In between applying for jobs and working on my latest book proposal (working title, Contemplative Computing and the Goblet of Fire), I read Andrew Keen’s article on social discovery and threats to serendipity. “Applying algorithms to the personal data on networks like Facebook and LinkedIn,” social discovery apps “try to introduce us to nearby people whom we might like to meet—because we listed the same career on LinkedIn, say, or because we “liked” the same bands on Facebook.” The problem, Keen argues, is they threaten to destroy real serendipity:

[A]t the Austin airport the next day, I was bombarded with notifications that potential “friends” were nearby: tens of thousands of techno-hipsters had just descended, and every one of them seemed to have downloaded one of the social-discovery apps that pundits were predicting would go mainstream at this year’s South by Southwest.

My own experience at the festival, however, was decidedly short on serendipity. Everywhere I went, my new apps tried to connect me to people I didn’t want to see—business partners from failed ventures, Web developers I’d fired, entrepreneurs who were selling things I didn’t need, the inevitable ex-girlfriend. Worse, the people I wanted to bump into never popped up on my phone. In the end, most people who came to Austin seemed to agree with my friend: these apps are, in their first-generation form, annoying….

Ultimately, apps that claim to engineer serendipity seem more likely to do the reverse. Their main offense is not ubiquitous surveillance, but that they stand to destroy surprise and, with it, true serendipity. Rather than enriching our lives with unexpected encounters and genuine strangers, they threaten to take the mystery and the magic out of people we don’t know.

Now, if you’ve heard this before, it’s because you have– in different contexts, but with computers. The death of serendipity is one of those things we’ve been worrying about for a long time. When I was at Britannica, we would fret over how getting one article on a screen would mean the end of that serendipitous moment when your eye landed on something alphabetically proximate but on a completely different subject. We’ve worried about this as search engines have gotten better, as GPS tells us where to go, as Amazon recommendations suggest we might also like Breaking Dawn or the new Justin Bieber– mainly because everyone else in the universe seems to like them. (Sven Birkets, of course, talks about this in a recent piece.)

I used to think that there was a serious argument to be made that information technologies erode opportunities for serendipity, and in so doing wash some of the unexpected, exciting color out of our daily lives, but now I’m no so sure. And Andrew Keen’s article helps me see why.

First, it treats apps that suck like apps we should take seriously. This generation of discovery tools assumes that we want to meet people who are just like the people we already know, and when placed in a context like a big conference, of course, they’re going to work badly, delivering us too many recommendations that are unsurprising, and too few that are genuinely novel. (It’s as if JK Rowling had written 100 books, and all of them were bestsellers; Amazon would never recommend anything else to you.)

Second, the piece assumes that technologies eliminate human agency. We’ll just do whatever these apps tell us to do. But we can make choices, we can always turn them off, and we can make decisions about how to use them or how to interpret their recommendations. Always.

Third, it misunderstands serendipity. Serendipity isn’t a thing; it’s a state of mind, a measure of our openness to seeing similarity and difference in the world, of our willingness to set aside our usual assumptions about who or what interests us, and in some degree who we are. If I’m not in the mood, or I’m feeling very rushed and have a deadline, that really wonderful short essay right beside the article I’m reading will go ignored; if I’m feeling more leisurely, then I might look at it.

We usually think of serendipity as a delicious unexpected treat. But it’s not. It’s generated by our capacity to appreciate deliciousness in the world, by our taste for novelty.

Finally, I’m a little more positive about serendipity because of how I found this piece. Evan Selinger, a philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, pinged me on Twitter and asked if I thought technology would “take the mystery and the magic out of people we don’t know”? 

Selinger and I have never met, and I can’t recall how we discovered each other.

But the exchange is a perfect example of what’s valuable about Twitter and Delicious: they facilitate serendipity– if you’re open to it.