Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

The whole concept of the long tail, and personalized interfaces and even much of the contextually-sensitive network that I rant about regularly is getting targeted, relevant information to individuals at the right time.

But who says it’s the right information?

It’s been hip for years (at least among a certain slice of the population) to dis the media elites. We’ll all be better off making up our own minds. But how do we know?

This all came up while driving this morning. A local radio show interviewed Brian Kelly, the editor of U.S. News & World Report, specifically about how they have moved from weekly to monthly publication, and how their content (and readership) varies on the internet. At one point it came up how useful it was (is, I guess, but readership is so low anymore) to simply read the whole newspaper; you would learn about stuff that you didn’t even know you needed to know.

Now that I think of it, I fear we’re moving towards a world where everyone is only reading information sources that hew to their pre-established world view, interacting with others hardly at all.

So, that’s a call to arms for me. How do I square my desire for contextually-relevant content, delivered on time and personalized to the individual, with this need for a broader understanding? How do I avoid enabling a more tribal, polarized world by accident? Specifically, how do I do it on a personalized interactive device?

Presuming that we cannot simply say “read the newspaper” or otherwise change what users are asking for, I guess one way is to consider context and environment in a broader sense.

You read articles that are filtered by interest (via keywords), by your location, and so on. They may originate from any source and location but that is where it ends. While each individual bit of data lives in it’s own part of the world, there is no clear way to dive deeper or see relations between them or to other information.

Though I continue using news as an example, almost anything can be though of the same way. Manufacturing and consumer products are drawn from widely separated suppliers; the prices on items you buy, and their ingredients, and their safety are related to things that happen on the other side of the country or the world. For something less scary, music is somewhat insular in distribution, but musicians are influenced by those in far off places, cultures and times; you might very much care about this, so how do we get that information about the next level deeper?

One way is to rely on professionals. Writers and editors can not just create content but group and relate it. To a certain degree I like this method, as it’s deeply related to the information design processes I so love (and explain in my book). There are some sources of curated content now in new media methods, and I am sure some will continue to exist, and be created in different ways.

Another is to rethink crowdsourcing. The way many aggregation services work (google, and google news for one) is more or less a popularity contest. Clicks equal relevance. But this tends to emphasize commonality, and mass over depth. What if outliers were analyzed and promoted more. What if those edge case readers who like to tenuously related stories, music, ingredients, pricing, etc. were able to be employed in exciting ways. Nothing has to dead end, and cross-references bring not more information about the same, but deeper, different information.

Of course another good model mixes the two, with specific individuals paid little or nothing to add a manual touch to the data manually or automatically generated by the user base.

I don’t know what will actually happen, and can only influence so much myself.

I sometimes want to use the word “environment” to replace “context.” I avoid it to prevent confusion with the ecological context (the way it’s now hard to use “chauvinist” to mean “fanatically patriotic”). But I do like what it implies; that each of us, and each bit of data is tied inextricably to others. Tugging on one should reveal the web of information, and let us explore that environment and our place in it more thoroughly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Context, Design, Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.