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The problem of relevant content – and why we still need editors…

Posted by LBi India June 3rd, 2011

In his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You, Eli Pariser claims that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg once declared “a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to you than people dying in Africa”.

Zuckerberg’s point (I hope) wasn’t a moral one – it’s merely that people tend to be most immediately concerned with what’s most immediate to them.

And that, for Facebook, is the only definition of ‘relevance’ that matters.

For Facebook, relevance is judged purely in terms of your past behaviour – what content you looked at; what links you clicked; what stuff you ‘liked’; who you made friends with (and what and who your friends looked at, clicked, liked and made friends with…). All Facebook wants to do is define the sort of things you look at so that it can keep giving you more of the same.

The thinking behind this is fairly obvious:

• If Facebook serves up content that you want to see, you’ll keep coming back.
• If Facebook serves up content that you don’t want to see, you might go elsewhere.

So Facebook filters what appears in your news feed, based on an algorithm that defines what you’re most likely to respond positively to.

Is this a problem?

It is, Pariser argues, when this model for delivering ‘relevant’ content becomes the default for all electronic media we interact with. When Google, for instance, tailors our search results to what it knows about us personally, based on what we’ve looked at before (or, if we’re logged out, what it can work out based on our location).

Pariser’s thesis is that we could all very soon be living in our own personal online bubbles – ‘unique universes of information’ – in which what we get told about the world is based purely on prejudices we may not even know we have. And in which “you don’t decide what gets in, and more importantly you don’t decide what gets edited out”.

What might get edited out? Alternate points of view. Complex subjects. Bad news. “The way that information is transmitted on Facebook is with the ‘like’ button,” Pariser noted in an interview, “and the ‘like’ button has a very particular valence. It’s easy to click ‘like’ on ‘I just ran a marathon’ or ‘I baked a really awesome cake.’ It’s very hard to click ‘like’ on ‘war in Afghanistan enters its 10th year.’”

The ‘Like’ issue isn’t just peculiar to Facebook. In a recent piece in the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote, “the striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product.”

But when every interaction – and every piece of content we consume – has to be likeable, we’re in trouble. “As our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want,” Franzen wrote, “our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.”

In other words: it doesn’t challenge us, it doesn’t contradict us, it doesn’t disagree with us – and it never tells us what we don’t want to hear. Even if we need to hear it.

(Who actively ‘wants’ to know about people dying in Africa? Or the war in Afghanistan?)

The internet was supposed to free information from the editorial gatekeepers of the old broadcast model, argues Pariser, but instead “what we’re seeing is a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones… and algorithms don’t have ethics”. So instead of a balance between instant gratification and what’s good for us, all we get is endless dessert, tailored specifically to our own particular sweet tooth.

Only the facts that flatter our political point of view. Good news instead of bad. Fun instead of depth.

This both gives us an entirely false view of the world and rules out the possibility of making new and unexpected connections. No more serendipity. As Cory Doctorow writes: “some relevance can’t be divined a priori – how relevant is an open window to Fleming’s Petri dish?”

At the very least, Pariser suggests, we need to know what filters are being applied to what we’re seeing online (why did my search for ‘Egypt’ not return the same results as someone else’s?) He puts forward the idea of a conceptual slider that we can move between ‘show me stuff that’s similar to the stuff I’ve had before’ and ‘show me stuff that’s different’.

He also suggests we get into the habit of deleting our cookies and turning off tracking in our web browsers. Would that make a lot of online marketing more difficult? Probably. Does that necessarily have to be a bad thing?

And he punts the idea that we might want to hang on to those human editors after all. In a Q&A with Maria Popova he defined the purpose of the editor as “to extend the horizon of what people are interested in and what people know.”

“Giving people what they think they want is easy,” he said, “but it’s also not very satisfying: the same stuff, over and over again. Great editors are like great matchmakers: they introduce people to whole new ways of thinking, and they fall in love.”

Tags: content strategy, editors, Facebook, Google, Social Media

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A museum without walls

Posted by LBi India May 26th, 2011

So the other night I was reading art critic Douglas Crimp’s 1980 essay “On the Museum’s Ruins” (published in “The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture”).

