Exploration on the Internet

Information on the Internet

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

We asked these questions, because 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, which didn’t really pan out quite as planned..

Why exploration matters

Given the sheer amount of content online, lack of information is rarely (although not never) the problem, the more crucial issue at hand seems to be how users can browse content that is valuable to them without having to know precisely what they are looking for, not only targeting their immediate needs, but also long-term interest.

Our goal was to enhance how people explore the Internet, while also leaving content creators the freedom to design their digital spaces as they choose*. We interviewed an influencer, a professional from the e-commerce sector, a critic of the fast-paced Internet, consumers, and lurkers, and researched the areas of humane tech, recommender systems, media theory, and social relationships online.. This lead us to create a set of three design principles as a basis for a set of ideas for a more inspirational and explorabel Internet:

01

Content qualitaty is defined by humans primarily.

This, of course, doesn’t mean every human recommendation is equally useful to everyone. In a recommendation system, trust in the recommender’s expertise is essential, but also rarely unconditional. link to trust ref. We imaging that, by default, when a person opts in to getting inspiration from someone else, it is are tied to a specific shared interest. Getting recommendations regardless of topic could be an option reserved for friends and people with closely aligned tastes.
We believe that quality is largely subjective, depending on very personal criteria, preferences, circumstances, we don‘t want to merge opinions into one seemingly objective value or rating, and instead keep them individually connected to one person.

02

People have control over how they explore.

They should 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 what format the information they are browsing should have.

03

Exploration has to be possible across platforms

To get to suggestions that are most relevant to what someone’s lookinf for 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 work. Instead, we need to enable exploration at a higher level: In the browser or operating system itself. We believe that for joyful exploration is possible when recommendations aren’t driven by keeping users engaged* As it’s been discussed widely by the Humane Tech movement, platforms have a strong business incentive to keep users active, measuring success of recommendations in time spent on their site rather than the value they have for a user. .

Any system for exploration needs to respond to users’ 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..