Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

Jason linked to this op-ed on the "endangered joy of serendipity":

Serendipity is defined as the ability to make fortunate discoveries accidentally. There's so much of modern life that makes it preferable to the vaunted good old days - better hygiene products and power steering leap to mind - but in these disposable days of now and the future, the concept of serendipity is endangered. Think about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become such a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find - with an irritating hit or miss here and there - exactly what you're looking for. It's efficient, but dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding... Looking for something and being surprised by what you find - even if it's not what you set out looking for - is one of life's great pleasures, and so far no software exists that can duplicate that experience.

I find these arguments completely infuriating. Do these people actually use the web? I find vastly more weird, unplanned stuff online than I ever did browsing the stacks as a grad student. Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better. (I love the whole idea of pulling down a book because you like the "binding.") Thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere's exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture. It is far, far easier to sit down in front of your browser and stumble across something completely brilliant but surprising than it is walking through a library looking at the spines of books. With music blogs and iTunes, I've discovered more interesting new bands and albums in the past year than I did in all of my college years. I know radio has gotten a lot worse, but really -- does anyone actually believe that radio was ever more diverse and surprising in its recommendations than surfing through the iTunes catalog or the music sites? It's no accident that BoingBoing is the most popular blog online -- it's popular because it's an incredible randomizer, sending you off on all these crazy and unpredictable paths.

I mean, look at what's on the front door of Kottke this morning: soccer jersey fonts, debate over travel time to JFK, best American fiction poll, funny t-shirt joke, new Google software, Richard Feynman video, Tufte design riff, etc. What's the organizing principle? There is none -- other than Jason's quirky taste -- and that's precisely why so many of us visit his site every day. It takes me thirty seconds to make all those connections by reading Jason's blog. I defy McKeen to walk into a library and find so many weird and diverse and interesting things in an hour of staring at bindings.

Updated a few hours later: Alan Jacobs writes in to the comments section:

My particular situation is that of a scholar, and I think Steven is -- what's the technical term? -- nuts to think that I now have more serendipity than I did before. When I used to rely on print dictionaries or encyclopedias, I would very often forget what I was looking for because, in thumbing the pages, I would stumble across all sorts of interesting words or topics, which would lead me to look up other interesting words or topics, along the way to which I would be distracted by yet other words or topics that I had never seen before.

This is a perfect example of what I was talking about in my original post. There are two primary elements to this situation: first, the random stumbling across of something unexpected thanks to the alphabetical organization of the reference book (and the lack of digital search tools), and then this process of being led to other interesting words or topics thanks to that original swerve. It's true enough that Web's structure has eliminated the first kind of "discovery" -- you don't see alphabetical or Dewey Decimal "neighbors" the way you do walking through the stacks or reading book index. But the Web is far better at the second part of Alan's scenario: following a trail of associations from some original starting point. Pick a given entry in the print Britannica and a given entry in Wikipedia, and try to find ten interesting loosely associated articles published in other venues around the world. It's a thousand times easier to do this on the Web, obviously.

So the question is: is there anything in the online experience that compares to the random discoveries of alphabetical or Dewey Decimal exploration. I would say -- nuts or not -- definitively yes. I read regularly about 20 different blogs or other filters, and each day through them I'm exposed to literally hundreds of articles and clips and conversations and songs and parodies that I had no idea about when I woke up that morning. Many of them I just skim over, but invariably a handful of them will send me off on some crazy expedition from site to site, ushered along with the help of other bloggers, Google, del.icio.us, wikipedia, etc. I'm constantly stumbling across random things online that make me think: what is the deal with that anyway? And then an hour later, I'm thinking: how did I get here? I can't tell you how many ideas that eventually made it into published books and articles of mine began with that kind of unexpected online encounter.

Yes, those initial starting points are filters defined by my initial tastes. But my taste is for surprise and novelty -- and that's what they deliver. Serendipity is not randomness, not noise. It's stumbling across something accidentally that is nonetheless of interest to you. The web is much better at capturing that mix of surprise and relevance than book stacks or print encyclopedias. Does everyone use the web this way? Of course not. But it's much more of a mainstream pursuit than randomly exploring encyclopedias or library stacks ever was. That's the irony of the debate: the thing that is being mourned has actually gone from a fringe experience to a much more commonplace one in the culture. Boingboing has a million readers, for crissakes! Right now, on their front door, we have a study of monkey drinking habits, a roadsite alert sign hacking project, a "news of the weird" story about a German would-be suicide, a re-writing of Robinson Crusoe, a collection of vintage cartoons, a digital mapmaking tool, and so on and so on. And this eclecticism is what you get every day there -- which is precisely why it is the most linked-to blog in the world. Now factor in reading a dozen other blogs of comparable range. This is now the daily information intake for millions and millions of people around the world. Why isn't that an increase in serendipity?

