Idealist; one guided by ideals;

Luca blinked and stared bleary-eyed at the computer screen. He took a moment to get his bearings and then dived into it, jumping off from a google to follow endless threads of information pathways that led off into the infinite. It was one of those nights, he could tell, one in which the information-saturation rushed past you, and if you were not careful you could lose yourself in the silicon-coated promises of eternal life, larger breasts and cut-price medication.

Cycling past endless streams of porn, he chuckled at the absurdity of the situation. How ironic that Internet pornography was so prevalent, he thought, considering it merged a flesh fetish with a mechanical one. If Marshall McLuhan could see this, Luca thought, and contemplated how a postmodern interpretation of “the Medium is the Message” would account for internet porn.

The best estimates currently put the porn-percentage at about 38%, making it substantially larger than any other form of content on the internet.

Luca imagined a generation of males sitting in front of cinema screens, television screens, and now computer screens – all frantically trying to achieve sexual gratification. Countless orgasms over countless images upon untold numbers of screens. What did this mean? Pavlovian Conditioning. He laughed as he realised McLuhan was right. The screen-sexed males, would they eventually associate the screen with the image in the same way Pavlov’s dogs associated the bell with the food? Was it still necessary for the images to exist upon the screen? Or was the screen ‘sexy-by-association’? Perhaps it had already gotten to that stage, he thought, perhaps that might explain the popularity of the Net. Were we all in a state of perpetual arousal as we fidgeted aimlessly with the mouse? Were we already salivating?

He shook himself as he realised he had gotten sidetracked. It was easy to do that, especially tonight. Easy to live in a world of perpetual distraction. John Lennon once said that ‘life is what happens when you are busy making other plans’. Luca found that comforting, and resolved to never make any plans that might complicate his life-on-the-side. But tonight was different, tonight he had a plan, tonight his thoughts were not random and wandering, but direct and purposeful. Tonight he was seeking something, his mouse-clicks driven by some unseen force, his intuition blaring as leapt from site to site. The problem was the excess, the overload of information. The answer lay in the summary.

A world-wide survey (Reuters, 1996) found that two thirds of managers suffer from increased tension and one third from ill-health because of information overload. The psychologist David Lewis proposed the term “Information Fatigue Syndrome“ to describe the resulting symptoms.

Interesting. Luca clicked on.

Part of the problem is caused by the fact that technological advances have made the retrieval, production and distribution of information so much easier than in earlier periods. This has reduced the natural selection processes which would otherwise have kept all but the most important information from being published. The result is an explosion in often irrelevant, unclear and inaccurate data fragments, making it ever more difficult to see the forest through the trees.

Information-saturation thought Luca as he scrolled down to the conclusion.

Whereas information used to be scarce, and having more of it was considered a good thing, it seems that we now have reached the point of saturation, and need to limit our use of it.

Luca stopped reading there. That wasn’t right, he thought. The answer lay in the summary, not in the restriction.

All data can be summarised. That was the basis of Luca’s theory. No matter how complex or how abundant the information, it can be edited, pruned, and filtered until it reaches its perfect, synoptic form. This, Luca had come to understand, was his quest. To understand the Web, to understand and quantify, and then to summarise it – this was what drove Luca. This was the reason he stayed up nights, endlessly clicking from hyperlink to hyperlink. But tonight his quest might end. There was something in the air that hinted at revolution, and whispered of change.

Click.

Luca was a Blogger. Though only new to the game, he relished its opportunities for self-expression. His recent conversion occurred upon one of his nightly pilgrimages. Trekking haphazardly from site to holy site, he came upon a blog entry entitled “information saturation versus the ducks,” which concluded by saying

There are usually some profound feelings inspired by a lone bird soaring in the sky, when you get a duck or two paddling around in the water in front of you, you can’t help but feel you are getting a zen lesson in absurdity.

Below this was a link to the duck’s homepage and a pricing detail for the lessons. Luca liked that. It had a charming, almost irreverent style that Luca knew, arose from a particular brand of nihilism endemic to Net junkies like himself.

Click. Search String >> ”information AND power”

In the late 1600s Sir Francis Bacon stated that “Knowledge is Power,” and Luca knew this to be true. To summarize then Net, to find its “OM,” that was Power. “Siddhartha,” Luca whispered “Siddhartha, Gautama, OM.”

Click. Search String >> ”artistic AND expression AND internet”

Several sites popped up, one offering art classes, one offering models – all female – for life drawing classes, and one slightly more obscure link offering the truth behind Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa:

Dr. Lillian Schwartz of Bell Labs suggests that Leonardo painted himself, and was able to support her theory by analyzing the facial features of Leonardo’s face and that of the famous painting, She digitized both the self-portrait of the artist and the Mona Lisa. She flipped the self portrait and merged the two images together using a computer. She noticed the features of the face aligned perfectly!

This was not what Luca was looking for. The trick was in the search, you had to know what you were looking for. You had to define your goal, define your endpoint. “In the long run, we only hit what we aim at,” – someone said that – Luca wondered who, and whether they ever found what they were looking for.

Luca had tried endless amounts of search strings. He had connected vast quantities of words, each chosen as meticulously as one would choose herbs for a recipe. And each one had come up blank. He knew the page existed – the truth, as one FBI agent put it, was out there. The trick was finding it.

Click. Search String >> ”meaning”

Click. Search String >> ”meaning AND internet”

Click. Search String >> ”summary AND internet”

Click. Search String >> ”summary AND internet AND power”

Click. Search String >> ”potato AND cancer AND eternity”

Click. Search String >> ”beansprout AND harmonic AND resonance”

Click. Search String >> ”aura AND omniscience AND consciousness”

Click. Search String >> ”shoelace AND asimov AND spaghetti”

He was rapidly running out of combinations. Luca wasn’t sure what he would do when he had exhausted all possible combinations of words, but he hoped it would never get to that point. Then he had a brainwave, perhaps he had been too complex in his searches:

Click. Search String >> “OM”

No. That wasn’t right either. That just brought up “OM.net – Site Officiel de l’Olympique de Marseille”, and “OM Records – The United Nations of Future Music”. He gasped. Could it be that simple? Was that all it took? His hands shook slightly as he typed each letter into the computer.

Click. Search String >> ”nothing”

No. Damn. But he was close, he could feel it. Luca reached down to type another search phrase in and stopped, perhaps he’d been going about it all wrong.

Click. Search String >> ”-“

SUCCESS! There it was, the OM, the Power, the Perfect Synoptic Form. It was fabulous, oh it was glorious, it was everything that Luca expected and more. His quest was fulfilled, the Holy Grail retrieved, and eternal life supped upon. He read the page that followed.

Congratulations! Well done on completing the practical component of Web Theory in the Modern Age, student T-10124958. As you have adequately demonstrated your ability to understand, mediate, and operationalise complex course concepts you will receive a PASS for this session. Thank you for your participation in the Web Theory in the Modern Age. We hope you consider taking another online course soon.

Short Story by Michael Clay. All Rights Reserved. (c) 2004