How many times have you faced another reality? I am talking about a feeling when you encounter a person, an event, a fact that has existed for ages in parallel with you, but you were totally unaware of it. It happens to me from time to time, to encounter someone who lives under totally different rules (different than my way of life, and different from all the people I am surrounded with), who has totally different values, who does totally different things, and who has a totally different perception of the world.
Although I am aware that I mostly live surrounded by like-minded people (because their company pleases me), it always strikes me, how far some other worlds are, from the world I am living in. We all live in a certain world, defined not just by geography and class, but also by perception, values, background, profession etc. This separation of worlds is reflected on the Web as well. When you log in to Facebook, what you see is not the same other people see. Your view is limited by your social circle. This phenomenon is well pointed out by the foremost Social Media researcher, danah boyd.
Filtering, recommendation, and personalization narrow our view to relieve us from irrelevant content. It is true that his functionality is needed, as in the opposite case we would find ourselves in a chaos of information coming from all sides. However the possibilities of serendipitous discoveries, broader view, tasting the differences seem to be quite limited. I remember my early days on Twitter, when almost none of my friends used the service, so I turned to following people I didn’t know (but I admired them, or they seemed interesting). It was there that I discovered a lot of interesting stuff, a bit of the regular track of my work and thought. danah boyd also argues that Chatroulette is now one of such places for random discoveries, and stepping out of your walled garden world, that reminds her of the early days on the internet, when the early users communicated with strangers (since the strangers were more or less the only one around on the internet.
People need filtering and personalization. Even more, they need a walled garden in order to feel protected and among friends, to be confident to share personal experiences. Walled gardens (walled in the sense of privacy) provide means for this natural need of sharing with friends to take place on the Web. But people also need a break from the routine, from usual and expected. They need a seed of randomness, and serendipitous discovery, that helps them form a global picture and know where their world is with regard to other worlds.
However, there is, for now, only a small number of ways how this randomness can be achieved on the Web:
Random page/profile
On Wikiedia, you can try Random article, and gain some knowlegde in an unexpected field. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Random person page on Social Networks. However, this randomness is not good enough as it is totally random, so chances that I wouldn’t be interested are quite significant.
ReTweet
Retweets do not give an insight into a totally distant world, but make some jump into an adjacent world possible. If my friends retweet something I can gain an insight into what is going on in their world. Provided that they have a circle of friends that is different enough; they present a boundary and a passage between two worlds. This kind of passage is enriching in walled networks; and I guess it provides mostly interesting stuff; but this way of breaking from the usual has difficulty in reaching distant worlds and distant information.
Public Timeline
Public time-line is like Wikipedia Random article. On Twitter (and similar services), you may use it so see a global picture. I personally do not know anyone who uses this, as it is way too noisy, and mostly useless.
Trending Topics/Digg
As trending topics, is the third thing on my list that comes from Twitter, it seams to me that Twitter is the best we get for jumping to other worlds
Trending topics relies on the number of people that speak of a term, and puts puts the most popular terms in everyone’s sight. This gives a global picture, a bit out of the closed view. It is in fact similar to Digg (that sounds a bit retro now, but is a useful service).
Location Based Services
Who said Foursquare? Gowalla? The emerging location based services, make discovery possible on another ground: using location. You may discover people that you don’t know, just because they were at the same place where you are. They might have left you a message, a tip, an object to collect. You can discover total strangers. Yet, this is all quite new, and maybe not yet fully adapted to a meaningfull discovery of new people, and new things.
* * *
If I were to classify all those ways, I would say there are two apparent categories. There are ways that use a certain property, a certain fact about me as hole between my world and somehow adjacent worlds, and make a discovery of new things possible through that. This property can be a friend that is on the border of social circles (in case of retweet), or location (in case of location based services), but we can imagine many more properties (items on restaurant menu can connect me to people who took them as well, etc.).
The other kind of ways are those that profit from the big picture; services like trending topics and public time-line. They take the totality of users’ behaviors and draw patterns from it. Later they serve as those patterns showing us where we are in the global community, indicating the other, unknown side of the Moon.
To take away: broadening our view is maybe as important part of our Web experience as narrowing it, and should be treated as an equal player in designing Web communities.