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Ebusiness in the Enterprise – December 17, 2002
Chance encounters of the electronic kind
By Sean Mc Grath
My all-time favorite quote about hypertext is attributed to the late Yuri Rubinsky:
"The trouble with hypertext, is that it always takes you somewhere relevant."
I cannot find a citation for this on the web. The nearest I can find is a place where I attributed it to Yuri last year[1]. There is an irony there don't you think?
Yuri's observation is a profound meditation on the difference between following paths laid down for us (links) versus stumbling upon interesting things by accident. I have lost count of the number of interesting things I have encountered by chance in the real world, and I'm sure you have too.
Here are some examples of real world serendipity from my own experiences. An eclectic mix of uncommon words in my head (including that one) are the result of looking up paper dictionaries and spending time reading entries that I did not set out to look up. They just sort of catch my eye. Many is the time I have become so engrossed in entries I stumble across that I completely forget what word I was looking up in the first place.
Another example, I first became aware of the Python programming language by taking a detour back to my hotel in downtown Boston only to stumble across a bookshop. I have a rule in life about never ever passing a bookshop unvisited if possible. I very nearly passed this one as I was carrying two large Barney dolls I had bought for my kids. Barney dolls are not classic accessories for browsing the Computer Science section of bookshops. Anyway, there it was, in the midst of a sea of Perl books "Programming Python" by Mark Lutz[2].
Then there was the happy accidental re-discovery of SGML in the bowels of a now very old copy of Byte circa 1989.
You get the picture, so why am I wearing a long face about this? Well, my concern is that the sort of serendipity that involves seeing things out of the corner of your eye in the physical world of information has no obvious electronic equivalent.
I increasingly rely on Google for searching for stuff. It's wonderful. I'm not alone in my addiction to Google. But I do wonder sometimes, given that so many of us are using Google for research, doesn't it follow that we are all following the same yellow brick road laid out for us in Google's fantastic link map? Does that mean that, insofar as we can continue to stumble across stuff by accident, we are more likely to stumble, herd-like, across the same stuff?
In a recent article on his blog[3], Jon Udell worries that the burden of spam may yet result in us returning to reversing our open door policy to e-mail and only letting approved e-mail addresses contact us. Jon worries that this reduces the opportunity for ad-hoc e-mail encounters. The one e-mail in a thousand from someone you have never heard of, or last corresponded with five years go, that is actually very important, never gets through and serendipity suffers.
Perhaps I'm overreacting. Perhaps the sheer volume of links out there is so vast that we do stumble across things out there in hyperspace out of the corners of our eyes. Perhaps the loss of serendipity is more than compensated for by the peer-review, "survival of the most connected" algorithms of the search engines. Perhaps as we drop links to things into our web pages we are like ants dropping pheromone[4] "links", increasing the relative strength of links to sources of good stuff. Perhaps this is the start of a new type of collective knowledge, and emergent knowledge, grown as it were by the colony of Homo Sapiens rather than the individuals. Perhaps.
For now, I will keep investing in paper dictionaries and ensure my kids have access to them as well as the online versions. I will continue to visit bookshops even if I'm carrying embarrassing numbers of cuddly toys. And I'll continue to use Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button as the nearest equivalent that I've got to chance encounters of the electronic kind.
[1] http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200101/msg00050.html
[2] http://www.rmi.net/~lutz/about-pp2e.html
[3] http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/12/05.html
[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/emergence.htm