The filter chamber

Sunday, 23 Jan 2005

Jon Udell:

I subscribe to people more than to publications, and not because I don’t value the information in those publications – I do, very much – but rather because, outside of the realms in which I’m closely involved, I can delegate the job of tracking primary sources to people whose interests and inclinations qualify them to do so.

[…] If one of the feeds I monitor doesn’t react to some event in a given domain, another probably will. When they all react, I know it was an especially important event.

The resemblance of this model to the summing of activation potentials in a neural system is more than superficial. Nature knows best.