eating cucumbers without permission...

I missed OneWebDay because I didn’t hear about it until long after the fact, reading blog posts from people living ten hours past my timezone. That’s a charming and appropriate way to learn about “a global day to celebrate online life”, but still, I missed it, and this is one holiday I have to celebrate, even late. I really couldn’t care less about the Queen’s Birthday (or whatever), but I ♥ the Web; I can hardly pass up a chance to tell it how much.

There’s a lot there to love, but for me it’s one thing above all: the Web makes curiosity easier.

1.

We have a couple of hard-copy, dead-tree encyclopaedia sets in the house. It used to be three, but now we’re down to two: a fairly recent Britannica — less than two decades old! — and an Americana circa 1975.

It was a small shock to discover in primary school that many of my classmates didn’t have any encyclopaedias at all. (Or even any books, sometimes: it’s still disquieting to sit in a strange parlour and suffer the slowly dawning horror that they have no books, let alone shelves and shelves and rooms full. How do they stand it?) An encyclopaedia provided a real competitive advantage: if we ever needed to look something up, the information was right there, sitting on the shelf.

The other kids had to visit the school library the next day, so they had to sustain their curiosity long enough to spend a lunch break on it. Or they had to convince their parents to drive them to the public library, if it was open and accessible and there was transport available and the right books were there and they could find the right books and a thousand other things, any of which could prove an insurmountable obstacle.

If their questions weren’t important enough to make that effort — if they weren’t required for school, or their parents weren’t enthusiastic about learning — they’d go unanswered.

If we were ever even curious about something, though, the information was right there. If we had a question, the information was right there: there was no excuse not to answer it. Austria, camel, Marie Curie, Tyrannosaurus Rex, zygote…

2.

The Guinness Book of Records was created, apparently, because Sir Hugh Beaver became involved in an argument over the most effective brand of monocle polishthe fastest game bird in Europe. He was probably drunk at the time, so it required no great insight to realize that similar drunken disputes were happening in bars all over the country.

The information was already available, but it was not in an easily accessible form. How do you go about researching a question like, “How large was the largest potato ever grown?” An expert — say, a potato farmer — might know. If one isn’t available, you’ll probably end up searching newspaper archives for articles about prize-winning vegetables at local fairs. It’s a lot of work for a sober person; for a drunk it’s out of the question.

An encyclopaedia wouldn’t be much use. It’d contain some of the same data, but not all. The editor of the Britannica might, for some unfathomable reason, deem that the world record for the number of marshmallows eaten in an hour is too trivial a fact to bother with.

Even if it did contain the data, it wouldn’t necessarily be easy to find. The “world’s longest river” datum, for example, would be in the entry on the River Nile, or possibly in that on the Amazon (there is apparently some dispute over which is longer). It might be in the entry on rivers in general. In the first two cases, the reader would already need to know the answer before being able to find it; and in the latter, it might be buried on the third page of the article, if included at all.

The Book of Records solved this problem by indexing the datum by “longest river”, rather than “Nile”. Its contents were limited to a specific knowledge domain: records of the best, fastest, biggest, longest. As a result, it allowed readers to access information in a way that was imposssible, or at least unlikely, in a traditional encyclopaedia.

Just imagine, then, how useful an encyclopaedia might be if it had many different indexes: alphabetical, of course, and an index by date, and an index by country, for quick access to all articles referencing, say, Germany. An index by first name. (Only people have first names, so that one would be limited to a subset of articles.) An index containing only rivers, or mountains, or biologists. An index of media ordered by fictional expletives.

Imagine if it were possible to search by specific keywords — with exclusions, inclusions, marked records, stemming, pattern matching. Imagine tools to sort and analyse the returned documents: lexical analysis, term extraction, collaborative ranking and filtering, recommendation engines, personalized search…¹

Suddenly that information would be a whole lot easier to find, and those questions a whole lot easier to answer.

3.

It seems petty to stress quantity when there are compelling qualititative differences — the former is an administrative detail, the latter a quantum leap — but it’s undeniable that, for many people, thirty volumes is too many, too much. Too much space (the Britannica came, literally, with its own set of shelves), too much money. And that’s only thirty volumes: there isn’t room enough in a thousand for a comprehensive reference.

But the Web does have room. Wikipedia has space to spare for lists of exclamations used by Tintin’s Captain Haddock, for profiles of the characters on Fraggle Rock, for a biography of Internet legend Gene Ray. There’s room enough for it all.

The information isn’t just easier to find, there’s more of it.

4.

I’ve been talking a lot about “ease” and “effort”; so this, I suppose, is where I admit to being lazy. Even though there’s an encyclopaedia right there on the shelf, come on! Getting up, finding the correct volume, finding the correct page… Is it really worth the trouble? It’s not significant labour, but neither, often, is it significant curiosity.

If I’m engaged in research, of course I’ll look something up; if I’m engaged in a bar dispute, it’s rather less likely. It’s a matter of time and effort, and that effort isn’t always worthwhile. It’s only idle curiosity; I won’t lose sleep if it’s not satisfied.

With the Web, though, there’s no excuse; it’s no effort at all. The computer is already on; the browser is already open. Fifteen seconds? Five?

I read a great blog post the other day, about, amongst other things, Ruby on Rails:

Well, if you happen to be doing web programming, Ruby on Rails defies classical language mechanics by actually being a lower energy state. That’s right; it’s *more lazy* to learn Rails than it is to try to get your web framework to be that productive, so people are just tunneling over to it like so many electrons.

What I love about the Web is that it’s done the same to curiosity.

If you have a real, burning desire to know something, the low-energy state is trying to find the answer. It’s easier to open encyclopaedias, browse journal archives and cold-call professors at the local university than it is to suffer your ignorance. You can’t sleep, you can’t work; you’re consumed by curiosity. But how often are you ever that curious?

It’s not just that the Web makes it easy to find information. The Web makes it so easy to find information — so ridiculously, perfectly, instantly easy — that it’s a lower energy state to satisfy your curiosity than it is to suffer it. Even if it’s just because the TV doctor mentioned a “subdural haematoma” and you don’t know what that is, or a news report made you suddenly notice your shameful ignorance of contemporary politics in Thailand, or you happened to idly wonder about the ratio of cow to sawdust in a Big Mac.

I love the Web because it makes this possible:

So what happened was, I was talking with Joe about the fact that Dive Into Python appeared on the front page of digg.com this morning, despite having been submitted at least three times already, including once just 43 days ago. […] Which led to a brief discussion of collective memory, or the lack thereof. Which reminded me of the urban legend about goldfish, that they have 3-second memories or 30-second memories or whatever. From which I found a tantalizingly brief article on goldfish training. Which inspired me to do further research in the area of goldfish training. Which, as with all research on the internet, inevitably led to a fascinating Japanese video of trained goldfish […]

Even if further research does not prove rewarding, what matters is that it’s possible at all. Have you ever heard of a discipline more esoteric than goldfish training? A discipline less likely to attract serious interest? If there’s an answer to this question, there’s an answer to them all.

I love the Web because all I have to do is ask.

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1. It’s strange to think how easily these wonders become commonplace. It sometimes seems a poor substitute for the stuff of science fiction (”Computer! Plot a course for Alpha Centauri.”), but the librarians at Alexandria would have wept for joy at half of what we take for granted. ↩