David Weinberger is posting interesting notes from a high-powered TTI Vanguard conference here in SF.
This post on Eric Bonabeau’s presentation caught my eye:
Eric Bonabeau of Icosystem says that we tend to believe that the future is present in the mass of data and we just need to find it. But we use existing patterns to search the data, which can’t turn up new patterns. Humans are amazing pattern-detecting machines but we’re terrible at exploring alternatives. Eric suggests selective breeding: make new combinations, look at the results, pick the most interesting results, recombine them, etc. He does a live demo that discovers a “hidden bagel” in a 50-dimensional financial data set. (I have no idea what that sentence means once it gets past the word “bagel.”) It helps not to know what you’re looking for. |
I’ve heard Bonabeau, at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference (coming up again soon), give a talk on emergent behavior (among ants and in other places) and he’s always fascinating. This notion — that, since “we use existing patterns to search the data”, we’re blind to new patterns — has echoes and analogues all over the map, all the way from the little copy-editing exercise that Dave Winer periodically challenges us with to the disastrous failure of American policy in the lead-up to the Iraq war (a mistaken pattern so potent that much of the population still believes in a patently untrue scenario). Our minds fall into existing patterns like wheels in a rut; we “see” words spelled right even when they’re misspelled, and we “see” events unfold according to the sequence we expect, even when the information parading across our eyeballs tells us otherwise.
What interests me is applying this insight to journalism. We all know the hack’s drill: First you decide what your story is, then you go out and find the facts and quotes to fit. The sad truth today, however, is that this approach isn’t just for hacks: Most reporters in most newsrooms don’t have the time, the freedom or the resources to cover most stories in any other way. This is one of the big causes of the much-vaunted credibility crisis we hear so much about in the blogosphere and all of its attendant conferences. For an astonishingly high percentage of professional journalists, the news they recognize is the news that fits the pattern they have already selected as the template for their coverage. This keeps working until real news starts dancing in front of their eyes — and they miss it. (For instance, the story of the ringer reporter from Talon News was sitting right under the eyes of the entire Washington press corps. But it took a swarm of Web-based sleuths operating collaboratively across multiple blogs to piece the strange saga together and discredit President Bush’s friendly plant in the White House press room.)
“It helps not to know what you’re looking for” ought to be the proud banner of the journalistic generalist — the writer who can step into any situation, ask the right questions and get out with clear explanations for the rest of us. But reporters have tight deadlines and editors telling them what they want and, often, instincts dulled by years of repetition — and all but the very best and most creative end up coming out with what they went in for, rather than something unexpected.
One of the pacts I’ve made with myself as I’ve worked on my book is: Don’t go in with the story. Give myself the freedom not to know what I’m looking for. It’s less efficient, everything takes longer, there are blind alleys and extra interviews. But, if I’m persistent and lucky, maybe I’ll end up with something other than the same old patterns.
Newspapers and magazines and Web sites aren’t, can’t be, books, of course. They’ll always have deadlines; they’ll never have enough bodies or money or time. And more and more, the news that they miss is being covered by amateurs and solo operations on the Net. So forward-looking people in the business are all abuzz about new approaches to “citizen journalism” and “we media” and other ideas for harnessing the Internet’s many-to-many dynamics. Books are being written (congratulations to Jay Rosen, who has announced one that I will look forward to); new ventures planned.
Will some hybridization of old media and the new swarm dynamic help more hidebound publications find their souls again? I’m optimistic about the creative possibilities, skeptical about the business realities. But I don’t doubt that journalists could learn a lot from Bonabeau’s ants.