Surfing the web with blinkers on

The other week I was talking to Joanna Geary (web development editor at The Times) about how people consume (if that’s the right word) the news her company puts out there and got thinking about the phenomena where a journalist can write a thoughtful piece only for the commenters to pick up on a throwaway line and run with that, completely ignoring the main thrust of the argument. This is obviously rather frustrating for the writer but it’s not unique to journalism. You see it all over the socially enabled web from blog posts to YouTube videos (on the latter it can really get depressing: “the girl at 2:10 is hot!!” after a video about particle physics).

While we were talking I sketched this:

and I’ve been looking at it ever since.

When people move through the world, be it physically, mentally, emotionally or whatever, they do so with blinkers on. A psychologist can explain it in detail but as I understand it we are unable to process everything that our senses pick up on so we filter out the unnecessary stuff to stop us going mad. So when you’re concentrating on driving you won’t necessarily notice the colour of the sky or your friend waving from the pavement even though your eyes are receiving that information. (If anyone can remind me what this phenomena is that’d be great!)

Let’s take a random Guardian blog post as an example. Peter Preston is writing about how the Internet has ruined everything. Over nine paragraphs he introduces his idea and runs through a load of examples to back it up. In the middle of paragraph five he throws in this sentence:

We aren’t better for grisly YouTube grimaces from Downing Street, or Obama twittering away when he could be thinking.

The first comment, left by JosephPorta, picks up on this:

‘We aren’t better for grisly YouTube grimaces from Downing Street,. . . . ‘

I think those who watched Mr Brown on YouTube learnt a lot.
Enough to decide whether he is trustworthy or not.

So, we are better for grisly YouTube grimaces from Downing Street

Preston wasn’t writing about Gordon Brown being trustworthy. He barely mentioned the video in passing. But JosephPorta took this as a his cue to vent his feelings about it.

You might dismiss him as a single-issue idiot who’s either unable to engage in a conversation or trolling around leaving anti-Brown comments on newspaper sites, but I think it’s a lot more interesting than that. Have a look at his page of comments left on the Guardian site. Granted, it doesn’t make much sense as they’re all out of context but a couple of things jump out. First, there’s a healthy diversity to the topics he’s commenting on. And second, when you follow them through he sometimes adds something of value to the original piece or the discussion that follows.

So let’s look at my sketch again, this time using the whiteboard as the medium of choice:

Whenever JosephPorta comes across an article he reads through it and applies his personal filter, picking out the bits that fit with where his mind is at the moment. If he’s annoyed about Gordon Brown then any mention of Gordon Brown being annoying will register, and if the rest of the article doesn’t register then that sentence will stand out even stronger. As far as he’s concerned the article is about Gordon Brown and not how upset Peter Preston is about the Internet. And if he’s not a troll or an idiot we can probably say that he doesn’t think his comment is out of place or missing the point given that he pressed the “post your comment” button.

And, of course, sometimes an article will fit perfectly with whatever he considers important. In that case his comments will chime perfectly with the substance and spirit of the original piece and the original writer will read his comment and be reassured as to the thoughtful, considered response their readers are capable of.

This is slightly different to a basic browser history. You can bring up all the pages you looked at today but all it tells you is what pages you looked at today. It doesn’t say what you thought of them or which bits you focussed on. And while browser history can be useful to a certain extent it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Something closer can be seen by looking at popular items on Delicous. Let’s take TechCrunch’s publishing of internal Twitter documents and look at a few ways people have tagged them:

• twitter, strategy, socialmedia, business, management
• documents, confidential, revenue, transparency, internal, leak, startup, twitter, techcrunch
• Microsoft, Twitter, Google, Facebook, AOL, TechCrunch, MarissaMayer, AlGore

Certainly there’s a general theme to the tagging (which is one of the ways social bookmarking works – describing the content of links by which tags bubble to the surface) but those three strings of tags betray three distinct understandings of the piece. The first sees it as an insight into the business practices of social media companies, the second sees the leaking and publishing of the documents as the important thing while the third is interested in how these documents relate to a smorgasbord of other companies. All of them are right but each has zoomed in on a different thing and extracted a different meaning.

It’s a bit like art, really. Once the artist puts their work in the public sphere they lose control over its interpretation and any artist who gets upset that their intended meaning is ignored or edited by the viewer is never going to be happy. The viewer comes to the piece with their personal baggage and zooms in on the aspect that resonates best with that baggage. Hopefully it’ll add to their conception of the world and take them in interesting new directions but unless their baggage matches the artist’s completely they’re unlikely to “get it right” especially on the first viewing.

The same, I think, applies to the reading of news articles and always has done. The difference is that online the reader has the ability to comment, to pull out the bit they resonate with and mark it.

Am I right? Is there some research that backs up or refutes this? The comments are yours…