The Tyranny of Brown
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009Things that filter the information available to me based on similarity / algorithmic / social closeness to everything else I like are dull.
Back in the day, all the noise was about how everyone would have their own personalised media stream, tailored specifically to the needs and tastes of the individual. Now it’s here, it’s clear that we’ve created devices for keeping us in the same old worn-out grooves, selective exposure raised to the nth degree.
Technology advances. We replaced our newspapers with RSS readers (already fairly effective partisan-mills) and then Twitter, an echo-chamber, mostly a closed loop for people with similar interests to share their similarity, create bubbles to inhabit. Things that allow similarity to glom together breed mediocrity, an average of everything: brown.
I want to be surprised. I want recommendation engines that recommend things from the very edges of my extended network, and outside of it. I don’t want 63% of people who bought this also bought this, I want to see the 1%, curve balls. Last.fm is good for this: I can be listening to “artists similar to Aphex Twin” and get the occasional bit of Bach, or ELO, or Motown because someone, somewhere in the world creates those overlaps on the Venn diagram.
Let’s turn the algorithms inside-out. Let’s get them to throw out the brown bits in the middle, and find the spiky, technicolour bits around the edge. Let’s create tools for surprising ourselves.