Comments

[Alan Jacobs]

A convergence of opinion may be at hand! Insofar as it makes sense to speak of the aggregate of serendipity throughout an entire culture, there's no doubt that the "great expansion in the number of people who sit down at the computers every morning and browse through an oddball assortment of links" trumps any decline in stacks-browsing. No doubt about that at all. My comments have been focused, by contrast, on the experience of one person, namely me. Your last response is useful not least because it reveals that McKeen's article jumped from one person's experience (his) to a universal judgment about access to serendipity throughout the culture. And that jump -- we now all agree, I trust -- is totally bogus.

[Steven Johnson]

Nice warm feelings all around. Now, would someone PLEASE call someone else a Nazi? This is an online discussion board, after all.

[Alan Jacobs]

Don't worry, Steven, chris larry will be back before too long.

[chris larry]

I consider myself to much a creative and crass name caller than resort to the Nazi cliche! As I would assert "stacks-addicts" proved...

And lets remember I did out myself as a boob. Maybe I actually prove the thesis of Everything Bad is good for you incorrect.....Now can we talk about The Dharma initive and whether the Lost Universe is just a figment of Hurley's menatlli ill imagination?

Chris Larry

[Michael Anes]

Well, I enjoy the seemingly (but clearly not) random finding of a YouTube video as much as the next guy -- in fact, that Cher and David Bowie medley still blows my mind as does Beck's Clap Hands -- so I'm certainly in the camp of serendipity occuring via the web, in a massive way. Of course.

I wasn't championing "the book" either, necessarily, just asking that the question not be framed so dichotomously intially and to argue for futher deliberation, discussion and inquiry.

Wow, I've been reading too many science blogs in a too short period of time...avoiding grading...

[kdon]

I think the fact that you refer to the Web as as "serendipity engine" speaks volumes. To talk of a more focused or efficient way to be surprised kind of misses the point.

[Martin]

Former Feed writer here.

Can I just say that there is something singularly strange about people holding up libaries and encyclopedias as the exemplars of a serendipity that does not exist on the web? Let me quote from the comment posted by Nick:

"BoingBoing's interesting-link bounty, diverse as it might be, cannot be called 'serendipity'. When you pointed your browser there you knew what you were gonna get: links to Wonderful Things."

OK, fine, BoingBoing and the Internet itself are artificially generated proximity-generators, sure. But how can a big building filled with books or a set of books purporting to explain the world in alphabetical order be the exemplar for a "naturally" generated proximity generator?

If you disqualify BoingBoing for being artificial, then Britannica and Dewey Decimal go out the window too. And once you realize that, your belief begins to look a lot more nostalgia-driven, i.e. not based on reason. If books are valid, if encyclopedias are valid, if libraries are valid, then the Internet is valid. The fact of some of those things being analog and others not is not a logical argument.

Steven is right on.

[graham downes]

Serendipity.............I think it is worth considering the difference mindsets of digital natives and digital immigrants (John Perry Barlow).

How do I know this. Well, I was given a book; New Literacies by Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel. As a teacher using digital technologies I foubd the book deeply inspiring.

I went onto Amazon to find out what else they had published. Whilst searching, Amazon told me that 'people who bought these books also bought....'Everthing That's Bad is Good for You.'

Bought book, read book, fantastic! Life changing!

Went back to Amazon to find out if Steven Johnson has written any other books.......People who have bought Steven Johnson also bought 'Classroom Blogging: A Teacher's Guide to the Blogosphere��by David Warlick.'

Blogging...don't know much about that. Buy book. Get introduced to bloggon, wikis, rss feeds, xml and aggregators. Set up aggregator. Run search........Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel have own blog and have included version 2 chapters from New Literacies. Interesting.

Went for tutorial with my supervisor for my masters degree this week. Shared my ideas on what I wanted to do based on Steven Johnson's ideas on intelligence and gaming. She is a digital outsider. She uses the library. She has never hear of Steven Johnson! She has heard of Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel.

I feel stupid. My voyage of serendipitous self discovery has ended in humiliation. My ideas, discredited. Decide to abandon voyage.

Accessed bloglines this evening. Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel have posted on their blog. Read blog.........

This today from Steven Johnson with regard to the continuing significance of the book as a medium for influencign opinion.

