Serendipity as transformation
The human willingness to pay for the illusion of control is a fundamental motivation for technological innovation. Can it sometimes be unhealthy?
David Cowan has an excellent post on serendipity’s demise in the aggregated, filtered, and personalized world (and the demise of Kepler’s Bookstore)… (with good comments by Greg Linden, founder of Findory)
Hopefully some personalization technology can be designed to increase serendipity rather than prevent it. Serendipitous experiences are often transformative…