Bring on the noise (or get stuck in your own personal echo chamber)
Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a great post about the signal vs. noise discussion today (see also Hutch Carpenter’s article from yesterday about this). I recommend you read the whole article, because it puts a lot of the common arguments against noise in perspective. But if you are in a hurry – here are Marshall’s conclusions:
Quiet time, time off-line, deep thoughts and long books are all beautiful things – essential to a healthy intellectual, psychological and social life. We argue, though, that the opposite of all those things – online social media noise, is also a great opportunity that deserves to have its worth recognized at a time in history when many of us are struggling to deal with it.
I fully agree with Marshall. To me, the noise is where a lot of the good, undiscovered stuff is hidden. It’s where the stuff is that you don’t know yet you think interesting.
That’s the same reason I’m not very interested in highly personalized news services and why I still skim through physical newspapers sometimes (though not often enough) and why I subscribe to a lot of rather random RSS feeds. If I only read the things an algorithms tells me are interesting, I will not only never see my world-view challenged, but I will also miss out on a lot of great stuff I had never heard about (Marhall coins this ‘unexpected opportunities’).
I’m not advocating that you drown yourself in randomness – there is no point in only receiving noise. But the echo-chamber effect is already a big problem – by introducing a good amount of noise into your news channels, you can counter at least some of that.
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