Ethan Zuckerman's CHI (Computer Human Interaction) keynote, "Desperately Seeking Serendipity," is a thoughtful, nuanced discussion of the way that "cosmopolitans" (people who inhabit teeming, dense, multi-use spaces, be they cities or the Internet) experience serendipity. Zuckerman points out that we probably stick closer to our comfort zones than we care to admit — cities and the net may offer a million choices, but chances are we select only a predictable few of them. He relates this to Pariser's new book The Filter Bubble (high up on my to-read list!), to Jane Jacobs, and to the history of the idea of serendipity itself. It's one of those essays/talks that reframes a familiar, polarized debate, introducing a new wrinkle to a question whose answers seem predictable and settled.
Desperately Seeking SerendipityView more presentations from Ethan ZuckermanPhilosopher Kwame Appiah points out that living as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, has really only been possible in the past few hundred years. If you were one of the 97% of people living in rural areas in 1800, it's likely you would have had little or no contact with people who didn't share your language, culture or belief system. One of the reasons we have such difficulty living in a genuinely cosmopolitan way, Appiah suspects, is that we have vastly more experience as a species with parochialism than with cosmopolitanism.
If you wanted to encounter a set of ideas that were radically different than your own – say those of a confrontational homeless guy who sleeps in a tub – your best bet in an era before telecommunications was to move to a city. Cities are technologies for trade, for learning, for worship, but they're also a powerful communication technologies. Cities enables realtime communication between different individuals and groups and the rapid diffusion of new ideas and practices to multiple communities. Even in an age of instantaneous digital communications, cities retain their function as a communications technology that enables constant contact with the unfamiliar, strange and different.
To the extent that a city is a communications technology, it may not be a surprise that early literally portrayals of the internet seized on the city as a metaphor.
CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity
(via JoHo)
