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Aggregating the Whole World
Featured Artists
'Jason Kottke
Jason Kottke
“There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting.”
Robert Rauschenberg
In an article for Feed in 2000,(1) Julian Dibbell compared weblogs to wunderkammers, “cabinets of wonders” that were popular in 17th century Europe. Enthusiasts carefully curated their cabinets, filling them with treasures of the natural and pre-Modern world, crafting an aesthetic whole from the cultures and ideas those objects represent. kottke.org, a weblog I’ve been editing for more than eight years, is my wunderkammer; one that’s curated daily from current links, ideas, and information, my particular simplification of a complex world. As the curator, I proceed as follows:
Each morning as part of my work on kottke.org, I sit down with my computer and open my newsreader. A newsreader is a magical piece of software which, at the simultaneous touch of two buttons, collects updates from nearly all of the web sites I wish to read that day, some 600 daily items from 300 sites in all. In a way, my newsreader assembles a giant scrolling daily newspaper from a global pool of sources for me, including the latest science news from New Scientist,(2) typographic notes from Typographica,(3) economics discourse from Marginal Revolution,(4) the latest Apple goings-on from Daring Fireball,(5) clever pop culture from Goldenfiddle,(6) photography from Eliot Shepard,(7) food news from Megnut,(8) opinions from The Wall Street Journal,(9) and personal observations from dozens of active designers, artists, technologists, entrepreneurs, parents, photographers, waiters, call girls, filmmakers, and writers.
On an average day, I receive about 70–90 substantive emails along with 900+ spam messages which my mail program helpfully filters from my view. In the course of reading these emails and the items my newsreader has served up for me, the hyperlinked serendipity engine that is the web takes over, and I sprawl through dozens of sites about any and every available topic, clicking giddily from link to link on an informational bender.
I view 2–3 movies a week, read 1–2 books per month, and listen to music almost constantly. Periodically I hit the bookstore or library and browse through the stacks, skimming dozens of books as I go. Online and off, I read 8–10 magazines a month and browse through 30–40 others. I record some of my adventures with a cameraphone and DSLR camera. Museums, concerts, talks, conferences, restaurants, parties, coffee with friends, shopping ... you get the idea; it’s all part of my informational diet. In contemporary society, information consumption of this scale and breadth is not unusual. And for those doing technological or creative work, dealing with vast amounts of diverse information is not just an incidental task, it is the work.
From all that “stuff”, representing several hundred diverse biases, world views, and perspectives, I assemble a daily update to kottke.org that, depending on your interests, can be read in a few minutes or explored for hours. kottke.org is my interpretation of what’s going on in the world, a simple trail through a complex information space. In the introductory paragraph, I described this activity as curating, but you could also call it aggregating. I am an aggregator of information and ideas.
In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki describes the conditions under which you can extract good information from a group of people. The group’s membership needs to be diverse, independent from one another, and decentralized in organization. And finally, you need aggregation, a way of determining the group’s “answer” to a particular question, the zeitgeist of the group if you will. As the first three factors increase, so does the complexity of the system. More diversity, more independent ideas, and more decentralization introduces more factors and combinations for the aggregator to track and evaluate. On the other hand, effective aggregation is necessarily a process of simplification; in order to have value in answering a particular question or expressing a particular idea, the aggregate answer or expression must be simpler than a basic collection of each member’s raw opinion. In other words, you can’t just cram everything into your cabinet.
From this it follows that the more effective the aggregator is at effectively determining what the group thinks, the better the end result will be. But somewhat paradoxically, the quality of the end result can also improve as the complexity of the group increases. In constructing kottke.org, something that I hope is a simple, coherent aggregation of the world rushing past me, this complexity is my closest ally. Keeping up with so many diverse, independent, decentralized sources makes my job as an aggregator difficult—reading 300 sites a day (plus all the other stuff) is no picnic—but it makes kottke.org much better than it would be if I only read Newsweek and watched Hitchcock movies. As artists, designers, and corporations race to embrace simplicity, they might do well to widen their purview and, in doing so, embrace the related complexity as well. With apologies to Mr. Rauschenberg, there is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic palette with which to paint your small part of the world.
http://www.kottke.org
(1)
http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/feed_blogger.html back
(2)
http://www.newscientist.com/back
(3)
http://www.typographi.com/back
(4)
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/back
(5)
http://www.daringfireball.netback
(6)
http://www.goldenfiddle.comback
(7)
http://www.slower.netback
(8)
http://www.megnut.comback
(9)
http://www.opinionjournal.com/back
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