Contradictheory
By Dzof Azmi, The Star
Sunday May 11, 2008
A FEW years ago, when I was at a conference in Langkawi, my co-workers and I were bored of the formal dinners that acted as the stodgy end to every working day. One night, we hopped into a car and drove around the island, and somewhere near Pantai Cenang we came across a place called The Eagle’s Nest. Out in the middle of practically nowhere was a restaurant that served some of the best steaks I have ever eaten.
When they moved to KL, I had a new favourite dinner place in town – and it is one I would have never found if we hadn’t decided to jump in a car and drive off.
Of course, I probably could have found out all about this place through the Internet. Maybe I would have read a blog about it. Or Wikitravel would have posted it as a place to go in KL. Yes, the Internet is a revelation. It’s been touted by some as mankind’s greatest achievement in the 20th Century. It’s like a bigger and better Library of Alexandria, except it’s virtual, and so not as prone to a careless overturned oil lamp.
I don’t know how close it’s becoming to a complete repository of the world’s knowledge, but thanks to sites like Google, Wikipedia and Facebook, nothing seems to be out of reach.
As long as you know what it is you’re looking for, that is.
The problem is that too much of a good thing is, well, too much. You get overloaded by all sorts of information, good and bad. The GDP of Somalia. Who starred in the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A pole-dancing cat. Nobody can cope with that kind of assault on the senses.
It’s a problem that many have tried to address. I tried to do it myself for my IT Masters project. It was called the Genetically-Programmed User-defined Email Sorting System (GUESS), and it was meant to help you categorise and identify different types of email for you by watching you as you worked. Although it could learn your girlfriend’s emails from your ex’s, it took a whole night to do so. These days, it has been relegated to the fossilised strata of email-identifying systems by the spam-filters you find in things like Gmail and Thunderbird. (The new technology is called Bayesian filtering, if you’re interested.)
However, despite being a proponent of filtered and directed content, I have now turned the corner. Instead of viewing it as a narrowing of focus, I see it as a narrowing of views. My fear is that this increasing trend of only seeing what you want, when you want it, will result in you missing out on things that you didn’t know you wanted, when you didn’t know you wanted it.
Compare reading a newspaper (made from a tree) with reading an online version. It’s quite common to see me most mornings in a mamak shop, teh tarik near my right hand, The Star newspaper languorously spread on the table in front of me. When people browse something in physical print, it is an immersive experience. You don’t just notice the article you are reading but the ones that surround it as well.
On the other hand, reading print online is very focused, and it’s rarer to skip to an article that is tangential to the one you have in front of you. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s less likely to happen.
Although the conventional thinking is that this is a good thing, you are more likely to miss the unexpected gems.
Can a life without pleasant surprises really be one worth living? The unplanned road less travelled is usually slower and longer than the high-speed highway, and it doesn’t always get you where you want to go, but it occasionally sends you where you want to be.
You can extend this to further examples. Listening to your iPod versus exploring the radio stations. Downloading a show off bittorrent instead of mashing your buttons to channel surf. Looking up a word in an actual book instead of using dictionary.com. In all cases, although the digital, directed method is more likely to give you a faster answer, it is the conventional, random access way that will add sparkle to your life.
An article in the New Yorker (read online) recently bemoaned the death of the conventional newspaper. Costs were rising, adverts were not selling as well as they used to, and it made sense for newspaper companies to put more and more of their material online. It saddened me to read this.
I’m sure my local mamak shop would allow me to put my laptop on their table and I’m certain that I could manage to not spill kari ikan (fish curry) on it. But the serendipity of discovering the odd and the new would be lost, and the teh tarik would just not taste the same without it.
(Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions.)