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So, woken up to a very different world lately? Well, the info-geeks tell us that it really is different. The world gets more exabytes of new unique information every year, nowadays, than had been recorded in all of human history before. Sounds exciting? If it doesn't, you might be a victim of infophobia. Now, don't get this wrong. Infophobes are not people who shrink from the sight of a computer, or habitually pronounce 'surfing' as 'suffering'. They include millions of avid web surfers who spend enormous amounts of time logged on. What they don't do, however, is log their own linear programming off. They log on with an agenda, and then proceed to punctiliously fulfil that very agenda. The internet has become so well organised that it has begun to resemble a super-efficient library. Want something? You get just that. The result: the extinction of serendipity. From an efficiency perspective, and the techworld is very good at this sort of thing, that's more than marvelous. The scarce resource, they keep saying, is time. And the web is only as good as the last byte it serves that you demand. The trouble, however, is that the very wonder of the world wide web is its lack of linear structure. You can, at random, surf off in any direction----unguided and unpoliced by human agency of any sort (though, of course, the matter you find is all put there by humans, in all its fallibility). Link randomisation, theorists had imagined, would bust the way we unconsciously force ourselves to think... almost as if the brain pathways have got rearranged in one's head. This was supposed to do marvels for human creativity. Guess what----random surfing is a declining sport. There's simply too much junk out there to have to negotiate on the way to something of genuine value. Too much clutter, not enough time. Granted. That's a valid complaint. But random surfing is still worth the effort. There is a lot of good stuff out there in cyberspace. With patience, it can still pop a thought or two in your head that you wouldn't have liked whiz past you unnoticed. Besides, the patience part is not entirely a waste. It's an amazing reminder of the utter nonsense the human mind generates... which is an efficient way to become even more intellectually discerning.
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It's
been nearly a decade that net surfers have been celebrating the arrival of
the internet. In internet time, that's supposed to be like an aeon or
something. Or so they had us believe for a while.