Romanticizing Serendipity

Miriam Meckel defined serendipity thus:
“Serendipity is involved when we enter a book store and stumble on a random book that we would have never read, had it not been in the right place at the perfect time. It is serendipity, when we browse through a newspaper report and suddenly find ourselves riveted by its content even though we were neither interested nor familiar with the topic only minutes ago.”

In the digital age, Google has been accused of killing serendipity in two ways. First, since it can find whatever you query for, it inevitably reduced random, aimless browsing that in turn meant lesser odds of stumbling onto something interesting by accident. Second, as Google stored more and data about people, it started tailoring its results based on your past history, to show you what you liked (clicked) in the past. The latter is what Meckel criticizes the second aspect:
“It’s a life in the rear view mirror. The algorithms which compute all these recommendations and suggestions for us are forever stuck in the past, as they base their calculations on our actions in times foregone. Through the analysis and evaluation of this data, the algorithm creates a more or less linear projection into the future of all we ever did, desired and loved…Without serendipity’s intervention, the algorithms we created may force us into a never-ending time-warp, dwelling forever in the status quo of our own preferences and desires.”

In more recent time, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter face the same criticism. We see what our friends like, and chances are our friends share our interests and world-view, so we just keep seeing more and more of what we already like.

Most websites have “Most Popular Articles” and “Trending Now” lists that display the most popular articles. So we click on them, which then acts as a positive feedback loop to reinforce the same lists. That is why Alan Jacobs criticized social media, because they:
“exacerbate the gap between the attentional haves and have-nots.”

But c’mon, isn’t all this just romanticizing the pre-digital past? You had to pay money to read a different newspaper or magazine than the one you already subscribed to, so were people really reading a lot of views and topics they didn’t already care about? Which is why I totally disagree with Jacobs when he urges us to:
“Cultivate your own genuine interests and don't let them get crowded out by invasive species of popular but bad writing.”
Does popular necessarily mean bad? Or is that just being snobbish?

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