The Architecture of Serendipity

After watching this provocatively titled vlog about blogs and whether or not they work to limit our viewpoints and fragment our society, I got to thinking about how we might get more evidence to support either of the opposing theories - blogs give us a much wider range of views and help us better understand our fellow humans vs. blogs prompt us to make strong bonds with like-minded individuals and do not prompt us to consider alternate viewpoints.

If we're comparing blogs to older media with its top-down editing and broad audiences, then one key difference between the two is what Cass Sunstein artfully refers to as "the architecture of serendipity." When you see or hear some bit of news or an opinion that you would not have sought out, either b/c its content did not interest you or its point of view conflicted with your own, then you are consuming media serendipitously. This choice of word is a bit misleading, as the arrangement of content in a newspaper or a broadcast is not haphazard. It is designed to be something that the consumer will like enough to keep tuning in, but also to be something that the creator either believes the consumer should know or an unconscious reflection of the creator or, in most mass media cases, the creators.

I think the question at the heart of this is: is there such a thing as too much choice?

And I'm not talking about the excess of choice that paralyzes people and forces them to make lousy decisions. I'm talking about choice that seems to be a prerequisite of individuality, identity, and self realization. We can become individuals because we have options as to how to think and how to act. The more options we have, the more our selves we can become.

This may be our future, but it certainly was never our past. Society pushed back against people's self interests for, well, most of the history of society. If one wants to get Freudian about it, one could say that society acted as our super-ego via mass media and, before that, networks of gossiping locals who subtly or unsubtly expressed approbation through information you really didn't want to hear.

But enough high falutin speculation. How do we put this to the test?

Study 1: two groups provide a list of interests to the media creator. Group 1 is instructed to provide a very general list of topics while group 2 is asked to provide a very specific, exhaustive list that includes topics and opinions about those topics. They are then provided with news feeds that are tailored to their interests. Both groups feel as though they have exercised some choice in the process of consuming media (just as the TV viewer with the remote control and the blog reader both feel as though they choose what to view or read), but group 1 has less control over what they're consuming. In fact, you could have 5 or 10 groups with varying levels of specificity in their lists of interest.

So then, what would you measure after this part of the study, and how would you measure it? What do we fear about blogs or mass media? We use words like "cocooning" and "fragmentation," but what are we really talking about, and how could you measure it? You could measure:

Happiness: do people with more information choice report being happier? Do they act happier? Yes, this would be tough to measure, but psychologists have done it before, I'm sure.

Knowledge: What would probably happen here is that the group with the most choice would have knowledge that was deep but not broad, the group with some choice would have fairly broad and fairly deep knowledge, and the group with little choice would have knowledge that was neither deep nor broad. Is in-depth knowledge better than a broad range of knowledge? No way to tell, but I think we could agree that having both is best.

Open-mindedness: If you had a debate with someone who held a belief opposite of your own, would you just get really angry at them and start yelling, would you adopt some of their beliefs while sticking with some of your own, or would you just roll over and let them convince you of anything?

Social Skills: How well are you able to communicate with someone who is not like you, in terms of what they believe (it would be interesting to see if blogs were different than video blogs in this regard: maybe b/c you can't see who writes a blog, you're more apt to base your similarity judgment solely on stated opinions rather than visible characteristics like race, class, gender, and age).

It seems silly to defend a paternalistic media or society, to think that our happiness, our range and depth of knowledge, our open-mindedness, and our social skills would be better if we submitted to a society that severely restricted our choices. Just because society has always been that way doesn't mean that it always should be that way. But I really think that people instinctively believe that more choice is better and that this notion should be questioned. We have never experienced true self realization. Maybe its not what we think it would be.

I'd wager its a matter of degree. A total reduction of choice would make you feel lousy and make you into an automaton. But is the other extreme any better? It might just make you less open-minded, less able to get along with a lot of other people, and less happy. I bet we could begin to find the answers to these questions with controlled studies of information consumption and blogs.