+ SERENDIPITY
Adding it back in
So how do we put serendipity back into an online world designed to tell us what we want to hear, not what we ought to be hearing?
It turns out that there are a couple of options. Either we can alter the way the computers feed us information by creating MORE ALGORITHMS with increasingly more options for controlling the filters, or we can make it our PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY to seek out the information that is being hidden away from our reality.
It turns out that there are a couple of options. Either we can alter the way the computers feed us information by creating MORE ALGORITHMS with increasingly more options for controlling the filters, or we can make it our PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY to seek out the information that is being hidden away from our reality.
"Ah, the techies say, no worries. We have Facebook and Twitter, spewing a stream of suggestions about what to read, hear, see and do. We come to depend on it to lead us to the funny article on TheOnion.com or the roving food cart serving goat curry.
It’s useful. But that isn’t serendipity. It’s really group-think. Everything we need to know comes filtered and vetted. We are discovering what everyone else is learning, and usually from people we have selected because they share our tastes. It won’t deliver that magic moment of discovery that we imagine occurred when Elvis Presley first heard the blues, or when Michael Jackson followed Fred Astaire’s white spats across the dance floor." Damon Darlin in a New York Times Online post from August 1, 2009 |
But why do we need serendipity?
In the January/February 2012 issue of Intelligent Life magazine, Ian Leslie says that:
"a side-effect of [the internet's] awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, rather than an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of." He goes on to note that "Google can answer almost anything you ask it, but it can’t tell you what you ought to be asking."
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That's the real issue here isn't it?
Leslie says that serendipity is:
Leslie says that serendipity is:
“necessarily inefficient... It is a fragile quality, vulnerable to our desire for convenience and speed. It also requires a kind of planned vagueness. Digital systems don’t do vagueness very well, and our patience with it seems to be fading."
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