A Sunny Pleasure Dome with Caves of Ice

At the risk of being branded a Luddite, I maintain that the world wide web is the single most distracting thing ever invented by humans. The internet is immensely useful for practical matters of course but aside from its utilitarian functions, it is also capable of providing a device for pure play. It can be, in the hands of an appropriately interested and educated human, a virtually (sic) inexhaustible source of joy, the intellectual equivalent of Kubla Khan’s “miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.”

Ever since I have set eyes on the internet, I have been distracted by it. And I thank the gods for the distractions because at least a bit of the path to enlightenment can be illuminated by the faint glow of a CRT.

The web mimics and reflects into the virtual world the most salient feature of the real worl–which is that every tiny bit of the real world is connected to every other bit. The correspondence betweeen the image and the reality is continually gaining fidelity and the day may not be far off when it would be hard to distinguish the image from the reality.

It was John Muir, the environmentalist and ecologist, who used to say that he cannot write about nature. He said that when he starts to write about something, he finds it is connected to something else and that something else is connected to some other things and so on to infinity. So if he attempted to comprehensibly describe something however small, he would fail miserably.

I have the same pleasant complaint with the virtual universe as John Muir did with the universe when he noted that “when we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Connections. I am fascinated by connections. I used to sit glued to the TV watching James Burke’s BBC series called “Connections.” A journalist and historian of science, Burke is in a class all by himself. If you have an hour to spare for some delightful insights into the nature of innovation and the histroy of technology, listen to the man. And the miracle of it all is that you can do it from the comfort of your own home and at a time of your choosing, if you have an internet connection.

{to be continued.}