How Do You Get Someone to Read About Shijiazhuang?
Encouraging Internet Wanderlust Is Tricky, Especially If You Don’t Want People to Get Lost
We imagine ourselves to be citizens of the world, but in fact we are drawn to people like us, to familiar experiences, and to information that confirms our biases. This is the phenomenon Ethan Zuckerman, who is my advisor at the MIT Center for Civic Media, calls “imaginary cosmopolitanism.” We could potentially read the daily news from Lagos, Nigeria on our laptop while we’re wearing pajamas. We could follow trending tweets from Turkey. But the imaginary part of the cosmopolitanism is that we don’t.
Can we build technologies to engineer serendipity …
