the Scott Stein

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:

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 And they’ve done it without having to purchase a bulky and expensive set of encyclopedias that would be out of date before the ink dried.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.

On the local evening news several months ago, a self-appointed expert was warning us of the danger of digital cameras. A similar story ran on a different station last month.

Our poor children, apparently, aren’t going to have memories of their childhood, because too many people are using digital cameras instead of traditional film cameras. The reporter nodded seriously while the expert flipped through a photo album, telling us it was a shame that our children would not be able to do the same when they grew up. He offered statistics as proof that people just weren’t using the old cameras. Of course, he’s right that people are using digital cameras instead of the old film ones, but so what?

When I consider how many "slides" my father took during my childhood, now sitting in a box somewhere, that no one will ever view, I can't get worked up just because some digital pictures will be lost to crashed hard drives. Some people will learn painful lessons about backing up their files, to be sure. But in total these losses might be offset by other pictures not lost to fire or flood, because they existed online somewhere. And these losses are certainly outweighed by the increase in total photos shot per person.

People are taking more pictures than ever--far more pictures--now that they don’t have to worry about wasting film (no, I don't have any data on this, but it must be true). They are ending up with far more pictures that they actually like. Many of these pictures are in albums in the computer or on CD and can be looked at on the screen. It isn’t clear to me that our children are being deprived of memories simply because the photo album they view is on a screen instead of being a physical object.

And plenty of these pictures end up being printed. Online services like shutterfly.com print out just the shots that you like at low prices. My wife is compiling physical photo albums at an unprecedented rate. The local news need not fear for my son’s childhood memories.

All of this seems obvious to me, and probably to you. But once again the experts and the journalists had no idea how the technology was being used.

The desire to have pictures of our children cannot be wiped away by a computer.