The Tyranny of Brown
Things 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.
September 30th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
I agree.
If there was a way to designate friends as “experts” you could then pull some kind of feed of recommendations based on their activity.
For example: John knows lots about music and from talking to him about music you decide you’d like to know what he recommends. You designate him as music expert in your social graph which means that anything he does relating to music is added to the other info generated by music experts in your network and relayed to you as some a recommendation feed.
This feed could be somehow influenced and shaped by the activity of the social graph, or community as a whole but ultimately it would be the recommendations of personal expert peers. Something that’s far more valuable to you than “people you have no idea about and of undefined authority also bought/listened to/read/watched this.
The opinion of expert friends then becomes social currency. It then becomes all about recommending people that can recommend stuff.
September 30th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
What bashford says makes sense but what is described in the original post already exists. It’s known as ’selected at random.’