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Serendipty
By Rosie Perera | November 15, 2008 at 1:21 pm
My cousin, who is a librarian, recently sent me this quote from Annie Proulx: “I mourn the loss of the old card catalogs, not because I’m a luddite, but because the oaken trays of yesteryear offered the researcher an element of random utility and felicitous surprise through encounters with adjacent cards, information by chance that is different in kind from the computer’s ramified but rigid order.”
While I do think the loss of the tactile dimension of the old wooden drawers in dusty libraries is profound, I disagree that serendipity is gone with computers. Hyperlinks on the Internet can easily mimic with lightning speed what discoveries from adjacent cards used to provide. Want to see other books by the same author? Click on the author’s name in an Amazon.com description of a book. Many online library catalogs have a browse search mode where you can look at adjacent titles. A daily visit to Google Books shows some new random titles each day. Websites that are part of a “webring” link to others on similar subjects and you can discover all kinds of stuff you might never have known about. I don’t think I have any shortage of “felicitous surprise” when surfing the Web. As evidence of that, here are the interesting websites I’ve stumbled upon in the past month (I keep track of any cool new finds in my web “travelogue” file):
November 14, 2008
Quantcast – “The World’s Only Open Internet Ratings Service”; “Quantcast is a new media measurement service that enables advertisers to view audience reports for millions of sites and services to build their brands with confidence.”
November 13, 2008
Tribe – free, member-created groups for every interest – discussions, photos, listings and more; tribes; pretty useless – too many tribes, too much garbage, not enough refinement in the top-level browsing feature
DotSUB – Any video any language; translations of videos
November 11, 2008
Roaring Twenties database
October 22, 2008
Google Guide – tutorial for Google, not affiliated with Google
October 17, 2008
WADP (World Association for the Development of Philately) Numbering System – database of all authentic postage stamps issued by Universal Postal Union (UPU) member countries and territories on or after January 1, 2002.
No, I don’t think we are lacking in delightful discoveries from random walks through the Web as a replacement for library catalogues. If anything, the opposite is the case. It is too easy to discover all kinds of random curiosities and fill our attention with stuff we don’t really need to know about. At least with the physical library catalogue, you could stop when you’d had enough, and you weren’t overloaded with all the lingering evidence of your meanderings. There would have been no temptation to revisit your trails through the “History” in your browser or to mark websites in your “Favorites” for further exploration some rainy day when you felt like wasting more time. In the olden days, you could write down only so much interesting trivia on a pad of paper you had with you, and that was the end of it.
Annie Proulx has it wrong. We have no shortage of serendipity and “felicitous surprise” in the computer information age — we are drowning in it. Far from directing our attention only to rigidly ordered information, the Internet opens up never-ending branches towards new nodes to explore. And we never get to the end of it.
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