All entries tagged: homophily
More Zuckerman on serendipity
Ethan Zuckerman — the gentleman we posted about earlier today — has written a smart piece for the next issue of Nieman Reports on the importance of serendipity in news consumption. As he puts it:
The number of choices an engaged citizen has for reading or watching news has exploded in recent years, and this increase may, paradoxically, mean we encounter less challenging news, and fewer foreign viewpoints, than we used to…
Serendipity is tricky to engineer. It’s difficult to provide information that’s both surprising and relates to a reader’s unstated interests. Librarians engineer serendipity in open stacks by organizing books by topic, allowing eyes to stray from the requested volume to related ones. Retailers hope to increase purchasing by making it easy to stumble upon items you were surprised to remember you “needed” — the beer display at the end of the diaper aisle is an attempt to create a serendipity for the father sent to the store for baby supplies.
For me, the dozens of bloggers I follow in my RSS reader more than fill my daily serendipity quotient — they are a constant source of interesting surprises my local paper just can’t match. That said, I’m fully aware 99.9 percent of the world doesn’t share my media consumption patterns, and for those folks the curated front page has historically been a serendipity machine.
It’s an interesting read. You can download a PDF of his piece here, or look for it in the winter issue of Nieman Reports.
Ethan Zuckerman, on balancing the protein and Kit Kats in your news
In Friday’s Christian Science Monitor, Vijaysree Venkatraman talks with Harvard’s Ethan Zuckerman about homophily — the tendency for people to want to associate with people like themselves. Online, this can mean someone interested in the Red Sox will spend a lot of time hanging out on Red Sox forums, writing comments on Boston Globe Red Sox stories, thinking Red Sox thoughts — but be blissfully ignorant of, say, water quality issues in Boston Harbor.
(One of the traditionalist pro-newspaper arguments you hear these days is that the newspaper broke through this homophily problem by presenting all sorts of news about different things in one convenient package, delivered to your front porch each morning. I think that tends to overestimate how much time those hypothetical monomaniacal Red Sox fans really spent reading the metro section, but that’s another argument.)
Seeing that CSM article reminds me to post this video shot by our Edward J. Delaney some time ago. It’s a couple minutes of a conversation he had with Ethan on his ideas about “nutritional labeling” for news. Ethan’s doing his part to increase the protein (a.k.a. international news) in your diet through his terrific Global Voices project.
If there are any true nerds in the audience, the world is waiting for a Firefox plugin to do what Ethan’s talking about here on a browser-by-browser basis. (You could use Calais for the metadata creation.)