"[If] you're trying to change the way people think about a complicated issue, the advice is the same as it was two hundred years ago: write a book."

As with a lot that Johnson writes, I am in full agreement.

1. Colin Lankshear (whom my supervisor has hear of) agrees with everythin Steven says.

2. Steven has a blog.

Visit Steven's blog. He has an article on serendipity.

Is it just me or is this just weird?

Steven, you are an inspiration and, as a digital insider I believe that your ideas have profound imlications for the world of education.

[chris larry]

Martin is MY MAN! You said the same thing I did without the insults and silly jokes!

Chris Larry

[michael bywater]

The two paradigms are not, of course, exclusive. If I am looking for a particular book in the library, I will go to the catalogues to find it, then to the stacks to retrieve it. In the old paper catalogues, I will not find "serendipitous" associations; but in the stacks, I may, and, more often than not, do.

Similarly if I hit BoingBoing (or indeed my NetNewsWire aggregation) I will find myself off on some wild and useful trail.

The difference is that the web is usually purposeless (initially, at least) happenstance; the library stacks are *directed* serendipity.

I'd be interested to see some theoretical analysis of why the web leads to "semi-directed" serendipity, though. Semantic web-U-like?

In the end, I think the two are complementary from the serendipity standoint. The worst of all possible worlds is the new library paradigm: computerised catalogues, closed stacks. (Discuss...)

[Dan Ancona]

On some level, I have to say I agree with Mr McKeen here. The question for me isn't so much whether the web or print is more serendipitous; it is whether the factors creating serendipity on the web can be boosted or not. I think they can.

This is one of several benefits that I think might be afforded by the spatial hypertext visualization systems I've been toying around with. In general I'd say visualization interfaces have a lot of potential for generating serendipity. If you're a google earth fan, go here...

http://vizbang.com:3000/

and grab the kml linked there. It's a very fun way to browse the subset of flickr pics that have geographic locations.

[Rational Beaver]

So, I was reading through an aggregated list of vaguely related blog posts (all supposedly in the 'tech' category) when I saw a title that read "Can We Please Kill This Meme Now". I hate that word 'meme', but nevertheless my curious mind had to know: What meme is this that has to die? So I clicked the link.

I found myself on a blog I had never before visited, reading opinions from people I have never heard of. Soon I was wading knee-deep in an argument about the relative amount of serendipity that our modern society now affords us, be it more or less (something I had never before considered in quite that way). Then my wife came in to the office and we had a discussion about it.

What a fortunate discovery that turned out to be! (And how ironic...)

The local library is 10 minutes away from here (if you're lucky). The internet is at my desk. All day. Everyday. If the internet is robbing you of serendipity, you need to learn how to put you web BROWSER to better use.

[moon]

I'm no scholar, nor did i make regular long term studies. my way of eclecticism just grew up during the past ten years and mainly the past 5 years because of the internet almost infinity choises. and no doubts it has change the way i *consume* information (from technical info, news data, to literary, artistic stuff)
I'm definitely not doing it in a randomised way, it is more by "following a trail of associations from some original starting point" - and what findings!
I agree with you totally that those initial starting points are filters defined by my initial tastes! But my taste is for surprise and novelty -- and that's what they deliver"! "Serendipity is not randomness, not noise. It's stumbling across something accidentally that is nonetheless of interest to you." - i couldn't put it in better words then you.

[kdon]

Odd that the argument against McKeen seems to be that the Internet is a better and faster way to find seredipity.

Here's a quote from the article:

"Technology undercuts serendipity. It makes it possible to direct our energies all in the name of saving time. Ironically, though, it seems that we are losing time - the meaningful time we once used to indulge ourselves in the related pleasures of search and discovery. We're efficient, but empty."

So yes, it may be possible to get more from boingboing in thirty seconds then you could get from a library in a week, but that's exactly the point. It is empty, because it doesn;t involve time or effort (how often is searching on the Internet described as "effortless?") If you look at Japanese youth culture, the model for the sort of randomness and instant gratification found on a lot of internet sites, you;ll see the sort of emptiness McKeen is talking about.

[Nick]

Martin: "If you disqualify BoingBoing for being artificial, then Britannica and Dewey Decimal go out the window too. And once you realize that, your belief begins to look a lot more nostalgia-driven, i.e. not based on reason. If books are valid, if encyclopedias are valid, if libraries are valid, then the Internet is valid."

Well, I am not necessarily upholding the library as the ultimate breeding ground for serendipity. In fact I never once mentioned any of these things in my post. I do not deny that much of the same experience that can be had in the library can be had on the web, serendipity and all. What I do deny is that reading BoingBoing and finding cool links counts as serendipity. That's all.

