In a 1754 letter, the writer and politician Horace Walpole coined the term 'serendipity' - a word he derived from an old Persian tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. In the story, the protagonists regularly benefited from unplanned discoveries, and these seemingly random occurrences enabled them to fulfil their mission.
Early in the development of the web, the internet's capacity to surprise and divert us was recognised when the phrase 'web surfing' was coined to describe following the path of links that led to surprising places.
Although web surfing rarely ended with the sort of benefits the three princes sought (wealth, kingdoms, marriage to beautiful princesses), the web was a force that opened up our horizons by exposing us to new thinking, concepts and ideologies. Now, there is a growing belief that, far from expanding our horizons, digital media are making our worlds smaller.
In the analogue age, the shortage of bandwidth meant few TV channels, so ideas competed for exposure, and we had little choice but to see them. Today, we can watch the God Channel, the Wine Channel or the Gay Channel on Sky, and never be exposed to atheists, real ale fans or Jeremy Clarkson.
On the internet, collaborative filtering means we passively influence others when we do things online. We can shop at Amazon, and see other books purchased by people who bought the title we're interested in, and listen to Last.FM, where similar listening profiles will suggest tracks we might like. Our choice of music and books is therefore swayed by people whose consumer patterns indicate they're like us.
Social networking has added another dimension, enabling us to spend time with people who share our views, rather than merely our geographic location. We can also hang out with others who believe in reincarnation, UFOs, homeopathy or banking, and never trouble ourselves with views that run contrary to our own.
Digital media perform a reductive role in our lives, patting us on the back and telling us we're right, while keeping away anything unsettlingly different.
Just as it's said that the Queen believes the world smells of fresh paint and the national anthem is playing every-where, we're constantly presented with a worldview that induces complacency. This way, the world looks comfort-able, unchallenging and familiar.
Ethan Zuckerman has written a fascinating blog on the subject of homophily: the 'birds of a feather' tendency of people to cluster around things common to them.
Isn't this good though? Isn't it great that if we like Aretha Franklin we can also discover Etta James? Undoubtedly - but we'll never hear Bach's double violin concerto, or the Dead Kennedys.
This makes one aspect of Library-Thing.com interesting. The site, which enables people to share their libraries, also contains 'un-suggester' - described as 'the worst recommendation tool ever'. It uses statistical analysis of users' libraries to determine the books least likely to exist in the same collection. Type in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and it suggests Confessions of a Shopaholic; enter Henry Kissinger and receive Sir Terry Pratchett.
Unsuggester is fun, but it tries to address a serious issue. When we launch products, we challenge behaviour patterns. When we attract new customers, we're asking them to do something different. If homophily fuels people's insularity and builds resistance against change, in the future it will be difficult to form new relationships.
As marketers, homophily can reinforce our brand relationships, but it can also stand in the way of new ones. Addressing this problem might just benefit from some serendipity.
Andrew Walmsley is co-founder of i-level
30 seconds on LibraryThing.com
- LibraryThing is an online application intended to help people catalogue their books more easily. Users can pull in information from the US Library of Congress, all five Amazon sites, and libraries around the world.
- The site also offers social interaction through chat, groups and tools that enable users to compare collections.
- The site was created by Tim Spalding, a US web publisher and developer; it became a 'real' business in 2006.
- Free membership allows the user to catalogue up to 200 titles; paid personal account-holders ($10 a year or $25 for a lifetime) can include any number of books.
- Spalding 'conservatively predict[s] the revenue will enable me to recline all day on an enormous pile of gold'.
- At the time of writing, the site had 619,534 members with 36,462,719 catalogued books. Angelrose had the biggest library (26,100 titles); Twilight was the most-reviewed book (857 reviews); Jeannie Fulbright was the top-rated author; Robyn Donald the lowest-rated.