Random exploration
Recently, I noticed a new button on YouTube called “New for You”. By clicking it, my YouTube home page changes from a curated group of videos recommended specifically for me into a set of “random” popular videos.
I enthusiastically smash that button every time I see it, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s a mixture of fatigue from seeing videos by the same content creators over and over, and a desire to let some element of luck decide what’s placed in front of me for consumption. Or perhaps it’s the algorithms and data finally recognizing that serendipity has value.
Serendipity - there’s a word we don’t see often anymore. I’m not sure if it’s related to the fact that the need for this word has declined with time. Serendipity means the discovery of something good by happy accident, but how often do we make accidental discoveries these days?
Consider restaurants. Most of us refer to Dianping in China, and its equivalents abroad such as Yelp (or TripAdvisor if we’re travelling). Before we go somewhere new, we check its ratings, as if a number out of five could take into account the taste of everything on the menu or the friendliness of everyone on the waitstaff.
The same recommendations and reviews dominate online platforms for books and music as well. The home screens of every app we use to read or listen or view are the product of algorithms working from volumes of data that these apps have collected on us.
On my part, perhaps it’s an error of ignorance, of not knowing or not thinking about how to turn off these curated experiences. Today, I discovered that YouTube has an “Explore” tab that seems to refrain from making recommendations based on what I’ve viewed in the past or whom I’ve subscribed to. I wonder whether I’ll use this feature more in the future.
What I do know is the following: I still love physical bookstores because they allow me to browse in the true sense of the word. I prefer independent cafes because they tend to play a more eclectic mix of music. And when I travelled (remember when we could do that?), my best memories came from aimless walks and stumbled upon food experiences. To give just two examples - the best fish I ever had was grilled by a fisherman at a seaside town in Japan, and the best pizza I ever had was fresh from the oven at a farmer’s market in Granville Island, Vancouver. I’m pretty sure neither of these places are on any review site.
I’m not saying recommendations and reviews make our lives worse - far from it. I’m just suggesting that perhaps we should turn them off once in a while - so that we can just… explore.
Writing this post reminds me of the excellent movies, songs, and books that I found by chance, that I used to think deserve more recognition. I'll share one of each below, in hopes that you might discover them as happy accidents.
Movie: Once, directed by John Carney.
Song: The Reason Why, by Rachael Yamagata.
Book: Anything You Want, by Derek Sivers.
