bare yellow bulb, vol 1 serendipity in the age of convergence
cleaning off the desk last weekend, i found a piece of paper filled about 3/4 with my handwriting, this date at the top: "4/27/98". 27 april 1998. it's the thesis for that book i was going to write. it reads thusly:
The future of information dissemination is the customized information supply specially designed for each information consumer. Each consumer selects information they want to receive or areas they want to be updated on. This will change the breadth of knowledge. In today's newspaper with its wide mix of stories, consumers see headlines covering a wide variety of topics and may learn about things they would never have known about to request information on. With the customized information delivery, the burden is on the consumer to decide what information they wish to receive. But by setting up filters for information they receive, consumers will reinforce existing belief systems and stereotypes by selecting information they need to support their existing points of view. Each consumer will become more isolated and more convinced that their view of reality is the "real" reality.
well, let's just overlook the stilted style and the preposition-ended sentences and the repetition of the word "information" and let's focus on the fact that i predicted the future. not only is there not serendipity, which implies a sort of pleasant skipping through the newsday and stopping when we see something ooo-shiney, but there is indeed an increased isolation and polarization. but it's not totally caused by the siloization [my blog, my words] of the news sources and not only due to consumer self-selection. it's also caused by the sheer dearth of topics covered by all sources.
google news is supposably an aggregator of the top stories. firstly, that begs the question of who gets to say what stories are on top. secondly, if you ever click on one of those news stories, i am sure that google grabs your IP addy and tags it as a reader of that particular storytype - so there is some self-description going on which likely narrows what's offered. but the front page of google news contains a variety of stories on a variety of topics in a variety of sections. at least, it seems that way, but when you dig a little deeper you'll see there just isn't that much there. for a given headline there are thousands of "related stories". haha. related stories? it's The Same Story over & over again in thousands of newspapers.
where are you supposed to get the variety? even if you seek it out, it remains elusive. try listening to fox [news, not opinion] and listening to npr [news, not opinion] and you will hear the same stories, same headlines. who decides these things are universally important? aren't different stories of interest to different groups?
i am not talking here about opinion, interpretation. there is no shortage of opinion. if you're not able to form opinions you can get plenty of ready-made ones complete with supporting evidence. say for instance i am capable of my own interpretatilizing. where am i to go for the variety of inputs? what i need is a custom designed news feed that will deliver me some serendipity by email.
posted by ace @ 20:00
9 comments
9 Comments:
The problem here is that what counts as serendipitous news is just as question begging as what counts as a top news story. And plus, what's the point of news that no one else knows about. We all know that the real function of news is not to be informed, but to appear informed, and if we start widening the news-picture to include the serendipitous than that job is going to get really hard. Though now that I think about it, the real function of news is to appear not just informed, but ever so slightly MORE informed, and there--in the well-measured more--is where your concept has legs.
firstly, you said "than" when you meant "then".
secondly, it appears that you have built a competition model - "ever so slightly MORE informed" - where one was not intended and you have used as your foundation the statement that the real function of news is "not to be informed, but to appear informed". fascinating that one so steeped in the quest for knowledge sees knowledge not as a treasure on its own but instead as a mere tool in a shallow, appearance-deep game of one-upsmanship.
http://www.lemonde.fr
They gotz difference news.
Also, try different top-level country domains in Google news...
http://www.google.co.uk/news
http://www.google.it/news
http://www.google.com.au/news
und so weiter....
Except all of that fries in the face of your initial intent/premise/thesis thing. Serendipity is not serendipitous if you seek it out; it's consciously seeking to be more widely informed which isn't serendipitous. It's NOT trying to seem more informed. You only seem more informed if you are more informed. That's the power of information - you don't have to understand it to regurgitate it. Perhaps there are those who attempt to appear more intelligent or thoughtful or morally better than others by regurgitating information - that's not seeming more informed, that's affecting an air of superior understanding by the presentation of scattered knowledge. See Wittgenstein, Foucault, and/or Spinoza on the relationship between knowledge and wisdom. In other cases, you are reading the AP wire which is simply a manifestation of doofusity.
Oh yeah. On a more practical note, set up email alerts from major search engines with sufficiently specific keywords to get what you want but with few enough boolean controls to grab some things you didn't know you wanted to read.
you're face is a manifestation of doofusity.
ka-shaaaa!!
Okay, but we're talking about the function of NEWS here, not knowledge. News is not knowledge or wisdom, no matter what Spinoza, Foucault, or Wittgenstein may or may not say (not that dropping their names would make a person seem more or less wise.) News is kind of like information, but new.
And furthermore as much as I would [not] like to take credit for it, I did not build the competition model in news, I'm only noting yes cynically that the news is often used in this way.
In my life there seems to be very little correlation between being up on the news and having knowledge, much less wisdom.
jeebux, jeff, you have driven me to post during the workday.
i am talking about opening the newspaper and seeing a story about betty lou and her 4h goat project and thinking i am glad to know that folks like betty lou with her gopdambed 4h goats are still in this world i call home and how lucky i am to learn about something there is no way in hades i could have sought because there is no possible way i even knew it existed to be seeking it at all in the first place.
seren.dip.ity.freakin.doo.dah.
i am not casting news, knowledge, or information in an environment where one gains ones gratification from having the informational upper hand. i am talking about an environment where one gains ones gratification from the simply joys of having the information.
you want competition? come watch me run a 5k tomorrow. oh, yeah, that's right, you're "busy".
oops. simple joys, not simply joys.
jeebux.
Run well, tomorrow.
I know what you're saying, but something about the interwebs makes me always pretty much want to disagree.
Anyways, what was most impressive about the post was your prognostication. I have a prognostication for you. Tomorrow morning you will run fast.
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