by: Simon Baddeley

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:12:45 +0000

This is the old idiot’s lamp used a little more intelligently, inviting people to shine a magic torch on a world before the internet when what is currently available on the net is only a taster for what is presaged, with increased bandwidth, the multiplication of servers and information providers. It realises, even more than with newspapers and radio, Eliot’s condition of being “too conscious and conscious of too much”. The internet is driven by lust and wickedness yet behind the bicycle sheds is a labyrinth as enchanting, in its own way, as the British Museum Library or the great Library at Trinity College, Dublin, with the dust-specked beams of sunlight missing the carefully protected Book of Kells in its glass case, or the bookshops of Charing Cross Road or Hay-on-Wye on a chilly rainy autumn afternoon. Layer upon layer of reference tempts me on, diving through texts and icons through servers to other servers and home by different routes. I retrace my trail and find side exits that become the main trail. I follow trails laid out by others. I hit dead-ends and retracing my steps discover exits into new branching tunnels. It’s intoxicating and yet recalls alarm I felt as a child watching the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Disney’s Fantasia. Back and forth I roam into the early hours down-loading buckets from the Pierian spring. I exhort myself to define my objectives, while another part of me pleads respect for the focus of ‘proper’ research. Every time I decide what I really want to know I read something that tempts me to type in another search word, another Boolean term to extend my enquiry back and forth via addresses at Stanford, Tokyo, Oslo, Towson State, Florence, Durban, Harvard, Ann Arbor, Tel-Aviv, Edinburgh, Princeton, New York, Göteborg, Melbourne, Mexico City, Cambridge, Colorado, Kobe, Geneva, Rio, London, Massachusetts, Marseilles – to and fro and on and on, half-hoping the magician will return, and after stern reproof, tidy everything up. This connectionist ramble will not submit to the two-dimensional mind-maps of this survey of people’s needs. The trees bifurcate and bifurcate and form new nodes from which further branches expand and divide. And alI the time I can stop for chats with anonymous avatars, leaving addresses or slipping back intom anonymity, enjoying infinite memory, though I recall that Borges’ Funes the Memorius, having perfect memory, took as long recalling as he did perceiving.

Comments on: Sex, t’internet and Government

by: Simon Baddeley