At the risk of getting away from the topic, it should be mentioned that the library does have a dimension the Internet can't offer. People! In the flesh! The Internet is great when we're talking about discovering media. But nobody shushes you, or smiles in your direction. How about, say, walking down the street to the news stand? What is the web equivalent of walking down a busy NYC street and seeing hundreds of people in frantic collision and interaction? Wouldn't you consider that a fertile ground for serendipity?

[kdon]

C'mon Nick, drop it with your nostalgia for people and smiles - the Internet is all about people, somebody must be responsible for all this stuff...and haven't you seen those little yellow smiley faces all over the Web - they brighten every day with promises of free DVD players and credit scores!

Some people just can't get out of the past.

[Steven Johnson]

Um, Nick, the online equivalent of seeing people on the sidewalk is THE CONVERSATION YOU'RE HAVING RIGHT HERE. Yes, you don't get to see everybody's faces and smiles, but you do get to have an amazingly intense and complex conversation with complete strangers, which is frankly much less likely to happen on a sidewalk. (And believe me, I love sidewalks -- I wrote a whole book celebrating them.)

[Nick]

Steven: I don't see how you can consider the two to be even close to the same thing. There is no spontanaiety here, no body language, no interruptions, no flow of conversation back and forth. I can edit what I say before I say it. Furthermore, I'm not so sure about the "complete strangers" bit either, for the people on this site (and on any community site) make up a narrowed conglomeration of perspectives. It is a self-selected demographic. You and I are not "strangers" like me and the aging French superintendent on the ground floor of my building are "strangers". You're right that this conversation would never take place on the sidewalk. We are writing essays at each other. I'm not knocking online discussions but to consider them the same as the real kind is a big leap if you ask me, esp. in the context of serendipity. Who are you most likely to hear a new perspective from? A stranger on the street or a stranger in a comment thread on Kottke.org?

[Steven Johnson]

Nick, as I said, I'm a great believer in sidewalk culture, and I've lived in pedestrian-centric cities for my entire adult life. But I can safely say I have never once had an experience where twenty strangers spontaneously gathered on a sidewalk corner and got into a sustained debate about a complex cultural issue where everyone got a chance to share their views -- and where a number of interesting consensus points were reached. In fact, I've never had a conversation like that happen with TWO strangers. But it happens all the time in online discussion boards.

Yes, there is probably less diversity in this crowd than on the streets of many neighborhoods. But there's more real engagement here in terms of the sharing of ideas. (There's been a lovely conversational back and forth to this particular debate, in fact.) Which is why it's nice to have both sidewalks and discussion boards available to us all....

[Ryan Romero]

Wow, at this point I don't know where to start. I checked a blog that I everyonce in a while look at and got caught up reading 20 or so people argue about one topic that I had no intention of reading about today. I'm in college, this never happens in a university library(It couldn't, someone would have at some point said "shhh"). I think Steven would agree with me that the library in many senses is *more* of a passive form of absorbing information where the net has the ability to be passive but is more interactive.

What's more serendipidous; interactive or passive? My mind was just able to gather opinions of plenty of people who disagree and formulate, as I suppose everyone who reads this will, a better idea of the state of serendiptiy in our culture. Rather than go to a library and read what a few authors have to say about their respective subjects, I actually got to read an author's opinion as well as other peoples reactions to his opinions, even his opninons about their opinions.

As far as what Nick was saying about "complete strangers", you dont meet *complete* strangers in just about every neighborhood. If you live in the suburbs you meet almost exclusively people who have similar economic backgrounds, status in society etc. It's not universal, but this does effect your opinions on just about everything. And I hate to be cynical--wait, no I don't--I would rather hear the opinions of people on a common thread like kottke.org than many people on the street. Odds are, they take more time to formulate their opinions aka edit themselves.

If people only interacted online then yes, there would be less serendipity in the world. However, this is not the case. Serendipity is no endangered it's around more so than ever. It's in T.V. more than ever (reality t.v., "Lost" vs. soap operas), it's in music more (ipod store vs. AM radio), video games that are now gaining technology to react to you differently every time you play the game.

And honestly, it seems like most people who have left comments read books. I know I do and I'm pretty sure Steven has read at least 10. But for those who *don't* read books, and I know plenty, they are exposed to so many new ideas that they would otherwise not be exposed to because of the net. For them, serendipity in the realm of ideas has never been so vast.