Crimp’s subject is the way the emergence of post-modern art in the 1960s and 70s challenged the authority of museums and galleries to decide how art should be organised and presented (bear with me).

By quoting, copying, referencing and mixing up images from different historical eras and contexts, works like Robert Rauschenberg’s screen prints questioned the practice of hanging works of art according to discrete historical periods, art movements or styles.

If one of Rauschenberg’s pictures can contain elements of both “Venus at Her Toilet” by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1615) and a modern (1960s) street scene, the argument goes, then who’s to say where it should be displayed?

All of a sudden, curation – the selection, caretaking and presentation of works of art by highly trained and trusted experts – became a tricky business.

Of course, everyone is a curator now. Umberto Eco at the Louvre (his theme was The Infinity of Lists). Laurie Anderson, Nick Cave, David Bowie (and others) at the Meltdown Festival. Audiences (especially bohemian ones). Robots. Even boutique shopkeepers (when they’re not getting celebrities to curate things for them).

Plus me and you, every time we like or link to something via facebook or twitter (or create a spotify playlist, or add something to a tumblr, or expand our Last FM library).

As author – and ‘freelance curator’ – Marvin Heiferman puts it “the title curator is increasingly being used to describe anyone who turns a critical eye toward the aggregation or highlighting of whatever content seems to be at hand.”

Which, these days, is all of us.

One argument says that curating things is easier than creating things. It costs less – in terms of time, equipment, and talent for starters. And you get to enjoy a little bit of the glamour associated with creation without doing all that hard work.

However, when there’s far more content than anyone has the time to consume (or even find), curation has become a valuable social act. Valuable because it helps “synchronise communities”, as Clay Shirky argues (though for the first few seconds of the video it looks like he’s about to start playing the harmonica).

And valuable to the people who want to talk to those communities.

But back to Douglas Crimp. As he points out, in a museum or gallery things become defined by the act of being included. They are defined as ‘art’ rather than rubbish, defined as belonging to this artistic movement rather than that one, defined as being part of a particular narrative (how many different ways could we tell the story of the benin bronzes, for example?)

Conversely, when it comes to our online personas, the things that we include – by linking to them or posting them on our Facebook page – define us.

Do I want to be seen as the kind of person who forwards two-year-old viral videos that everyone has already seen, or as someone who provides links to intellectually stimulating pieces of classic postmodern thinking? Should I use twitter to link to the same sort of things that I like on Facebook? And what do those things say about me?

If I’m going to present myself as a commodity, what sort of commodity do I want everyone to think I am?

Context is everything here. Museums and galleries give context to cultural objects. And the cultural objects we link to give context to our online identities.

One more thing that Crimp touches on in his essay:

Gustav Flaubert’s unfinished 1880 novel “Bouvard and Pecuchet” tells the story of two Parisian copy-clerks whose search for intellectual stimulation ultimately teaches them that, among other things, real life is very different to what one can learn from reading books.

Our heroes study landscape gardening, chemistry, anatomy, medicine, biology, geology, archaeology, architecture, literature, aesthetics, politics, love, gymnastics, theology, philosophy, religion, education, music and urban planning.

But whenever they try to apply what they’ve learned, everything goes wrong.

So –at least in one of Flaubert’s sketches for the book’s finale (he died before it was completed) –they go back to their original profession. Like Robert Rauschenberg, they start copying things: “…haphazardly, everything they find… old newspapers, posters, torn books … real items and their imitations…”

And the problem of context? Like the rest of us, at first Bouvard and Pecuchet have trouble “putting each thing in its proper place – and suffer great anxieties about it.” But finally they realise the important thing:

“The page must be filled! Everything is equal, the good and the evil. The farcical and the sublime… the insignificant and the typical, they all become and exaltation of the statistical. There are nothing but facts – and phenomena.”

And lots and lots of stuff.

By: Owen Booth, LBi London

Tags: content strategy, curation, Facebook, Social Media, social networks, Twitter

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