I'm using this week’s post to consider how the "six degrees of separation" principle might apply to ideas, the same way that it applies to our social lives. The blogosphere provides a great demonstration of both aspects of the principle: it’s about networking people and ideas.
But long before we had blogs we had books. Through bibliographies and indexes we can trace the same kinds of networks among authors and ideas – though it’s more fun to find connections by accident. It makes a better story that way.
Some of the most creative thinkers allow themselves moments of disorderly discovery, allowing new influences and sources to, in a sense, ‘find them.’ One of my favourite stories is how the great cellist, Pablo Casals stumbled upon Bach's cello suites in an antique store. Consider this as something like finding an unknown Beatles album at a garage sale -- and that still isn't as big as the discovery Casals made. What Casals did with those pieces effectively made his career and brought greater respect to his instrument.
Friedrich Nietzsche is another great example of a disorderly explorer. He’d never heard of Dostoevsky until he spotted the French translation of Notes from the Underground in a used book store. He liked the title and decided to pick it up. If it hadn’t been for the near-miracle that his weak eyes happened to spot that particular book on a crowded shelf, the great existential philosopher might have never known about the great proto-existential novelist (at least not until much later); Dostoevsky almost immediately became one of Nietzsche’s favourite writers.
As with making social connections, there is a kind of ‘knack’ for experiencing these coincidences, which is simply a reflection of your personal lifestyle or approach. This lifestyle has three primary characteristics: (1) you possess an already well-established network, with which you are familiar, and you cultivate your network so its nodes are diverse and alive, ie. you keep in touch with friends, or you keep reminding yourself of your ideas; (2) you actively put yourself in circumstances where new connections are likely to occur, i.e. by reading, or in the case of social networking, going out; and (3) you actually want to find new connections: you are open, interested, and attentive.
Thanks to the web, we don’t have to leave as much to chance as in the time of Casals and Nietzsche. Now the semantic web, with customized content and ambient findability, are supposed to be taking care of these connections for us, bringing recommendations to us automatically. (I’m going to assume that everybody’s heard this pitch before: Amazon, TiVo, etc...)
But from a creative person’s perspective, there’s no replacement for being actively organized, open, and attentive. Genuine creativity demands an intuitive ability to conceive new relationships, patterns, compositions, rhythms, harmonies, melodies, and syntheses [associations]. And the ability to conceive syntheses is learned and practised by perceiving syntheses in the real world. Our habit of making connections imitates our habit of finding connections. If we don't allow ourselves to discover new relationships, we won't be able to generate them either.
More importantly, as the quantity and diversity of content expands [I mean, on the web, or just in general], the greater chance we have of finding books, music, and movies similar to (and increasingly similar to) what we’ve already read, heard, watched – which is bad, at least from the creative perspective. It creates an ever-smaller range of specialization, an ever-shorter feedback loop. Without continually challenging and expanding our experience and taste, there is a greater danger of 'inbreeding' our influences. The more specialized we become, the less open and attentive we will be to new ideas.
Another problem is our tastes evolve – and perhaps not in a way that an algorithm will be able to predict. Anyone who ever loved, say, the Toronto Blue Jays as a kid, and then received nothing but Blue Jays stuff from relatives as gifts, will understand how difficult it can be to ‘reprogram’ our supposed preferences and tastes.
This is where something like Facebook becomes especially useful. Software can more effectively predict changes in our preferences if it considers our friends’ preferences as well – along with the evolving behaviour and characteristics of similar people we may not even know. It can make a pretty good guess what we might like, because it knows what people like us like. Examples of this include Last.fm and Library Thing.
But I don’t really have the expertise to carry this topic any further. Actually, I hadn't even heard the term ‘information architecture’ until about a year ago. The story of how I stumbled upon it is coincidental enough to be another example of ‘disorderly discovery,’ but it's also an example of orderly discovery, an example of the way the web helps us pinpoint the exact information we need.
I was doing a little recreational research on Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, and I read a comment in a book that claimed he was influenced by Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten. (That an architect could be 'influenced' by an educator is itself is a demonstration of how diverse influences work on creativity). When I googled "Froebel's influence on Wright," one of the first results was an article on Boxes & Arrows, the online journal for information architects. My research on Wright stopped immediately: I'd just stumbled into information architecture as a whole new field of discovery.
But that isn't an especially interesting story. It mainly serves to demonstrate how the web helps us to balance orderly and disorderly discovery, making both more productive. My main worry (which may or may not be important) is that stories about our connections – both between people and between ideas – won’t be as good as the old ones. Consider dating sites: they may help people find their "perfect match," but a story about sorting through carefully selected profiles doesn’t seem to make as great a wedding speech as stories about... I don’t know, what are some stories that you have?
I’m not asking for stories about meeting people; we've been telling those stories since the dawn of civilization. I think there is an important ‘human’ side to ideas, which tends to be ignored in favour of the orderly, refined, finalized forms that they take. If we pay more attention to this aspect of discovery and creativity, and share more of our stories, then we may generate valuable insight into how minds, social systems, and idea systems work -- which helps us to harmonize them -- to work, learn, and live more effectively.
[25Oct07: Since writing this, I made a few more 'disorderly discoveries' about creativity, like Howard Gruber's notion of having a "network of enterprise," and Dean Keith Simonton's notion of "creativity as a stochastic process," or something roughly analogous to the chance variations involved in Darwinian evolution. See my post on the Origins of Creative Genius.]
