New on my blog: “Engagement Is the Enemy of Serendipity”—a seemingly minor change to the New York Times iPad app provides a good case study in what’s wrong with the algorithmic personalization of our media, and why we need to bump into the unexpected.
So what would digital serendipity look like?
It might look like human-curated hyperlinks. Serendipity in newspapers and record stores is dependent on unlike things being adjacent to each other. Discovery during "Web 1.0" was entirely through hyperlinking via the personal website: I might follow a hyperlink to a website because it was like the page that linked it; but might leave the website through an unlike but adjacent hyperlink. It's the caprice, whimsy, lateral thinking, and uniqueness of the curator that decides what link stands next to what else -- something that machine algorithms just can't do. These days we rely too much on a machine serving us hyperlinks; a return to human-curated hyperlinks is perhaps a way of raising serendipity.
// CC'ing @kicks @bradenslen as I've had past convos with them about hyperlinking.