When I was a young boy, my parents bought me a set of The World Book Encyclopedia. The 22 burgundy-and-gold volumes lined the shelves above my bed. On any given day or night I would reach for a book and lose myself for hours in its endless pages of maps, photographs, and text. Even when I had a purpose in mind -- say, for instance, a homework assignment on salamanders -- I would invariably find myself reading instead of Salem and its witch hunts or of Salamis, where the Greeks routed the Persians in the fifth century B.C. Like all encyclopedias of the day, it was arranged alphabetically, based on sound and without regard to subject. As a child, I saw it as a system wondrously whimsical and exquisitely inefficient. Perfect for exploration. The “S” volume alone could lead me down 10,000 unconnected highways.
The world my two young sons inherit is a very different place. That same encyclopedia now comes on CD-ROM. Simply drop the platinum disk into the A-drive and type in a key word. In a flash the subject appears on the screen. The search is perfected in a single keystroke -- no flipping of pages, no risk of distraction, no unintended consequences. And therein lies the loss.
My boys belong to an age vastly more efficient in its pursuit of information but oblivious to the pleasures and rewards of serendipity. From Silicon Valley to M.I.T., the best minds are dedicated to refining our search for answers. Noble though their intentions may be, they are inadvertently smothering the opportunity to find what may well be the more important answers -- the ones to questions that have not yet even occurred to us. I wish, then, to write on behalf of random epiphanies and the virtues of accidental discovery -- before they, too, go the way of my old Remington manual.
My boys are scarcely aware that they are part of a grand experiment in which the computer, the Internet, and the World-Wide Web are redefining literacy and reshaping the architecture of how they learn. These innovations are ushering in a world that, at least to my tastes, is entirely too purposeful -- as devoid of romance as an arranged marriage. Increasingly, we hone our capacity to target the information that we seek. More ominous still, we weed out that which we deem extraneous. In a world of information overload, this ability to filter what reaches us has been hailed as an unqualified good. I respectfully disagree.
Consider, for example, those of my sons’ generation who are learning to read the newspaper on a computer screen. They do not hold in their hands a cumbersome front page but instead see a neat menu that has sliced and diced the news into user-friendly categories. They need not read stories but merely scan topical headings -- sports, finance, entertainment. The risk that they or any readers will inadvertently be drawn into a story afield from their peculiar interests, or succumb to some picture or headline, grows ever more remote. The users define their needs while the computer, like an overly eager waiter, stands ready to deliver, be it the latest basketball scores, updates of a personal stock portfolio, or tomorrow’s weather. In my youth, information was a smorgasbord. Walking past so irresistible an array of dishes, I found it impossible not to fill my plate. Today, everything is a la carte.
There are moral consequences to being able to tailor the information that reaches us. Like other journalists, I have spent much of my life writing stories that I knew, even as I worked on them, would not be welcomed by my readers. Accounts of war, of hardship or want seldom are. But those stories found their way first into readers’ hands and then into their minds. They were read sometimes reluctantly, sometimes with resentment, and, most often, simply because they appeared on the printed page. Doubtless the photo of a starving child or a string of refugees stretching above the morning’s shredded wheat and orange juice may be viewed as an unsightly intrusion, but it is hard to ignore.
In cyberspace, such intrusions will become less frequent. There will be fewer and fewer uninvited guests. Nothing will come unless summoned. Unless the mouse clicks on the story, the account will not materialize. And who will click on the story headlined “Rwandans Flee,” “Inner-City Children Struggle,” or even “Endangered Butterflies Fight for Survival”? If the mouse is a key, it is also a padlock to keep the world out.
Those already on the margins of our consciousness -- the homeless, the weak, the disenfranchised -- are being pushed right off the page, exiled into cyberspace and the ever-expanding domain of the irrelevant. Already the phrase “That’s not on my screen” has found its way into common parlance. In the end, self-interest may be the most virulent form of censorship, inimical to compassion and our sense of community. It is the ultimate V-chip, this power to sanitize reality, to bar unpleasantries. “Technology,” the Swiss playwright Max Frisch once observed, is “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”
It would be ironic if the computer, this great device of interconnectivity, should engender a world of isolationists. Yet increasingly we use its powers to read about ourselves and to feed our own parochial self-interests. Instead of a global village, we risk a race of cyber-hermits. And the World-Wide Web, the promised bridge to that which is beyond ourselves, may be yet another moat to protect the self-absorbed.
A friend of mine recently joined Microsoft. He was struck by the youthfulness of those around him and the absolute faith they had that every question had an answer, every problem a solution. It is the defining character of the Microsoft Culture, its celebration of answers. Within that church, there are few Luthers to challenge its orthodoxy. So much energy is spent to produce the right answers that little time is left to ponder the correctness of the questions.
I find it amusing that Bill Gates, shrewd investor that he is, has emerged as one of the world’s premier art collectors, acquiring the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, the consummate figure of the Renaissance. I wonder: Does he identify with that genius, or, perhaps recognizing the peril in which that humanistic tradition is now placed, is he simply attempting to corner the market on its artifacts?
This is not a revolution but an evolution. In ancient caves can be found flakes of flint left by early humans, evidence of the first impulse to put a point on our tools, to refine them. The computer, with its search engines, is simply an extension of that primal urge. From the Olduvai Gorge to Silicon Valley, we have always been obsessed with bringing our tools to a perfect point. But where knowledge of the world is concerned, I suspect there is some virtue to possessing a blunter instrument. Sometimes a miss produces more than a hit.
Ironically, we continue to call entrees to cyberspace “Web browsers,” but increasingly they are used not to browse but to home in on a narrow slice of the universe. We invoke mystery with corporate names such as “Oracle,” but we measure progress in purely quantitative terms -- gigabits and megahertz, capacity and speed. Our search engines carry names such as “Yahoo” and “Excite,” but what they deliver is ever more predictable. The parameters of the universe shrink, defined by key words and Boolean filters, sieves that -- with each improvement in search engines -- increasingly succeed in siphoning off anything less than responsive to our inquiries. The more precise the response, the more the process is hailed as a success.
What has been billed as the information superhighway has, like all superhighways, come with a price. We have shortened the time between departure and arrival, but gone is all scenery in between, reduced to a Pentium blur. We settle for information at the expense of understanding and mistake retrieval for exploration. The vastness of the Internet’s potential threatens to shrink into yet another utility. As the technology matures, the adolescent exuberance of surfing the Web yields to the drudgery of yet another commute.
One need not be a Luddite or technophobe to sound a cautionary word in the midst of euphoria over technology. I have a fantasy that one day I will produce a computer virus and introduce it into my own desktop, so that when my sons put in their key word -- say, “salamander” -- the screen will erupt in a brilliant but random array of maps and illustrations and text that will divert them from their task. This I will do so that they may know the sheer joy of finding what they have not sought. I might even wish for this virus to spread from computer to computer. And I would name this virus for that which ought not to be lost -- serendipity.
Ted Gup is a visiting professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Journalism.