Gleick invited everyone to participate in the discussion, and while he managed everything smoothly, the mindset gap between the lecturer and the audience was easy to notice.

Referring to his experience working as a science reporter for the New York Times, Gleick contrasted the old media world and its leading newspapers and journalists with the new googlized world and its drowned-in-information citizens.

If you haven’t had a chance to read his book on Information, reading his article titled How Google Dominates Us will give you a grasp of his ideas on this topic.

Although various points were discussed in that highly interactive session, I just want to draw your attention to one of the issues discussed there: the concept of serendipity.

Definition of Serendipity

The Oxford Dictionary has defined serendipity as the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity from the Persian word Sarandib, referring to the old Persian fairy tale about three Sarandib princes who were always making accidental discoveries (Sarandib was Persian word for Sri Lanka).

The happy accident of discovery is another general description used for the word serendipity.

But in the context of the information and media, it’s easier and more helpful to consider serendipity as finding information which you were not looking for.

Referring to the old newspaper-age, Gleick provides a simple example of serendipity:

while reading the newspaper page by page, you see a short article about an event in a far country. You were not looking for such an article and never thought that it could be interesting for you, but now you are engaged with the article and may find it helpful or insightful.

Serendipity in the Digital Age

Because of their nature, serendipities were a common incident in the traditional media. Reading, watching and listening was linear and you had no other choice except following the content from the beginning to the end.

However, with the current digital tools and technologies, the user/audience has much more power in managing the inflow of information.

Most of search algorithms are proud of customized search results. Social media platforms filter the information and present you a handpicked set of the most relevant published content.

Filter bubble and echo chamber are coined to describe the situations where there is no chance of confronting with the serendipities.

As it is discussed in the video, someone may argue that the duty of the search engines is not to provide the user with the experience of serendipities. Users of the search engines, reach them with a specific question and expect to get the most relevant answer as fast as possible. Therefore, it’s the duty of the other institutions, such as universities and magazines, to make serendipities for their audience.

In his party controversial discussion, Gleick says that many users of the search engines, do not have a specific question in mind. They just start with a keyword and there’s still some room for providing unexpected answers for them (or at least consider a few serendipities in the search engine results page). But one of the attendees told him that usually, user refines its query and Google considers this back and forth communication as a dialogue. Therefore there’s no reason to derail such a purposeful conversation with irrelevant information called serendipity or whatsoever.

A Book about the Concept of Serendipity

While searching the web for the concept of serendipity, I learned that there’s a book dedicated to serendipity: Accidental Information Discovery.

I’ve just read a few pages of the book, but it seems to me that there are many fantastic ideas about the serendipity concept for anyone interested in this topic. The book is published in 2016, five years after the discussion of Gleick and Googlers in Mountain View.

The post Search Engines and the Future of Serendipity appeared first on webmindset.

Most of us now spend a majority of our waking hours watching screens: Mobile screens, Laptop screens or TV screens.

So it’s interesting and critical to study the ways in which people think differently on the screens.

Such studies can help online marketers to influence online behavior while developing a rich body of knowledge on designing more effective choice architectures.

Shlomo Benartzi has done an excellent job in using insights from behavioral economics to explain how people respond to digital information on a screen.

He goes far beyond the shallow popular criticisms of the new technologies and tries to analyze the ways by which these technologies affect our behavior and our economies.

Attention scarcity is the first result of the new digital gadgets. An important concern that Benartzi expresses using a famous quote from Noble-prize winner Herbert Simon:

In the world of screens, the first impression is one of the most powerful shaping forces in managing attention flow, a critical point that should be seriously considered by digital designers as well as authors.

The book is rich in collecting and reporting fascinating research showing how our mind processes information in the new digital world. A world that is full of digital screens and people who are craving for the fastest and easiest way to receive and digest information.

The smarter screen somehow reminds me the theme of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. The irrational humans of the physical world have found a new place to live and evolve their long-lived irrationality.

The irrational humans of the physical world have found a new place to live and evolve their long-lived irrationality.

As a reader who is interested in content strategy, the core message of the book can be stated as follows:

In the world of endless possibilities for finding the desired content, better curators would have a greater chance of success. In other words:

While the last decade was belonging to search engine specialists, the content curators would reign the next decade.