[Martin]

Nick: My only response to your second post there can be (a) flesh and human eye winks may be nice, but what's that got to do with serendipity? and (b) you seem to have gone out of your way to establish that my argument that people have a need to praise analog things was a correct one.

As Steven points out, sidewalks and libraries are sometimes places for people very much not to communicate with each other, or at least very much not to communicate with each other the way we're doing here. For the clinically neurotic shut-in, this page right here is positively teeming with "life" -- there's even winks! ;) There's good and bad in the analog world, there's good and bad in the digital world. They're not "the same," but there's also no reason to posit that the negative attributes of the analog world are actually arguments in favor of its superiority.

And FWIW, I tend to agree that the web is a serendipity enabler. Since we don't actually give up our right or ability to find serendipity IRL, it doesn't really matter what the details of the (vast) serendipity are -- we get both anyway. But the web sure adds a lot of them. Kill the meme.

[Nick]

Steven: I am in complete agreement with everything you just said. There are two different worlds here, and it's hard to compare them without dissecting exactly what the Internet can and can't do. For the purposes of "library serendipity" as compared to the web, I will buy that the differences are negligible if you discount the human element. The size of that "if" is for everyone to decide on their own, I guess.

Martin: I don't necessarily disagree with anything you're saying either. But as for "the need to praise analog things"... I think you are twisting my words a little. Nobody is saying the digital world isn't worthy of praise too. But is it possible that real-world life experiences are just better, richer, and more memorable than the digital kind? Can the two worlds really be compared in this regard? I have been a serious Internet user for ten years and a serious computer kid my whole life, and while there have been good times along that road, I haven't had anywhere close to the number of poignant memories and experiences that "analog" life offers, serendipitous or not.

To that end, I think your point about my touting "the negative attributes of the analog world" reflects the other side of the attitude of which you're accusing me, which is the need to assert the all-encompassing greatness of digital culture as a kind of a counter to those weepy nostalgists who like the real world better. Unless I am reading that wrong--I found your comment a bit confusing. What is "negative" about the analog-world attributes mentioned earlier?

[Martin]

Nick: If you notice, my posts really try to be very even-handed -- in my first post, I wrote, both analog and digital have good and bad aspects, etc. Of course it's true that real life is fuller, richer, etc. than a purely digital existence (at least as far as we have currently developed it). But when you write,

"People! In the flesh! The Internet is great when we're talking about discovering media. But nobody shushes you, or smiles in your direction. How about, say, walking down the street to the news stand?"

Yeah, and nobody stabs you, screams at you, punches you, or picks your pocket online, either. That's what I mean when I say you are implicitly rejecting the negative aspects of analog life in your presentation. Well OK, you did say "shushes." If you want analog life, you have to valorize all of analog life, warts and all. Digital life is less stimulating, less vibrant etc. -- but it also has some virtues that analog life can't match.

Both things have good and bad aspects, and you have to discuss both sides of both when you weigh which is better at X, Y, Z. It's maddening because obviously your case that analog life is fuller is a darn strong one, you don't have to put your thumb on the scales by implying that analog life is all about the smiles and not at all about the potential of getting punched, getting yelled at, not being able to find smart people in a 10 mile radius etc. Indeed, those potentialities explain why people gravitate to the Web, so much, to avoid those negative things.

(Digital life has plenty of negative effects, just to show I can walk the walk. It does nothing for the body for almost all people, and having a healthy, fit body is important. Social interaction with real live humans is important, and it can impede that. Paintings in museums are far more beautiful than a reasonable gif version of same -- to name three things.)

And one of the virtues of the Web is that it enables easier, faster, richer serendipity of a purely informational/intellectual sort.

[Jacob Lozano]

Can we please kill the meme that the internet is the greatest knowledge tool that the world has ever known? The human mind is the greatest resource we have, and we don't bother to use it. In the past 15 years since the birth of the internet, the U.S. has descended into insanity and idiocy. I would rather give up all of these modern technologies if human beings would learn to think and practice the art of dialogue.

[Sukhdev Singh]

Browsing / Surfing is one way of acquiring knowledge and to satisfy the inner hunger for information. Call it infotainment – entertainment with information. One can get this type of entertainment either visiting a library or sit in front of desktop. Books / other published documents in a library does go a filtering and selection process – first in the publication process then in the selection process of the library. Hence reliability of the contained information is somewhat ensured. The same cannot be said about whatever goes on Internet. Persistency and referencing is more reliable in case of library collection – though referencing by links is much easier on web. However, it is also true that as time passes Internet is evolving into a library. http://sukhdev.blogspot.com/2006/05/is-internet-evolving-into-digital.html