E-Activism

17May06

… which, as one would expect, would be the only kind of activism that I’ll actually participate in.

Save teh Internet! Makibaka!

Need more information? matterload.

The last time I participated in an online petition was in an online campaign to get Rick Berman and Brannon Braga off of Star Trek, back during the wild west days of the Internet. Don’t judge.

***

Meanwhile, an interesting op-ed piece on the endangered joy of serendipity:

In my freshman class at the University of Florida, I require the 240 students to subscribe to the New York Times Monday through Friday. I haven’t even finished announcing this in class the first day, when the hands shoot up. “Can’t we just read it online?” they ask, the duh? implicit.

“No,” I say and the eyes roll. They think I’m some mossback who hasn’t embraced new media.

“Why not?” Challenging, surly, chips on the shoulders.

“Because then you would only find what you’re looking for.”

“Think about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become such a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find - with an irritating hit or miss here and there - exactly what you’re looking for. It’s efficient, but dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding. Inside, the book might be a loser, a waste of the effort and calories it took to remove it from its place and then return. Or it might be a dark chest of wonders, a life-changing first step into another world, something to lead your life down a path you didn’t know was there.”

Its rebuttal:

“I find these arguments completely infuriating. Do these people actually use the web? I find vastly more weird, unplanned stuff online than I ever did browsing the stacks as a grad student. Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better.”

I’m inclined to agree with the latter. The former sounds someone who’s never fully utilized the Internet apart from the occassional Google search. Nevertheless, serendipity is a wonderful thing. That’s why it’s one of my favorite romantic comedies.

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