Brent writes today about the idea of adding a preference to add 5 random sites to your subscription list in NetNewsWire:
It would take five sites at random from the Sites Drawer and add them to the end of your subscriptions list.
Why do this?
There’s a joy in discovering sites that you like accidentally. You might never choose to subscribe to site XYZ based on its name or description, or based on the fact you never heard of itóbut once you start reading it, you realize it’s a cool site, and you want to keep reading it.
Of course there’s no expectation that you’d like each of the five random sites. Or that you’d even like any of them. But sometimes you’d find something you’re glad you found.
In David Brin’s novel Earth, there’s a passage that describes one of the main characters reading news items on her computer-cum-television. Brin notes two very interesting things during this passage: first, that citizens are required to subscribe to a minimum number of general news feeds, in order to avoid having everyone simply “tune out” the general news in preference for their specialty interests. The concern is that not only will people be less informed, but that if they don’t have exposure to at least a minimum cross-section of divergent views and information, society will fragment into conflicting tribes of special interests, ignorant of each other’s views and needs.
The second interesting bit is that the character has had an uber-hacker of sorts deliberately program her software to inject random bits of news and information into her data stream. Again, the intent seems to be directed at avoiding “brain lock” and to benefit from the introduction of serendipitous information into her thought processes.
My sense is that in this case, Brin projected some of the emerging concerns of the Information Age very well indeed. Five or six years ago, one of my great joys was the discovery of the new and different online. Back then, of course, nearly everything was new and different, and the major media organizations had almost no presence online at all. Online culture was a weird, different, and exciting place.
These days, I find that I seldom venture off the beaten path anymore, preferring to repeatedly visit the same sites for my news and information. As more and more has become available online, I use more and more automation and filtering to whittle down the fire hose flood of information to a particularly relevant trickle. I don’t explore as much anymore; the Internet has become a tool to me, and is no longer a frontier. Tools like Tinderbox and NetNewsWire and their ilk are particularly helpful in doing this; I can use them to automate the filtering process and serve up only the information of particular use at a particular time.
This isn’t particularly a bad thing in and of itself, of course. Having these tools available increases my efficiency and productivity. I can get more done, and learn more about a few chosen areas of concern to me because I’m more focused. The down side, of course, is that I’m not being exposed as often to the new, the different, and the divergent. Information that might challenge paradigms I hold dear has less and less chance of reaching me as my ability to filter and sort increases, and that leads to exactly the sort of situation Brin and others have been projecting about the Information Revolution for years now.
I see weblogs as a partial response to this situation; a homeostatic reaction of the information ecology to the increasing homogenization of the web at the hands of the media mega-cartels. Thousands of people sitting at thousands of keyboards self-publishing their hundreds of thousands of thoughts and experiences everyday, all hyper-linked together does contribute significantly to the overall potential diversity of the infosphere. One still has to be able to discover those weblogs, however; a daunting task when there are hundreds of thousands of point sources of information and opinion out there. The potential exists, but like the rest of the web, that potential is difficult to access and becomes more so every day, as new sites and sources come online. Worse, as more and more weblogs incorporate syndication technologies, they become more subject to my information filtering and sorting processes, thereby decreasing the potential diversity of opinion I’m exposed to even more.
Search tools like Google can certainly help in that exploration, but they aren’t the answer I’m looking for. Using Google turns out to be something like using the set of World Book Encyclopedias my grandparents bought me back in 1971; I’ll set out searching for information about something specific, but often encounter a lot of other interesting information along the way that provides an interesting diversion, an unlooked for learning opportunity, or even a radical challenge to an existing thought process. There are opportunities for serendipitous exploration in search engines. Unfortunately, those opportunities aren’t regularly and as a matter of course integrated into my information flow. I have to already be on a quest for something to access to them, and, as I suspect happens with many people, if I’m trying to focus or are pressed for time, those opportunities will be ignored.
I believe, like Brin’s character believes, that there’s value in being exposed to some randomness in my information flow. Allowing a little chaos in to a system that’s been designed to structure and eliminate chaos as much as possible is like throwing open the windows of one’s house that first day of Spring after a long, closed-up Winter: it can blow the cobwebs out and make things seem new and fresh again. That’s why I was so excited to read about Brent’s idea to add random sites to my news feeds. Doing so can do far more than just provide some exposure to the less well-read weblogs out there - it creates an on-going opportunity for serendipitous discovery of diverse opinions, thoughts, and ideas, something I think the world as a whole could do with a whole lot more, these days.
