David Tebbutt

Is all this clever RSS aggregator, search and filtering software pushing us into funnels of narrow interest? It’s all very well to respond to a user’s request for information, but is it so good when we start to do it to ourselves?

The question was prompted by Tony Rucinski of the University of Wales during the Cilip/Talis Re-imagining the Library conference. Following a session on the cultural shifts and user expectations wrought by the advent of social software, he asked whether it was healthy to be able to filter out anything that didn’t conform to our own worldview.

We risk surrounding ourselves with like-minded online friends, visiting only those websites that conform to our views and filtering out stuff we don’t want to hear. Thank goodness the technology is imperfect; otherwise web habitués would never break out of their self-imposed mental prisons.

This is not just an issue for the individuals themselves; it’s potentially an issue for society. Inhabitants of digital ghettos are likely to be less tolerant of conflicting viewpoints. We see it sometimes in the echo-chamber effect of the blogosphere.

Readers of IWR prove they are not of this mindset simply by picking up the paper – unless it’s their only reading matter, in which case they have pushed themselves into a dubious funnel and should seek an immediate remedy.

A continuous diet of the same thing is unhealthy. We need to climb out of our prejudices; otherwise we become stale and unimaginative. One of the key elements of creativity is to join things in unexpected ways. Teachers of creative thinking love to set a problem and tell us our thinking start-point is something daft, like an ashtray. By seeking a connection between an ashtray and the problem, our brains are forced down unpredictable pathways and serendipitous thoughts emerge.

As we spend more of our time in front of a computer screen, how can we counteract the urge to organise and filter the incoming deluge? If we don’t, the sheer magnitude of interesting stuff out there can overwhelm and paralyse. But if we filter ruthlessly, we end up with an unhealthy information diet. What we need is some enforced serendipity.

Sidebars of blogs can be useful – blogrolls, links to commenters, that kind of thing – but they’re still framed by the interests of the author. Something more random is needed.

Randomwebsite.com seems like the perfect answer. Just click and go to a website of its choosing, Marvellous; rut-breaking indeed. But a quick test led me to a site written in Chinese, details of a boutique church and injection systems for the paper industry. Three hits, but no serendipity.

Which led me to StumbleUpon. Started in 2001, it has quietly built a fan base of over two million users. It’s a halfway house between total randomness and narrow interest. You tell it what you’re interested in and, if you want, a bit about yourself. As you rummage the web, you can give pages a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to help it get to know you better. You can click a button in your browser to get a semi-random web page based on your evolving profile.

Or, of course, you could just get out more.

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