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Should Newspapers Give Readers the Power to Hide News They Don't Want to See? - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic
The writer of this brief article seems broadly in favour of giving readers the power to self-curate.
The systemic effects of doing so are, however, a little risky. Confirmation bias is a powerful force on the Internet and filter bubbles are widespread enough as it is. We need to encounter other beliefs, other interests and other ideas apart from ones we have already settled on, if we are to grow and learn. The rise of social networking and the stigmergic effects of ubiquitous algorithms like PageRank and Edgerank are already causing enough trouble without site owners contributing to the phenomenon.
On the other hand, there is little value in insisting that, for a single site, people should read things they do not want to read. Apart from anything else, if their choices are unconstrained, they will visit other sites instead if they don't like what they find. If you are in control of a site then it is better, perhaps, to let people select what they want from your site than to select nothing at all and go somewhere else.
In design terms, the Web is part of and a major contributor to a self-organising system, a massive range of overlapping, intersecting and connecting ecosystems. If it were one flat savanna, whether as a result of confirmation bias or a lack of differentiation, evolution would slow down or stop. Luckily, neither extreme is possible - we simply cannot pay attention to it all things, nor can we completely divorce ourselves from the things we do not want to see. It is neither an unstructured featureless space nor a set of isolated islands that never connect.
We need parcellated spaces for evolution to happen, but we need isthmuses, bridges, and breaks in barriers for good things to seep through. Self-curation is fine and, to a large extent, unstoppable: even in the days when I used dead trees for my news, I would skip not just articles but whole sections that did not interest me. Attention is a valuable and scarce commodity and, no matter how curious we may be, we don't have time or capacity to give it all to all things. However, we need to make room for serendipitous channels, seepages and signposts to remind us that there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophies. Yes, of course we should give people control over what they see and make it easy for them to filter things how they like. But we should also make deliberate holes in those filters, to remind people that their filters can and probably should change from time to time, to provide signposts to what they are missing and to encourage them to explore new islands and territories. We should design for serendipity.
- Sets, nets and groups revisited
July 3, 2024 - 10:41pm
Jon Dron
Jon Dron
Comments
Hello Jon. I read this post and absolutely think that viewers or visitors should be able to self-curate. This does present some challenges - and I like the idea of creating holes in the filters (or perhaps resetting parts of the filters) from time to time is a good way of introducing serendipitous possibilities into the mix.
One other situation where curation of a site seems to be applicable is when instructors want a learner to "see" something specific. I know of a situation where an instructor of a very very large course (1000+ at the same time) of students is needing to curate what the Tutors for the course, and finally the students in the course "see". The reason for this appears to be twofold - one to manage the infomation to ensure it is in line with the course outcomes and that in fact the examples are correct (where an example is being provided) and another is to manage the timing and amount of materials being provided to the students. There simply is TOO much information in a whole newspaper to read it all - unless one has the benefit of unlimited time...
Do you think, or know of, any ways in which filter bubbles could be used to provide students with personalized learning materials from a large curated list? Would that be a particular kind of situation where students could choose what they want to see or not (based perhaps on their prior learning?)
Finally - are you aware of any social networking site kind of implementation that is working currently that has the backend engines like Amazon which could be used to filter and curate large collections of relevant data for delivery in a personalized fashion to students?
By an odd coincidence I wrote a system or two that tried to do that in the early 2000s, CoFIND being the main one, that were used in precisely this kind of context. I wrote a PhD thesis around it. One of the notable things about CoFIND was that it inverted the usual approach to a user model. Most adaptive and collaborative filtering systems keep the user model hidden, and that's a big problem because we may not even know that we are in a filter bubble and, even if we do, we may not know much about the algorithms and data points that are being used to provide us with recommendations. My approach was to treat the user model as a set of user-generated tags (not just discrete categories but also fuzzy categories) that could be added, aggregated in new ways, and chosen according to context. For instance, learners could seek resources that were 'good for beginners' or 'funny' or whatever tag had been applied by others in a similar role, so you were not treated as one unified persona but as a constantly shifting human being with ever changing and adapting needs. Unfortunately, though I still think it was conceptually cool, the system was incredibly hard to use and exponentially magnified the cold-start problem, mainly because each combination of tags created its own micro-ecosystem. Any ways that I found to reduce complexity also reduced the value of the recommendations. Judy Kay's notion of scrutable user models was better, but ran into similar difficulties. Giving control over your user model adds too much complexity.
There have been many attempts to produce collaborative filters for education, maybe starting with CoFIND (which stands for 'Collaborative Filter in N Dimensions'). At least, it was among the first used in formal educaiton, though there were plenty of earlier informal learning/knowledge management systems like PHOAKS ('People Helping One Another Know Stuff') and even Tapestry, that started it all in about 1992, that explicitly tried to recommend things to learn from. There has been quite a bit of work on it at OUNL - I helped to examine Hendrik Drachsler's PhD on that subject, for instance (the link is to some of his papers). There are some huge issues using such things in education though: previous preference is way less useful in determining future needs in learning being perhaps the biggest one. One or two of Hendrik's papers have a good review of the issues -see http://inderscience.metapress.com/content/n63082472v3210l0/ for instance. Timing remains an enormous obstacle: these systems are OK if you are riding the wave and want to know where to go next, but hopeless at showing paths (and no, aggregation of paths doesn't work!). I don't think anyone has really successfully overcome the problems yet, but I and others are still working on it.