Musings
Further to that article I linked to the other day wailing that people don't 'surf' the web anymore, they use it to get things done.
Thinking that it's not either/or, sometimes one wants to get things *done* and doesn't want to faff around endlessly (I will take being able to order a new set of headphones online with next day delivery over flaneusing down Tottenham Court Road going into every bloody electronics shop to see if they have the right kind, any day). And sometimes one wants to idly skim and scan and wander.
Sometimes there are non-urgent errands that can be combined with a degree of flaneurserie: as so memorably depicted in Virginia Woolf's Street Haunting.
The difference between searching and browsing, perhaps - searching suggests that there is a Particular Thing, that can be Found, that one is Looking For (and may I say that Google is making it less easy than heretofore to do this), while browsing is much less goal-oriented a process.
And there are times for both (to everything there is a season: a time to search, a time to browse; a time to use an app, a time to web-surf idly).
***
There was a short piece in the Guardian G2 Women's page the other day about the film Eight Women, all about how wonderful it was, a film with an all-star female cast and NO MEN.
And I, having sat through it, was going, yeah, yeah, it's about eight fairly nasty women who are all defined by their relationship to a single man, and all pretty hostile to one another except for a couple of cat-fighty scenes that hint at femme-slashery.
I've never seen (I don't think) the classic version of The Women, and while I suspect that it's very much about wymmyn hatez other wymmyn, I also have the strong impression that it brings to that a level of not perhaps quite Parkeresque, but still crackling witty bitchery which Eight Women didn't achieve.
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