I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Search vs. Serendipity in our digital age. This isn’t just me, the topic is gaining some traction among thoughtful people, and it’s been on my mind lately so I figured I’d tap out a few thoughts of my own.

Today’s is about Twitter. This week, within 48 hours, I got no less than a dozen tweets about the Susan Boyle video. In fact, it seems many of the memes rocketing around the Interwebs flash across my Twitter feed multiple times.

This got me to thinking about the composite body of the people/entities I follow on Twitter (and in other channels). More specifically, I’ve come to wonder if, like an investment portfolio, my Twitter feed isn’t out of balance.

Could I be overexposed on some topics at the sacrifice of others? My ability to so granularly control the information I am exposed to via Twitter goes straight to the heart of the Search v. Serendipity quandry.

In short, digital media are great for search and pretty awful at serendipity (though there are some interesting randomizers out there). Digital media do a bang-up job of making it easy for me to find deeper content on topics I’m aware I am interested in. However, it’s much harder to discover new things by accident. This gets compounded each time I link my awareness to a friend or franchise that reflects my current interests.

Given the limitation of my conscious bandwidth – I’ve only got so many trackable tweets in me on a given day – am I wasting some of that limited awareness on redundant references to Susan Boyle, Flutter and the fall of Comic Sans?

Where am I getting exposure to contrarians? To the disconfirming insights that strengthen ideas? How frequently am I hearing about new thoughts on topics I don’t think about every day? Creativity is a big part of my career and my experience is that creativity comes from combing previously unrelated thoughts into something new. It therefore seems valuable to broaden my awareness.

To pull an analogy out of art school – is linking my awareness to friends, Twitter follows and RSS like demonstrating my individuality by wearing black just like the rest of my peers?

Browsing seems to be falling to the wayside in our search-centric world. Skimming headlines, thumbing through albums, pouring over bins of books, strolling through malls or rifling through magazine stands are all endangered (or at least declining) behaviors.

Ultimately, I believe my time and my conscious awareness are very valuable. That being said, maybe I need to rethink my information exposure as defined by my Twitter follows.

What would it do to my consciousness if I dropped a few digerati and grabbed a neocon or two? What would happen if I backed off the business publications and latched on to some physics or astrology? What new ideas would I be fed that I could in turn incorporate into my own thinking?