Ethan Zuckerman’s work toward a Serendipity Engine

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Ethan Zuckerman spoke at the New School last Wednesday to a turn out of about 10 people (where was everyone else from DT?).  Zuckerman is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.  His career has been marked by pioneering projects focused on participation, plurality, and attention on the web.  One of his most acclaimed projects is Global Voices, a citizen’s media project that aggregates, translates, interprets, and summarizes blogger activity globally to highlight conversations happening in grassroots media and provide windows into media spaces often ignored or misunderstood my mainstream news.

I’ve been putting off writing about the talk because I have considerable research to do in order to articulate Zuckerman’s ideas accurately.  I’d rather do my best now while it’s fresh, so forgive me if there are gaps or unclear concepts.

Zuckerman spoke with us about his current project to develop digital architectures for serendipity.  He opened with the example of the band Journey finding a replacement for lead singer Steve Perry by watching youtube videos of cover bands.  They found Arnel Pineda, a Filipino singer, flew him to the US, and toured the band with him.  It seems that the internet is built for exactly this kind of serendipitous, global human interaction.  At the same time, digital media can actively facilitate what Zuckerman and other identify as homophily, the tendency of people to hang out with people like them.  The issue with homophily in media is that when the information we get about the world is largely made by people like us and about people like us, we only hear the information we want or already know.  To illustrate this, Zuckerman outlined to phenomenon of Nigerians attempting to scam people in the developed world through email.  The result is that some people are actively trying to block any communications from Nigeria, be that email or internet publishing.  In this case, the resulting media architectures promote xenophobia and classism. (Please see Zuckerman’s detailed post on homophily as he presents the issue much more elegantly than I could.  His inquiries are worth reading at length.)

A possible antidote to homophily is serendipity, finding exactly what you need without knowing what you’re looking for.  One place where Zuckerman sees serendipity happening is on the front of the New York Times.  The front page presents a collection of stories chosen by the editors that are meant to be of general interest and import to the Times’ readers.  Some of these stories are important in ways that the reader can not anticipate, so it’s the editors job to choose and present them in a way that will pull readers in.  In comparing the front of the print section of the Times and the digital version, the digital version presents considerably more headlines and links.  The possibility that a reader will engage with a story is dependent upon less information about each story, making it easier for a reader to ignore stories that are not of the most obvious interest to them.  Thus, more NYTimes.com readers will arrive more quickly at articles about local elections and home decorating, missing the news about politics in the developing world or global food security that might smack the New York Times reader in the face.  If you are following this logic, you can see how the earlier example of Journey finding their new lead singer is actually an example of internet homophily.  Journey knew what they were looking for.  The internet just provided more opportunities to find it.

Zuckerman sees libraries functioning similarly to the New York Times, where upon searching for a book you can’t help but see the books grouped around it, often finding relevant and unanticipated information.   Libraries and newspapers are precedents of information architectures for serendipity that Zuckerman hopes to emulate computationally on the web in the effort to offset existing digital architectures for homophily and predictability.

I asked Zuckerman about the roll of narrative or story telling in serendipity.  He pointed to what David Weinberger calls the Ninja Gap.  Nigeria and Japan have roughly the same population and dramatically disproportionate media coverage.  We as Americans generally have an idea of Japan, even if that idea is limited to ninjas.  This is the context we bring to stories about Japan.  Nigeria on the other hand has no ninja equivalent in the American popular imagination.  No context, no interest, no attention.  Story telling is important because it creates the context that will motivate someone to pay attention long enough for serendipity to happen.

I also asked about how to account for the fact that the best serendipity tends to come from friends because of their intimate and sustained relationship with us.  They can recognize things that might be importnat to us through their intuition, that quiet feeling of information becoming meaning before we’ve coded the meaning into language.

There is a lot of social software that is reaching toward serendipity.  Institutions like Google are on the forefront of with projects that anticipate flu trends.  This can be seen as serendipitous because it presents us with useful information, indication of an oncoming epidemic, that we might not have known to look for.  Zuckerman’s serendipity project is driven not by an interest in social control (as suggested by modern histories of the epidemiology originating in cholera outbreaks) or creating incentives for populations of similar procilvities to gather in one place for marketing (as facebook does) but by an interest in challenging classims and xenaphobia on a global scale.

This is exciting.  I’m glad I went to the talk as Zuckerman is dealing with many issues that are near and dear to me, namely intercultural understanding and slowing down enough to listen to each other.  Zucherman helped complicate my assumptions about the relationship between the increasing speed of new media and attention economies.  Thanks Dave Carroll for suggesting I go to the talk. I look forward to seeing how the serendipity project develops.

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Tags: digital media, ethan zuckerman, homophily, serendipity