About the authors

Schlomo Benartzi is a leading behavioral economist and faculty member of UCLA Anderson School of Management.

He serves as Chief Scientist for the California Digital Nudge Initiative and has also worked for many financial institutions.

Although Shlomo Benartzi has addressed Jonah Lehrer as his collaborator, as publisher mentioned the name of Jonah Lehrer with a far smaller type size on the cover, it may look safe to consider Shlomo Benartzi as the main author of the book.

However, in my opinion, after it was revealed that he has fabricated some quotes in his bestselling book Imagine (2012), may publisher has decided to understate his contribution to protect the credibility of the book.

It’s worth mentioning that as a reader of Lehrer’s instructive and inspiring books, I believe that the publishing industry has gone too far in penalizing his misdeed.

Other details about this book

Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC

Publication Date: 06/10/2015

ISBN13: 9780349410395

Number of Pages: 256

Smarter Screen in Amazon

Smarter Screen in Barnes and Noble

P.S.: I have photographed the cover of my version of the book. However, there’s another cover designed for the book by S-T which I believe communicates the message of the book more clearly:

The post Book Review: The Smarter Screen (By Shlomo Benartzi and Jonah Lehrer) appeared first on webmindset.

You retweet an interesting quote from Albert Einstein which I have tweeted last night and will tell me that I have enjoyed the quote and retweeted it. Most of us forget that we are generating some extra contents in this process.

Let’s take a look at the other contents transmitted, besides your favorite quote (you can click on the image to see the larger version):

 Some of the above data such as the bounding box coordinated and may not be so interesting for you. But there are much more amazing data attached to a single 140 character tweet.

The same story holds true for every single piece of content we create. When you like a post on facebook or Instagram, besides this single like, you have generated many other data which the time of action and ip of your connection are just the most obvious ones.

The same happens when you make a pdf or word file on your computer and the author name and creation data and many other data are also written in your file. Even in a single photo you have taken with you camera, there are other information stored, including but not limited to: time of taking the photo, type of the camera and exposure setting.

Metadata can be defined as data about the data as it is stated in wikipedia article about metadata. This term was originated in the 1970s when database and database management became a popular practice. The database was supposed to be filled with data, but database managers had to store some descriptions about that data too.

With the enhancement of digital storage technology and emerging new content types, the concept of metadata received more attention.

NISO has published a very helpful document called understanding metadata and three different types of metadata are introduced there: Descriptive, Structural, and Administrative.

Metadata can be produced manually or automatically. Title of this post is a descriptive metadata I have chosen by myself. Tags I have added to this post (data, metadata, definition) are other descriptive metadata provided by me to ease your access to the other similar content in this blog.

Publish date and post url (http://www.shabanali.com/en/?p=501) are samples of the automatically generated administrative metadata. Table of contents in a book can be considered as manually created structural metadata as it has no new data, but it helps the reader for better understanding of the book structure.

Content strategists prefer to use the term metacontent instead of metadata as a more general term, although metadata is still a much more popular term.

After this introductory article, in future articles I will talk about current metadata trends such as:

• Our faster move toward data explosion as the unavoidable consequence of the automatically generated metadata
• The rise of big data analysis and thirsty analysts looking for metadata everywhere
• The threats of privacy for most of the web users as they are becoming prosumers without any knowledge about by-products of these newly emerged small content factories.

The post Definition of metadata or the content about the content appeared first on webmindset.

I was full of hope and happiness. a little more privacy can make life sweeter and enjoyable. But my hope turned into despair just after a few minutes.

I received more than 100 welcome messages from people in my contact list just in 10 minutes. Then I learned that telegram informs everyone else that you have joined the network and even offers them to send you a welcome message.

Can  I consider it a privacy infringement case? I don’t think so. Telegram has not announced my phone number in public TV or on outdoor billboards. This application has looked for the persons who already have my phone number and just informed them that I’ve also joined the network now.

Even without telegram message, everyone could be able to know whether I am on this network or not. It costs a few seconds of time to send me a message and check for delivery note.

This is not limited to Telegram. Similar cases happen with Viber and WhatsApp applications. WhatsApp encourages you to pull the curtains and receive more information from the others in return: If you give me permission to show your online status to the others, then I will tell you about real status of the others too! Or if you let me tell the others that you have read their messages, then I will tell you whether your recipient has read your message or not.

