Adriano Farano

Paper is about serendipity, the Web about determinism — so far

It’s kind of weird. I am on my way back from the Online News Association conference in DC, and the reading of a $6 Sunday edition of the New York Times is just reminding me how great is to immerse myself into a paper news experience.

The founding publisher of one of the oldest online magazines (Café Babel), today the strategist and partner at the freshly awarded OWNI media startup, and on a journalism fellowship at the geeky Stanford University with a focus on nothing less than Augmented Reality,  there’s no doubt I’m a sort of digital media dinosaur and admittedly technophile.

Picture by Skeddy in NYC (Flickr)

Yet, being forced to sit for five hours in a crowded (and uncomfortable) United flight just made me reconsider a couple of things on the way consuming media affects our knowledge skills.

Well, I confess after reading no less than twentish or so articles in depth (and screening others just for the pleasure to learn about things), I feel smarter. Smarter than when, in the last five hours US Airways flight I took three months ago, I spent most of my time on Facebook and Twitter and Skype and Gmail socializing and telling the world I was actually 30,000 feet from ground AND still online thanks to a newly launched on board Wi-Fi service.

My NYT reading let me discover stories I would probably never have with my longtime trusted RSS-feeds, social networks “likes” and “shares’” and whatever the Web can offer you.

Take the compelling personal story of an ‘helicopter mum’ surprisingly struggling to cut the cord with her freshman daughter. Believe me, I would never had subscribed to an RSS-feed on middle-age parental issues. My (happy) ‘new dad’ situation would have rather led me to opt for a feed on diapers, kindergarten or so.

Picture by Shapeshift (Flickr)

On another note, take this wonderful tourism feature in a remote Vietnam region. I would have never either subscribed to a travel feed or googled it unless I had deterministically decided to do so because I wanted to find a destination for my next vacation. Instead, this worked the other way around. I actually realized I wanted to experience something exotic like this.

Not to mention a looong (and deep) piece on Twitter’s Ev Williams I would have probably clicked onto online too without reading it until the end.

Here’s my feeling. While online news experiences are there mainly to satisfy your deterministic needs, paper gives more room to serendipity and discovery.

This is a paradox. Indeed, the Web offers much more potential freedom of choice than paper even if you’re reading the Times’ almost-one-pound Sunday edition. But until which extent do we actually use that liberty?

In a compelling ONA conversation earlier this week, I learned that every month an average Internet user ONLY consumes 20 or so web sources with a general turn-over including only 1 to 3 of the latter.

So am I preaching for a restoration of the ancient ‘paper’ régime? Certainly not. Do I conclude that the determinism vs serendipity rules applies to the opposition between online and paper forever? Neither do I. My point is rather that we are still far from inventing new ways to distribute the most interesting stories and information.

Tools like Flipboard are just great in capturing your network’s favorite content but they actually miss the random, the serendipical and, at the end of the day, the surprise. These things are actually what we should expect to get from a compelling reading experience.

Because human interest is not always and entirely predictable. At least with current technology. Until that point I will probably look forward spending more time reading paper. And trying to brainstorm (at Stanford and with whoever is interested) on new ways to effectively distribute personalized information.