Exploration on the Internet

Information on the Internet

The work on this thesis started with the following questions about being online:

How is it possible for the many people, who use the Internet every day, who have different thoughts, motives, and tastes to not only coexist but also be satisfied on the same platform? How can they find something that inspires them in the right moment? And, how do they find content that does not float in the mainstream?

At the core, we want to move away from an Internet dominated by pushing trends and media-effective content onto its users towards one that instead acknowledges a diversity of interests and information* The vision of an Internet for everyone is anything but new. In the early days of the Web it was a techno-utopian believe that this would be enabled by anonymization and connecting people across the world..

Why exploration matters

Given the sheer amount of information that is accessible online, it has become a common challenge for users to browse content that is valuable to them without knowing precisely what they are looking for, not only targeting their immediate needs, but also long-term interest. At the same time there’s a desire to avoid noise—distractions, repetitions, or simply content that’s uninteresting for a user at that time.

Our proposal addressing this challenge centers around three fundamental ideas to enhance how people explore the Internet while leaving content creators all existing liberties when designing their digital spaces* We interviewed lurkers, an influencer, a professional in the e-commerce sector and a critic of the fast-paced Internet, and researched the areas of humane tech, recommender systems, media theory and social relationships online, that led us to create a set of design principles as a basis for our concepts.:

01

Humans should be primary authorities to declare qualitative content.

This authority doesn’t mean every human recommendation is valuable. In a recommendation system, trust in the recommender’s expertise is essential, but also rarely unconditional. link to trust ref.Consequently, suggestions are by default limited to specifically assigned areas of interest.
At the same time, quality itself is largely subjective, depending on individual judgement criteria, preferences and one’s personal situation. In order to retain that nuance, opinions from different people shouldn’t be quantified and merged to assign an objective value to a piece of information.

Concept 02

People should be in control of how they explore.

They need to have the capabilities to define the topic they want to expore, how much they want a recommendation to diverge from the content they are currently viewing or which format the information they are browsing should have.

Concept 03

Exploration has to be possible across platforms

To ensure that suggestions are most relevant we need to take different sources into account and break engagement loops created on individual websites or platforms.

This last point specifically implies that simply inventing another social networking site, web app, or search engine won’t be enough. Instead, we need to enable exploration at a higher level, like the browser or the operating system itself* Looking at it through the lens of humane tech, it is important that recommendations aren’t driven by keeping users engaged. Specifically free platforms have a strong business incentive to keep users active, so they measure success of recommendations in time spent on their site rather than the value they have for a user. .

To match how people interact with the Internet, the system needs to respond to their changing intentions. If someone decides to spontaneously jump from broadly browsing for information on one topic to searching for a specific link, that shift has to be easily possible. Likewise, if someone doesn’t want to continue exploring, but rather focus on their current task, any additional recommendations need to get out of their way.

Zooming out

To put these ideas in context, exploration is only one part of the process of learning, researching or coming up with ideas. The system presented in our thesis is intentionally open-ended, because it only focusses on using the Internet for inspiration. It needs to be connected to tools from other areas, such as focussed consumption, archiving, synthesis or communication, to truly provide value* Note (June 2021)
Vice versa tools that want to augment human productivity or thinking need to consider exploration. I believe that it is still unsolved, how the different areas of realizing this vision (e.g. also synthesis, ideation, or collaboration) can be connected work together fluidly..