BuzzMachine

Good point. In all the talk about it, the distinction between serendipity and randomness hadn’t occurred to me before.

One thought I had is Google or Facebook could figure out how a user’s likes and interests are most divergent from their friends and give more weight to those likes and interests that aren’t being well served by their social graph. I take it this is what Nathan Kurtz meant in this comment. I also wondered if Google could offer the most semantically relevant results but pull from the bottom of the popularity list — but that might just turn up a lot of that SEO-exploitative stuff and spam.

I think it the best serendipity engine would have to use a fairly hybrid approach though (e.g. mix these ‘parallel social graph’ results with results based on pure popularity, pure randomness, and results from the social graph), because a lot of the ‘serendipity effect’ on user experience would be lost if results are too recognizably & consistently influenced by specific factors.

Finishing my book on online reputation and web literacy serendipity was the word ringing in my head. Being connected, being in networks, increases serendipity, happy coincidences, the right person talking to you with the right idea at the right time.

What articulated this best for me was this video interview with John Hagel: http://goo.gl/JrKP – where he talks about Twitter and Twitter-like tools as being far more effective for knowledge sharing in organisations because they tap into tacit knowledge, and increase the likelihood of serendipitous conversations between individuals.

I also liked Shane Richmond of the Telegraph’s take on it: http://goo.gl/2zJD

> CNN/NYT/broadcast news vs. Fox/Drudge Report/Limbaugh). People become separated into political ghettos, only hearing from their own side. Separation breeds intolerance of different views, etc.

> I think the effect is much stronger on the right than the left.

Based on what? (The fact that ex-republicans don’t like the party now doesn’t tell you anything about insularity.)

I ask because Limbaugh etc regularly cite NYT etc so that their listeners can see what the other side is saying. Yes, they encourage their listeners to see what the “MSM” is doing.

NYT and friends claim tell you what Limbaugh etc is saying but seem to consistently miss details that don’t fit the narrative.

You wouldn’t notice this unless you actually look at both sides instead of listening to what they say about each other.

That traditional newspapers offer many opportunities for serendipity is, in fact, serendipitous. That serendipity wasn’t intentional — rather it is simple consequence of the anecdotal properties of the technology. Maximizing the number of stories presented on a fixed amount of paper implies that multiple stories will be printed side-by-side, etc.

But, those who bemoan the “loss” of serendipity seem blind to the reality of the web today. My own experience is that in any single day, I’m exposed to vastly more “serendipity” online than I can even imagine being found in a newspaper.

The new and constantly evolving human-machine-relationship is creating an ever growing complexity to “the system”. Serendipity had always the same effect, but it was always an expression of the contemporary complexity of the system.

I’ve recently found – serendipitously – the book “Three Princes of Serendip”. It’s actually a story that led to the creation of the word serendipity and the definition of the effect itself. In this story the three princes deduce with the help of serendipity the state of a camel. This is – of course – a story from a long, long time ago. Today we wouldn’t need serendipity to deduce the state of a camel. The information that is available to us changed environment and thus changed serendipity. The effect itself evolves parallel to the environment it exists in.

And since we are living in a system that relies on technology and algorithms, it is only natural that we will reach a state of algorithmically created serendipity. As always, it is not the death of something, but only the next version of it. And as always people who are not evolving with the pace of “the system” are telling the story of the “death of a certain something”. Yes, the old version of serendipity is dead, but long live the new version.

Until it is also dead.

Bit late to the serendipity debate – sorry, Jeff – but you might find a piece I wrote for the BBC back in 2006 of interest:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5018998.stm

the main argument is that ‘today’s richly interlinked web is as much a promoter of serendipity as the library’, an argument that I still think holds.

No, no, no, no, no, Jeff, please, no.
You are seeing serendipity as a commodity to be exploited as just another search tool enhancement rather than a wonderful aesthetic experience. By automating and mediating and mathematically defining it you are stripping it of why it is a joyful experience.

The whole point of serendipity is that you don’t ask for it. It is both constrained by your own experience and constraining of future possible experiences. By mathematically defining it you take one half of the equation away and just leave another search tool.

I agree with Bill T that the interlinked nature allows for increased opportunities for serendipity, but any automatic ‘enhancement’ of what should be a wander through the park sniffing whichever flower takes our fancy, being told by any external agent what a flower might smell like. No. That’s no longer serendipity, that’s an enhanced search tool or an augmented results parser or whatever you might like to call it. To call it serendipity implies that you believe that some portion of your mind’s complexity, your memories and all the intuitive associations that go to make up you can be split off and embodied in a piece of maths.

Take a good hard look at what cutting edge neuroscience is actually telling us about our minds and how well we understand them. You’ll see that we are nowhere near being able to claim to be able to simulate serendipity, even if it were desirable to do so.