ’surprises’ yet, and like Stephen I have absolutely no difficulty in discovering weird new shit ALL THE TIME to look at online. In fact, my biggest problems right now *by far* are:

• A super-abundance of weird new shit to discover
• Not enough time to do so, and a resulting daily sense of crushing regret
• Poor attention literacy, manifested by a willingness to be distracted by new stuff discovered by accident through practically every interaction I have online – this is especially serious now that I have a torrent of links pouring into my eyes through my various iPhone apps and desktop, and emanating from a network of 483 ‘friends’ on Twitter

The declinists argue that our ‘human’ need to discover things through serendipity is thwarted by emerging recommendation and discovery technologies but, like Stephen, I feel that it’s completely the other way around.

The declinists point to a mythical golden pre-Web era of serendipity. They say that the way people read newspapers in the old days supported serendipitous discovery far better than a website can. They claim that the experience of discovering music through radio and club DJs was more serendipitous than the experience provided by online music sites. They seriously believe that bookshops and libraries made it easier to discover knowledge by accident than the Web can.

I say that’s rubbish and the declinists are 100% wrong. Serendipity is boosted in the age of super-abundance

The word itself is fascinating. It’s a lovely word isn’t it? It feels good saying it. It’s one of those graceful, slightly mysterious words that invests the one who utters it with depth and a sense of sophistication. The word is unnaturally powerful, magical – almost totemic to its acolytes and disciples, let’s call them the serendipitards.

Its etymology is fascinating and perhaps explains its mythic overtones. The English author Horace Walpole introduced it into the language in a letter in 1754 with the following explanation:

“this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.”

Walpole created the word from an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip and explained that this name was part of the title of:

“a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of….”

I met quite a few serendipitards earlier this year at SxSW at a talk billed as ‘Music 2.0′ by Elliott and Sandy Hurst of Supernova.com. The talk’s premise was that the new era of unlimited catalogue and algorithmic recommendation simultaneously provides too much choice AND makes discovery less random than it was in the age of scarcity, and life is therefore less pleasurable.

As this blog post relates, I became involved in an  argument in which several of the audience – including me – attacked the panel.

Firstly, I made the point that algorithms are tools: you can use them for good or for evil. In fact, Last.fm had (maybe they still do) a recommendation engine that you could crank up from ‘just like yours…’ to ‘almost totally random’ (the recommendation equivalent of Spinal Tap’s ‘volume 11′ setting).

Secondly, I tried to argue that the new super-abundance of unlimited catalogues cancels out the predictiveness of algorithmic recommendation, and that far from being a paralysing nuisance, abundance is a good thing. In evolutionary terms surplus is definitely “a good thing”. The myths and stories of “the ancient ones” demonstrate that pretty much every global culture (other than ascetics, puritans, Taleban and other self-punishing guilt freaks) fantasise about treasure caves, El Dorado, overflowing cups, feasting, milk and honey and cornucopias. The afterlife envisaged by pretty much every world religion is characterised by abundance – and that’s because for most of human history life has been lean, mean, brutal and short.

So, what’s with this “too much choice” whinging? I don’t get it. At all.

Not only that, but it’s a really boring, college debating society type argument. Ultimately, it comes down to a philosophical point about how random anything engineered by mankind – in this case an algorithm – can really be. That’s about as interesting as debating how many angels you can dance with on the head of a pin.

Lastly, I would just point out that this is not an issue we hear real users complaining about. Ever.

I challenge the serendipitards to go out and discover some real users who are worried about super-abundance and the decline of serendipity. It is simply not a real part of any normal person’s experience. Normal people want more of everything and some tools to help them filter the stuff they might like.

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