Seems kind of fair agreement. I can call it Mutual Information Disclosure Agreement or MIDA. But can we call every mutual and bidirectional agreement as a fair one? Can we call a duel game a fair agreement? As there’s a mutual agreement between parties and each one gave permission to the other one to kill him if he could?

Nowadays, privacy is a real concern for most of us. But it seems that the privacy concept is somehow limited to explicit information and not implicit information derived from our behavior.

If I hear that Google has sold the content of my mailbox to someone, sure I will file it as information abuse and privacy infringement. But what if google just makes it public that when I have checked my emails for the last time? I believe that most of us would not take the latter case as serious as the former case.

Facebook activity feed changes as fast as the closing credits scrolls at the end of a film. Instagram shows the behavior of the people you follow. Pages they have visited and photos they have liked. Even a very simple blog shows the last commentators.

Sure there are possibilities to limit this exposure. Although most of us don’t care so much and in many cases like WhatsApp taking any action to make your environment more private means a breach of MIDA. So you will also lose some of your privileges. Seems fair enough.

Besides all formal nice quotes and happy mission statements, digital applications and social networks are a business and not a charity. So they must have a feasible business plan.

Also in tight breath-taking competition between digital applications and service providers, there’s virtually no way to increase the price of the services or even hold them in future. Every digital service has to get cheaper or has to die in this zero marginal cost society.

But becoming cheaper or free, doesn’t mean that costs are vanished. It just means that there are other people or organizations who are ready to pay for the costs. As advertisers pay costs of the TV programs and we have privilege to watch them for free.

The same story holds true in the digital age. Amazon turns our behavior report into a valuable information. Facebook uses our behavior to customize advertisements for us. Everything seems fair. There’s no free lunch. I let you watch me and you give me money directly or indirectly by giving me permission to use your service for free. Just as a naked girl dances in front of the others in a peep show and gets paid for that. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem as bitter as prostitution!

It’s not easy to define a clear border between your explicit information and implicit information derived from your behavior. By the way, it’s not always costly or dangerous to share your behavior with others. Sometimes it even helps providers to render a customized service for you. Although I have already mentioned possible dangers in some cases like google blindness.

Sure I am not against digital technology and social networks. Bitter or sweet, it’s a fact that every advantage has a price to be paid. But it makes me worried that in my current point of view, the behavior of the users can never absolutely considered as private. Because behavior monitoring and even reporting is the core element of most online business models and the basic building block of gamification: the inevitable powerful technic behind most applications in the digital age.

Shall we omit the word privacy from our dictionaries within ten or twenty years? Will it be limited to bed activities? I am even more pessimistic. Sooner or later, apple will promote an application for its famous smartwatch which suggests you the best time for intercourse based on your tossing and turnings in the bed!

Let’s wait and see.

The post Information age, MIDA and the privacy challenge appeared first on webmindset.

Your clients are already around. Couple of email notifications waiting on your mobile screen to be managed. Some text messages waiting to be answered.

Your team members engage you with your work even before you leave the bed. Seems that your office is somehow open!

The borders got disappeared. There’s no line between your private life and public life anymore. The line between your life and work is blurred.

Some people call it digital age. Some others call it computer age. The others use the term media age. But from my point of view, information age would be much closer to the nature of the current age.

Abundant information provided by billions of people, hosted by clouds of storage systems and selected and republished by close-to-free media owned by every individual now.

Information age, radically changed the governing paradigms in many disciplines. From ethics to economics. From science to humanities. From individuals to families.

Beside all these changes and challenges reflect on our role in this new structure. A member of this society, what kind of contribution is supposed to be provided by me? What can be called a contribution? How it can be measured?

Information age changed every metric around us. From just in 15 minutes to just in 15 Megabytes. From billboards to banners.

From context to content. From mass production to mass customization. From fixed working hours to flexitime plans. From meetings to sessions. From visits to clicks. From credit to rank.

The new world is emerging with totally different concepts: availability, agility, acceleration, consumerization, distributedness, connectedness and emergence to name a few.

Seems that it would be so hard to survive in this world overheated with information without being equipped with a whole new mindset.  The one which I call it webmindset.

The post Information Age appeared first on webmindset.