On Joining Oulipo by Accident
Ezra Klein writes:
Compared to this, electronic text is a GPS system. You tell it where
you want to go, it finds the route. The whole book is searchable. So,
for that matter, are your notes, which can all be stored. Favored
passages can be clipped and saved in a separate file to facilitate more
rapid review. When text ceases to be fixed, when margins swell to an
infinite expanse, when every word can be sorted and searched, the
failings of our brains are hardly noticeable. Your bookshelf becomes
your mind’s external hard drive. It’s a shiny new e-brain, a Google
that searches your personal intellectual universe.
This is true, and yet, so many times I went looking for something in a book, didn’t find it, and then stumbled on something so much better that I was glad I’d never run into whatever it was I searched out in the first place.
This point has been made before but: in a searchable world you lose out on the chance connections, the things you could only find by not knowing that you were looking for them, and sometimes those are better.
For a little more on these two ways of looking for data, read Barrett’s essay from The Quarterly Conversation.
You Might Also Like:
More from Conversational Reading:
- Show Us Your Blog, We'll Tell You What Books to Buy I’m convinced that blogs are pretty good indicators of the person behind them, so this could work. Then again, if I want instant book recs...
- Most-Searched Books The most-searched books at Google Book Search. Probably not the ones you’re expecting. ...
- Vitality vs Empathy There’s a nice post over at CultureSpace that looks at the pitfalls implicit in the characters of Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, and...
- Borges Interview And for a little more Borges this morning, the journal Habitus has posted the text of a previously untranslated interview with the author. STUDENT: You...
- Books on the Web Apparently, if you’re a billionaire entrepreneur with tons of cash on hand and a high tech company to support your whims, the new trendy thing...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
In a searchable world, you don’t lose the element of chance. At least not with current searching quality. I can’t count the number of times I’ve searched for something only to rathole on dozens of other things found. Perhaps when search is so good it finds exactly what I looked for, then it becomes an issue. But right now it isn’t.