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Robin Good: How do you escape the filter bubble vortex? How do you expose and encounter new, valuable and relevant information if news services pick always from the same sources?
Jonathan Stray, has something interesting to say on this. He writes on the Nieman Journalism Lab site: "The filter bubble is a name for an anxiety — the worry that our personalized interfaces to the Internet will end up telling us only what we want to hear, hiding everything unpleasant but important.
It’s a fabulous topic of debate, because it’s both significant and marvelously ill-defined. But to get beyond arguing, we’re going to need to actually do something.
I have five proposals."
Among them he suggest journalists and newsroom editors to look more seriously at "curation". He writes: "...if there has been a decline in the power of editors to set the agenda for public discussion, maybe that’s because the world has gotten a lot bigger.
A news editor has always been a sort of filter, making choices to cover particular stories and selecting their placement and prominence.
But they filter only the product of their own newsroom, while many others are filtering the entire web. How can users depend on a filter who ignores most of everything?
Editors could become curators, cultivating the best work from both inside and outside the newsroom.
A good curator rewards us for delegating our attentional choices to them.
We still like to give this job to people instead of machines, because people are smart, creative, idiosyncratic, and above all personal.
We can form a relationship with a good curator, sometimes even a two-way relationship when we can use social networks to start a conversation with them at any moment.
...
There are many possible reasons why linking and curation have not been more fully adopted by traditional news organizations, but at heart I suspect it boils down to cultural issues and anxieties about authorship."
Excellent insight. And there's a lot more in this article that relates back to curation (see Don't Just Filter, Map) 9/10
Full article: http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/07/are-we-stuck-in-filter-bubbles-here-are-five-potential-paths-out/
