The Old Man of the Internet
Excuse me for the nostalgia, but it’s become way too easy to know things. Way too easy to IMDB that actor who was in that movie but also in that TV show. Too easy to get info so you never have to wonder. Googling is too fast for wonderment to even present itself. Everything is there before you asked it. Everything is not astounding. Everything is thus unimportant - there’s no need to memorize it, it will always be here.
So as our memory circuits rust, our imagination stays limp. It’s an old truth that questions always arise and always must be answered, and as old a truth that when hard data doesn’t present itself, fictional data appears like an understudy. Why did lightning strike that hill? Why, it was the lord of such things from his dwelling place high in the sky. What is his name? Well, it is Yeush, the master of despair. Where is his dwelling place? Oh, it is a palace on top of the highest mountain, where his sits upon his gilded chair, waited upon by his beautiful, pregnant concubine Hara. Lightning used to mother pantheons; now it begets a Wikipedia page the content of which there’s no need to remember.
It wasn’t always like that. Even though the television people called it the Information Superhighway, it used to have much less information, and the road was narrow, and the ride was really very bumpy. Information was scattered, prosaic and hard to get to. Searches were hard and long, not Google-fast, when you were stumbling through Lycos to get at pages written by Geocities citizens. While searching you had time to wonder, you’d have time to invent. You’d have time to work on your memory. Who was that actor in the movie? Wasn’t he that guy who’s that son of that other guy? From the movie? What was that movie called? We must really watch it together sometime.
Another fine post from Quotendquote. Please comment there.