Facebook’s recent plans and developments and Google’s social search have made me think more about the increasing loss of random connections on the internet through personalization. This idea of randomness stands in direct opposition to the kind of “serendipitous” relevance you find on places like Amazon or Last.fm where relevance is defined by the choices you’ve made and the choices of your friends.

I have no doubt that serendipity through algorithms and filtering through your social networks are wonderful ways to improve the signal to noise ratio online. However, I’m a little disturbed by our decreasing access to the randomness that I loved so much about the internet (which is why I’m interested in randomized places like chatroulette).

I know what my online friends like and think because, well, they’re my friends. Or they’re friends of friends, or share an offline reference point that was probably not public nor random. The information that comes from these filters are not necessarily forming an echo chamber, but it is familiar. And yes, that familiarity does often imbue the information with a high degree of relevance.

But I also want to know what people who are not like me think. I want to know what those outside of my various frames of reference find relevant. I want to easily access voices and narratives that have been silenced, marginalized and forgotten. There’s only so much I can gain out of discovering news, information and media when everything is based on what I already like and who I already know. And when online relevancy is predetermined by offline relevancy, I worry that the online world will come to exhibit more and more closely, the same power dynamics and normalizations we find offline.

As much as personalization improves relevance, I’d also like spaces online where Charlaine Harris is no more relevant than Christine de Pizan, Quentin Tarantino no more relevant than Takashi Ito, Lady Gaga no more relevant than Ladytron. But more importantly, maybe us N. Americans will learn more about the vast and unfamiliar world out there. Maybe we will stop referring to Africa as a country and be able to identify Bhutan, Estonia, Afghanistan and countries we have armed forces in on a map. Maybe we can listen and learn from other cultures and other communities and other time periods.

In an early cyberpunk film, Ghost in the Shell, the protagonist claims, “The net is truly vast and infinite.” Let’s keep a part of it that way.

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