The Pitch I Never Have Heard
I was speaking with an entrepreneur in Montreal today, at Startup Fest, and he pitched me on his product, which was a semantic analysis-based aggregation tool. The tool would scour various sources — like all the RSS feeds in my Google Reader, for example — and bring up the the most relevant, timely, etc. etc. etc.
I just don’t think that a solution like this — which many are working on — is going to make any difference. It’s working on the wrong problem, or perhaps better said: it is operating outside my process, operating outside the human aspect of making sense of things.
I don’t believe solutions like these can work today. Perhaps they could have worked in an earlier time, but they won’t work for me in the post-modern. Things are changing too fast, are too uncertain, too complex.
For example, I am reading some text, and that references some person. I decide to read something about that person, which includes a quote about something that happened in the past, and looking that up I discover some topic I knew nothing about, but now I bookmark a few references for later review. The point is that I couldn’t have known about that person, that historical event, or that topic in advance. I don’t know if anything other than an unimaginable artificial intelligence could help me there.
I am not using a/ an unchanging search query over some large and unchanging body of information, or b/ an unchanging search query over a growing and changing body of information. Neither of those problems are particularly relevant to me, at least now, after living and working on the web for decades. I am deep in a process of inquiry where the parameters of the inquiry itself are changing all the time, based on what I encounter.
So, I don’t think tools like the one I was pitched can help me.
However, it’s possible that technology of that sort can help me, in a different context. It can’t help me in the scalar, day-to-day way that its user experience is geared to. I do that at human scale today, relying on my own process, and the offerings I get from friends, or friends of friends. Yes, I do use tools like Flipboard to turn my social stream into a social journal, a small savings in time. But Flipboard (and its competitors) aren’t changing what I do in any fundamental way. Metaphorically, its just a slightly larger wrench.
I suggested an area where semantic analysis could actually do something outside of my general process: the area of dark influence (read It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence for a long explanation). Imagine a tool that would mine the information floating out in the ‘third closure’, the friends of my friends’ friends. That third closure are the social scenes that I am embedded in. For the average person with 150 friends, who each have 150 friends and so on, that third closure winds up being millions of people. I can’t possibly analyze that using my step-by-step inquiry process.
But none of the tools that I am being pitched are attacking that. They are either looking at my friends and friends of friends, or they are looking at everyone in the world: the first I am already doing, and the second leads to blandness.
That’s the pitch I was hoping to here, and I have never heard it.
