You are what you read

Interesting post by Hutch Carpenter asking "who is your information filter" - especially pertinent as this morning (UK time) Techmeme seems to be down. This is quite an interesting question, on 2 levels:

Firstly, who is your filter - ie how do you filter data today - and secondly, what are the systemic effects of your choices.

How do you filter?

Techmeme was down this morning, UK time, and it made me reflect on how my filtering habits have shifted. A few years back, I had feeds up the wazoo coming into my reader and eventually got so fed up that I declared "RSS bankruptcy" and turned most off. Aggregation services like Techmeme, digg, Technorati etc became a far more effective way of finding the zeitgeist (the last 2 less so now). Since then I've added Twitter and Friendfeed to the mix - not because of them per se, but because a lot of the people in the tech space / London social media space are on these platforms. When these people move on, I'll connect to new platforms.

The Systemic Effects

Hutch notes in his article that over the last decade or so there has been a steady drift towards news aggregation/filtering sites/services (Letterman, Drudge Report) that have a number of common characteristics:

- They don’t actually find and report news (for the most part)
- They only present what they find interesting
- They have shrewd judgment as to what audiences will like
- Their personalities are part of their effectiveness as news filters - people trust them

In other words the "dumbing down" of information by presenting it as entertainment and stripping out the hard bits. As Hutch notes, in a time constrained world its hard to persuade people to take on information that they don't like (but may be good for you). NBC's Bryan Williams calls this the "eat your peas" element of being an informed citizen.

Once it was religion, then TV - now will online "bubblegum media" be the new opiate of the masses.

These sites are deliberately doing this, ie you know what you get. More pernicious perhaps is limiting yourself to "wisdom of crowds" aggregators like the Techmeme's, Friendfeeds etc - by definition you are getting what a subset finds important - not so much dumbing down as dumbing narrow.

(In)Conclusion

When it comes to consuming media, you are what you eat - or read, listen to etc.

The risk of relying only on "wisdom of crowd" filtering is that, whether "innocently" or intentionally, we start to miss the correct picture and over time dumb ourselves down. Seems to me two functions need to be set into a good aggregation service to mitigate this:

(i) Serendipity switches - find stuff your mainstream is missing
(ii) Eat your Greens functions - adding in undesired but necessary data to the feed.

You almost want a forced "Renaissance Man" function, to balance the tendency to only consume what you like.

Thoughts on how to execute welcome......