

Can We Please Kill This Meme Now - ams1
http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2006/05/can_we_please_k.html

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grellas
The web is great for serendipity and will eventually leave books lagging far
behind in that area (it certainly has done this with respect to library
stacks). But nothing will ever replace the sense of excitement one can get
from antiquarian books if one is a lover of history and traditional learning.

I have an 1850s 5-volume set of the complete works of Aristotle in 2-column
format with the original Greek in the left column and with a complete Latin
translation in the second. For a language lover like me, the web has nothing
even remotely close to this. There _is_ an inimitable sense of discovery you
get as you thumb through pages and compare column to column in a work such as
this - a sense of discovery that the web can't begin to match.

I think this has to do with both history and aesthetics. Why was such a work
ever printed? What does it say about those who did it? Why all the care to put
it in handsome bound volumes? Such factors combine with the unusual nature of
the subject matter to enhance the sense of discovery one gets when reading
such a work. The web can’t do this because it can’t provide either the
historical sense or the aesthetics.

Now imagine a room full of such works from different times and places spanning
the centuries. They do indeed provide an amazing sense of discovery that
cannot be matched on the web today.

There is no magic to antiquarian books and there is no need to romanticize
them. They are just books. But they can be really fascinating. Serendipity
with such books _is_ different from serendipity on the web - it goes beyond
content to a sense of discovering how people in different times and places
lived and about what fascinated them in their day. Perhaps the web can some
day capture this same sense if technologists can devise a way to capture a
comparable sense of the intangible elements of time and aesthetics. It does
not do so today.

Of course, if one's sense of serendipity turns on the content of the
information alone, then these intangible factors are irrelevant, but I think
it is artificial to try to separate those intangibles from the content itself
when it comes to the pure excitement of discovery..

~~~
jamesbritt
"The web is great for serendipity and will eventually leave books lagging far
behind in that area (it certainly has done this with respect to library
stacks). But nothing will ever replace the sense of excitement one can get
from antiquarian books if one is a lover of history and traditional learning."

I find the serendipity bandwidth of wandering around a bookstore much higher
than the Web. The Web, however, is more more available to me. But wandering
around the real world has a lot going for it.

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makmanalp
This is a pet peeve of mine. A fun pastime is to tell a book aficionado, or
maybe a librarian how in 20 years all their favorite medium will be
obliterated completely and how the likes of them will be dismissed as
luddites. Just sit back and relax for the next hour while you listen to an ad-
lib essay on why books are so great and how they have "life" and how computers
are "mechanical and lifeless", and how staring at a computer screen will
surely cause asociality (while of course staring at a book is not likely to).
I've even heard people tout that the book experience, from the feeling of the
covers to the smell of it, is inexchangeable to that "degenerate computer
crap". Overly melodramatic.

Do I really believe that books will come to an end that soon? No way. Much
later, maybe. Do I hate books? Not at all, I love them. I own many of them and
regularly buy, borrow and read more.

Honestly, I'm sad that these people can't identify with all the change they're
being subjected to, but I'm tired of the behavior. If you don't like where
everything is heading, that's fine, you're free to keep your old ways but if
you're going to grumble on about it, then you better stop swimming upstream
and start learning the other way too. Maybe the reason I'm so receptive to
change is because I was born into an era of it.

~~~
derefr
A book aficionado perhaps, but not a [real, graduated in L/IS] librarian.
Library and information science is basically the study of all the stuff
hackers like arguing about—what information is, what is or is not
important/redundant information, what metadata is needed to efficiently find
something, the value of information in different contexts, the best ways to
guarantee the preservation or distribution of information, and so on.
Librarians were the first people to use (and espouse) search engines. I'm sure
they'd absolutely love it if instead of having a huge library building that
had to survive with little funding, taking up city space with books that have
mostly never been touched (and therefore have to be culled sometimes—not a
happy pastime for a librarian), they could run a small stall that checked out
e-ink tablets with the sum of all human knowledge pre-installed, and never
worry about conserving space by removing information again.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Yes, you must remember that _you_ might think of a library as a building full
of books, but to a librarian it's always been a means to an end.

A librarian's job is to archive and retrieve information. For them, having to
physically unshelve and reshelve books is not an act filled with nostalgia and
romance -- the novelty has long since worn off. Moving books around is a
tedious cost of doing business. It's what they make the new interns do. They
won't miss it any more than grad students will miss photocopying journal
articles. [1]

(God, do you realize how much of my life was wasted lugging giant bound
journal volumes around, shlepping them on and off of photocopiers, just
because I went to grad school five years too soon? You young whippersnappers
don't know how easy you have it!)

\---

[1] With the important caveat that librarians are not at all impressed with
the archival quality of electronic media. There's nothing like being handed a
truckload of seven-inch floppy disks and being told to preserve the contents
for the next 500 years. The job has its challenges.

~~~
nostrademons
Curiously, I don't think I know of any librarians working at Google. I wonder
what they'd think of the zillions of documents at every engineer's fingertips
here.

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bkudria
Horrible title for actually quite an interesting discussion.

~~~
hack_edu
Absolutely. He bases it on the analogy of library browsing.

I agree that its a played out symbol. And I'm a librarian.

------
lsb
There's quite a bit of serendipity on Wikipedia: <http://xkcd.com/214/>

Almost all Wikipedia articles are within 4 hops of each other. You can open as
many tabs as you like, but now you have the choice.

~~~
paulgb
> Almost all Wikipedia articles are within 4 hops of each other.

Neat fact, do you happen to have the source? I'd be interested in hearing more
on this.

~~~
joeyo
I couldn't find anything definitive, but here are some papers on the topic:

<http://mint.typepad.com/mypapers/pp017-lizorkin.pdf>

<http://www.fran.it/articles/wikimania_bellomi_bonato.pdf>

[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=arnumber=4...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=arnumber=4559785)

------
Goladus
I don't actually think of books so much as I think of browsing stores for
actual goods. On the one hand, I have too much stuff
(<http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html>) on the other hand, I'm far more
likely to unexpectedly encounter a useful _and actually buy_ a thing (say a
cooking tool) at the mall than online (even something simple, like a quality
spatula).

I wouldn't even look at cooking items online. No AI recommendation engines
have ever recommended cooking utensils to me that I can remember, and
certainly nothing that I was interested in. I've never made a conscious
decision to outfit my kitchen, so I've never gone on an online shopping spree
for that sort of thing. However, if I walk by Williams-Sonoma in the mall, I
may stop in and check out what they've got.

------
AmericanOP
People use the net to find a wider array of information than they did before,
but they don't go as deep. On the other hand, book readers are much pickier in
choosing the topics they delve into. I could probably go through my entire
cycle of sites in the time it takes me to pick out a book at Borders.

I'll never forget stumbling across the 17th century tulip craze in a book from
my public library. I never heard another word about it until a Matt Taibbi
article a couple months ago. On a long enough timeline horizontal browsing
intersects with information once reserved for those who dig deep, but how many
almanacs would you have to read to know as much as a librarian?

~~~
ikkiv
Interestingly, the tulip craze was one of the early and more memorable things
I've found stumbling the web. I believe some people were comparing it to the
dot-com bubble.

------
kingkawn
There is something fantastic though to being stuck listening to crap on the
radio and suddenly a wonderful song comes on. Pleasure through forced
deprivation.

~~~
maxwell
At least in Maine, on commercial stations, I statistically find less moving
new music than on, say, thesixtyone. But I tend to appreciate a song most
after a few listens, on the album or a mix, and view the radio and
(contemporary) web as mainly just a means of discovery.

