Pay attention, find interesting people, watch what they're interested in, risk wading into new waters, repeat

I know Mita because she came, from Windsor, along with Art and Lisa, to Zap Your PRAM in 2003. 

I met Art at the Access conference in St. John’s in 1994.

I was at the Access conference in 1994 talking about the nascent Internet, and my part in contributing to it at the PEI Crafts Council.

I was working at the PEI Crafts Council because I came across a job ad in a copy of The Guardian I found in the Metro Reference Library in Toronto in 1993.

I was at the Metro Reference Library at the behest of my friend Karen. 

I met Karen through Stephen. 

I met Stephen at Trent Radio. 

I got involved with Trent Radio because I was a student at Trent University, and saw an ad in Arthur, the Trent student newspaper.

I was at Trent because I’d been a camp counsellor when I was a teenager at nearby Lakefield College School, and had ridden a borrowed bicycle through the campus on my day off, and fell in love with it.

This morning I read, in an issue of Mita’s (remember Mita?) fortnightly email newsletter:

Good morning. I am in the study, writing from the sofa with a coffee beside me. Thanks to the magic of a newly acquired subscription to a VPN service, I am catching up on episodes of Night Tracks from BBC 3.

This got me wondering what I could listen to on the BBC if I routed my traffic through a VPN to the UK.

So I  went looking for the BBC Listen app in Kagi, and, in the search results, I found a link to Listen to the oldest known recording of a human voice.

From there I found First Sounds, a project that “strives to make humanity’s earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time.” 

That’s a fascinating website.

I hate the algorithm. 

Like James A. Reeves wrote, and I memorialized in print:

The algorithm in YouTube serves me up a study diet of tiny home videos, Taskmaster clips, and Elizabeth Gilbert interviews.

The algorithm in Facebook serves me up a study diet of ads for airlines, shoes, and hotels.

The algorithm in Spotify serves me up a study diet of  ballads by Nordic singer songwriters.

The algorithm is designed to prevent me from discovering anything novel, under the guise of doing the opposite (cf. “Discover” Weekly).

In 2013, I pointed to Study suggests reliance on GPS may reduce hippocampus function as we age, and quoted:

There are two major ways of navigating: by spatial navigation or by stimulus-response methods. The spatial method uses landmarks and visual cues to develop cognitive maps that enable us to know where we are and how to get where we want to go. The second method relies on repeatedly traveling by the most efficient route, as though on auto-pilot. The second method will be familiar to those using GPS.

I believe the same thing is true about how we navigate the networks of people, information, creativity, and what’s interesting.

I ended up listening to the oldest known recording of the human voice this afternoon because of my algorithm: pay attention, find interesting people, watch what they’re interested in, risk wading into new waters, repeat.

I don’t need a machine to help me do that.

Indeed, machines interfere with me doing that.

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