Crafting a Personal Gatekeeper

Last year I left the IVOH World Summit with a sense of hope I hadn't felt since I first dreamed of pursuing a career in photography. It was my first year in attendance, and I entered the conference as a proud member of the IVOH Youth. As I sat on the train chugging away from the Peace Village and entered the dark tunnels of Manhattan I remember feeling a sense of optimism that countered the doomsday prophecies I had learned to believe marked the end of journalism and the media industries. Now nearly a full year after experiencing that weekend full of thought-provoking conversation I have been invited to discuss what I found to be a wonderful takeaway from my time at the summit.

I have always viewed my generation as a bridge between two vastly different ways of thinking-those who grew up without the Internet versus those who are consumed by it. Young adults my age experienced life without cyberspace but then witnessed its emergence into daily routine just as we were reaching our teenage years.

In third grade I was asked to make a presentation on an animal of my choice. Rather than open up my laptop I went to the local public library to research the Aye-Aye, a particularly hideous species of lemur. Yes, I went to a library and flipped through issues of National Geographic. I spent hours there, undisturbed, and had the patience to read articles that didn't even directly relate to my subject. Fast-forward to high school. Suddenly teachers found it necessary to punish students who cited Wikipedia in their final term papers. Somewhere in our teenage years we all moved away from the calm act of pursuing knowledge. Research was now a numbers game. How many websites are in my bibliography? Is there a quote? Well, I can just read a sentence in this e-book and pretend I looked through the real thing.

That was the formula for success and every student knew how to use it.

For a long while I was aware of these two ways of thinking but I had no idea what to call them. Then I found myself in a classroom with Fred Ritchin, a professor at NYU who was actually the reason I attended IVOH last fall. In ‘The Future of Imaging' we had lively debates about analog vs. digital photography. Analog took time, care, and patience. Digital catalyzed the need for instant gratification. It wasn't long before we began applying these terms to life. My third-grade self indulged in analog research, but as an 18-year old I dismissed the worth of sitting in a library and embraced the convenience of Google. I was living in the digital.

After returning home from IVOH last fall I wrote about the summit as a bastion for analog thought. The moment I was back in Manhattan my senses were energized (and scrambled) by the digital intensity of the city streets.

It takes due diligence to calm our need to consume information at lighting speed when every time we turn on our cell phones there's a yearning to participate in Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, or any number of other social media outlets. In order to begin this process we must craft what I would call a personal gatekeeper, something I see as the first step in the road to balance between analog and digital. We must filter through the media stream and force ourselves to consume less. In the past the gatekeepers of media kept much of the frivolous content at bay. If a writer wanted to share his work it had to make it through a publishing company. Now we have blogs and Tumblr. Because of the democratic nature of digital sharing we must be hyper-aware of what we let in and what we dismiss. Not only must we filter through what we consume but we also have to accept that it's okay not to read every article that pops up on Twitter.

A few months ago Linda Holmes wrote an essay for NPR.org titled, The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything. Here Holmes laments the amount of quality media produced every year and our limited capacity to see, read, or listen to every wonderful moment.

"I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I'm supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn't get to."

Holmes describes two options: culling and surrender.

"Culling determines what is and isn't worth your time...Culling is easy; it implies a huge amount of control and mastery. Surrender, on the other hand, is a little sad. That's the moment you realize you're separated from so much. That's your moment of understanding that you'll miss most of the music and the dancing and the art and the books and the films that there have ever been and ever will be, and right now, there's something being performed somewhere in the world that you're not seeing that you would love."

The Internet itself is already trying to filter the media presented to us on a daily basis but computers should never replace our brains in the culling process, as Eli Pariser warns us in his recently published book. In Pariser's "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You" he analyzes the algorithms now being used by Google, Amazon, and many other sites to deliver search results and product suggestions that the computer thinks you will enjoy. In a recent TED talk Pariser shows a screenshot of the Google results for the word "Egypt" as they were delivered to three different individuals. For one man, news of the Egyptian revolution didn't even show up on the first page of search results because it "didn't fit his interests." How are we supposed to pursue conversation and debate if our main researching platform is only showing us content it already knows we enjoy? Culling should be a process that forces us to filter through content that is both for and against our political and general interests.

We also need to establish new platforms for viewing media that are conducive to focusing on a single piece of content. Reading on an iPad is easy because it only allows the reader to view one object at a time. Whereas on a ‘regular' computer there are hundreds of tabs in multiple windows surrounded by chat boxes and pages of email. The iPad mimics a book in size, weight, and its capacity to allow its user to focus on content.

It would also be helpful if news sites were onboard with this idea, but TIME.com is a prime example of distraction-based design. A reader can't get through a single article without at least ten different links embedded between paragraphs that lead to related photo galleries, articles, and top ten lists. Even the webpage around the article is smattered with ads, images, and links to share their content on social networking sites. Compare this reading experience with sitting on a bench in a park with a printed copy of the magazine.

As technology is ever-changing how do we find a balance between the opportunities presented by digital and analog's entwinement with calculated thought? Is the solution merely to educate consumers? And is that the job of the industry? Most Internet users likely believe that Google results are the same for everyone and they probably don't mind if they're viewing TIME.com on an iPad or a laptop, so long as the content is free.

As I make plans to return to this year's IVOH summit I plan to arrive with many of these questions in mind. I most look forward to the calming atmosphere of "analog conversation" that I believe is our only hope for discovering the necessary steps to begin controlling media in a progressively digital reality.