Serendipity Still Serendipitous
Posted on Thursday June 22, 2006 at 4:53pm.
A couple of weeks ago Reason.com's blog Hit & Run had a bit about whether the ease of Internet research was killing serendipity.
For the past several years I have had my students read an essay by journalist Ted Gup called “The End of Serendipity.” In it he mourns the loss of spontaneous discovery that he enjoyed as a kid. Technology, he laments, has made it too easy for our kids to find what they’re looking for. Intellectual curiosity, it seems to him, is doomed. He remembers looking up salamander in the The World Book Encyclopedia as a boy:
The Gup essay is popular with freshman writing instructors and textbook anthology editors. Maybe it's because of some nostalgia for maddening hours wasted in university library stacks. Or envy at how easy research has become. After all, we had to walk uphill to school, both ways, and so should everyone else. Until the end of time. Or some anti-technology bias that is fashionable among some in the humanities, sure that kids these days with their loud music and their cell phones will be the end of civilization. Or something.
In any case, professors and journalists need not fear. Human beings are human beings, and intellectual curiosity and the joy of discovery cannot be wiped away by a computer.
Work Cited: Ted Gup, pp. 478-481 in The Blair Reader, edited by Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. 4th edition, Prentice Hall, 2001.
For the past several years I have had my students read an essay by journalist Ted Gup called “The End of Serendipity.” In it he mourns the loss of spontaneous discovery that he enjoyed as a kid. Technology, he laments, has made it too easy for our kids to find what they’re looking for. Intellectual curiosity, it seems to him, is doomed. He remembers looking up salamander in the The World Book Encyclopedia as a boy:
I would invariably find myself reading instead of Salem and its witch hunts or of Salamis, where the Greeks routed the Persians in the fifth century B.C. ... In my youth, information was a smorgasbord. Walking past so irresistible an array of dishes, I found it impossible not to fill my plate. Today, everything is à la carte.Students see through Gup’s error instantly. Serendipity hasn’t ended. It’s just moved from one delivery system to another. Unlike the experts who cling to a romanticized version of the past, the students have actually searched for information online. They’ve found themselves reading Web pages they never intended to discover. They’ve distracted themselves for hours on spontaneous intellectual adventures. They’ve experienced the same joy of unexpected learning that Gup says has disappeared. And they’ve done it without having to purchase a bulky and expensive set of encyclopedias that would be out of date before the ink dried.
The Gup essay is popular with freshman writing instructors and textbook anthology editors. Maybe it's because of some nostalgia for maddening hours wasted in university library stacks. Or envy at how easy research has become. After all, we had to walk uphill to school, both ways, and so should everyone else. Until the end of time. Or some anti-technology bias that is fashionable among some in the humanities, sure that kids these days with their loud music and their cell phones will be the end of civilization. Or something.
In any case, professors and journalists need not fear. Human beings are human beings, and intellectual curiosity and the joy of discovery cannot be wiped away by a computer.
Work Cited: Ted Gup, pp. 478-481 in The Blair Reader, edited by Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. 4th edition, Prentice Hall, 2001.
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- Digital Cameras and Lost Childhood Memories
- Serendipity Still Serendipitous