Apollo Gonzales

Serendipity, Right in Front of You.

In today’s New York Times, Damon Darlin writes a piece about how social media is killing serendipity. Once again, when talking about social media the traditional media bastion shows it’s disdain for a medium it claims to embrace. Damon’s thesis is bull shit. There is no way he uses Facebook or Twitter or any other social media tool then wrote this piece and didn’t think to himself “This is bull shit.” It’s an intriguing premise carried through to a bull shit conclusion.

Recommendation engines, whether mechanical or those ubiquitous re-tweet bots (who are flesh and blood, yet continue to act like machines) are a poor substitute for human exploration into literary, musical or visual adventure. The echo chamber of Twitter or Amazon or Facebook or any other digital machination are no different than the hype spewing, too loud talking, must-see-this crowd at a party or on the Metro. The ability to shut them out or turn the up applies in both worlds.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aedes/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

On line, as in meatspace, your adventure (and thus discovery) is limited only by your ability to follow serendipitous clues to discover that which brings delight. My friend’s bookshelves or CD racks are just as accessible to me on-line as they are when I am in their home - that is, available to the extent they wish to share. Darlin’s claim that CD collections have disappeared into the iPod is only a half truth. Open up iTunes on your office or hotel network and allow it to share and search for shared libraries, your world of music choices will explode. I share 1500 CD’s across my office network, at any given moment of the day all 5 connections (iTunes limits the number of people who can share your library) are in use.

Darlin claims that “Many software developers are trying to recreate serendipity.” If that is the case, there are lots of developers who’d better get used to failure. You can’t re-create a human experience with an algorithm. The best you can do is create mechanisms to allow SHARING of the human experience and let the HUMANS find their way.

In the end serendipity doesn’t know the difference between analog and digital, it only knows a mind receptive to adventure.