An article from late March in the St. Petersburg Times of Florida, “The Endangered Joy of Serendipity,” by William McKeen, quickly became a meme, which is internet-speak for “a herd of nerds write about it on their blogs.” So here goes.
As might have been expected, the author, who is chairman of the University of Florida department of journalism and apparently the age of your dad, was taken to task for bemoaning the evaporation of serendipity in a world of music downloading and web sites that have “replaced human conversation.” He sealed his fate as a fuddy-duddy by championing libraries and bookstores as enriching places in which to browse and discover unexpected but engrossing detail. In short, he wrote, “Technology undercuts serendipity.”
Duck, buddy; the nerds zinged back, steaming that the internet can quickly and easily lead you off on crazy and unpredictable paths of serendipitousness. It’s the best for that, in fact, they seemed to suggest.
Both sides have valid points and here’s what I think:
- Most information on the internet is one big circle jerk. The most popular blogs aren’t content generators, they’re content aggregators. A site or story gets linked to by Boing Boing or Fark, and lickety-split, other blogs link to it, and then still other blogs link to those blogs, and so on. The most popular information reigns. Now, nowhere does it say that information discovered via serendipity must be unique. But to me it should at least be unexpected, and not something that 1,001 white people are already dissecting.
- Media other than the internet still have the upper hand in serendipity. McKeen chose some unfortunate examples to illustrate his point; libraries are always the death knell for arguments like his. “Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better,” fumed Steven Johnson in his blogged response. I’m reminded of Nicholson Baker’s report on the library that had embraced its new computerized reference system so fully that it disposed of its card catalog by tying each card through its punch hole to the ribbon trailing a helium balloon, then released and spirited away by the wind. However, the introduction of McKeen’s article wasn’t mentioned by any of the rebuttals I read because it’s correct: print versions of newspapers are better than online versions at finding unexpected information. And I said unexpected. I agree that, say, The New York Times online or Google News are fine briefs on what’s news. But until screens get larger and technology more robust to display more than an average of 1,000 words per screen, I’ll prefer the newsprint version of the paper, where my eyes can dart here and there, picking up words, phrases, names, photos and illustrations of interest, where I can skim two stories and move onto a third, jumping to the last few paragraphs where I may find an engrossing cache of description or detail, in the time it takes to scroll one screen of one article online.
- I don’t know about you, but the internet is killing my ability to focus and concentrate. I flit from site to site, unable to digest anything more than a few hundred words of text. And how much knowledge do I retain? Little. My home internet connection has been down lately and I’ve found myself jittery from lack of surfing. But I soon moved on to cutting into that pile books accumulating on my bedside table and found myself more attentive and comfortably engrossed. Concentration can inspire serendipity.
- Which brings me to the point that there’s still plenty of value to browsing books and bookstores for information. Despite the strides of Amazon.com getting sample pages and searchable versions of books online, I enjoy paging through books, reading author quotes on the jackets and then skimming books by those authors, grabbing books I remember reading about or just because I like the cover design. Seeing what other people are reading or asking the store’s staff for recommendations can also be beneficial.
Perhaps the larger lesson to be learned is that the physical world is no better or worse at serendipity than the one online. It’s just that it’s now often a lesser or forgotten option, perhaps because it requires effort and often direct human interaction. There’s still something to be said for non-text based serendipity: walking down a street you haven’t before, checking out a new shop or restaurant, heading out into the city with no purpose in mind, just to see where you may end up.