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In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson proposes several ingredients for serendipity. They are almost all impossible to replicate on a machine: sleep, coffee, a creative walk, a hot bath, a broken treadmill, chaos and an open system are among them. Yet Johnson still describes the web as “the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture”, because it allows us to traverse Wikipedia – from an article about fountain pens to one about monarch butterflies via links to chocolate-chip cookies and the chancellor’s real name. That is not, I would argue, serendipitously discovering something about insects; it’s discovering something about insects via a path laid out by the people who edit the articles. It’s not making conclusions, drawing parallels or creating something new. The directed nature of how we use the web is therefore in contrast to, say, taking a hot bath: we can collect information along the way, but the process of serendipity happens elsewhere.
“Results are not ‘here-ish/soon-ish/there-ish/then-ish’ or even ‘good enough’.” Vagaries do not compute. We aren’t given a range of opportunities, even on Wikipedia; we are served The One.
Digital serendipity: be careful what you don’t wish for | Technology | The Observer (via myserendipities)
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