Emily Daniel

4/28/2013

Online Serendipity

It has been said that when the pioneers of the internet began working, they did so with the intention of creating one great city. A city that pays no mind to boundaries of location, circumstance, or personal inhibition; in short, the ultimate trading-place for information. They have succeeded in their goal – the internet is nothing today if not one huge network of people, exchanging ideas and life stories and building relationships that would not have been possible as little as 30 years before.

In succeeding, the creators of the internet have also created the ideal place for serendipity. The Oxford English Dictionary defines serendipity as “The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident,” and several articles cite cities as the ideal location for this phenomenon. After all, what would be a better place for “happy and unexpected discoveries” than a communal experience hub, a stopover for travelers and a holding-place for information extending back centuries? The internet. It does everything cities do, but better; it's faster, more information is available, more people are coming and going. And if cities are the best possible real-world example of serendipity in action, shouldn't the internet be seen as an improvement on that model?

In some circles, it is. A new study done by the University of Missouri shows that most serendipitous discoveries of news articles are now made on our Facebook feeds. News creators both acknowledge and have adapted to this; even the New York Times now carries its online articles with the standard bar of “Share on...” links. 'Sharing' is a perfect way to get discussion going, mostly because it can happen so quickly. People can go from reading an article to discussing it with others in seconds, and by posting that article, they are also creating an opportunity for everyone else in their network to see it. I'm sure every student has at least one story of a homework break accidentally turning productive by an informative post on their social media platform of choice.

This effect doesn't just apply to traditional information aggregators. Last year, a half-hour video documenting the experience of child soldiers in Uganda under the rule of a man named Joseph Kony took the internet by storm, spawning charity projects, discussion, and a worldwide search for the people responsible. But along with this media frenzy came some other videos; videos of actual Ugandans, whose sentiments basically added up to “We appreciate your concern but could do without your white saviorism please and thank you”. I would have never seen this response without the internet – and with those responses came statistics, history, and the fact that Africa does, in many places, have a functional working class (a fact notably hidden from me by my western education). I am considerably more enlightened for having been involved in the whole experience, and I wouldn't have even had the chance to participate without the internet.

These changes have not been met with universal approval. Many supporters of traditional serendipity say that it is “under attack” by the internet, claiming that in organizing data and making it searchable, it is removing the sense of discovery from the process. But under that logic, wouldn't libraries also be as abhorrent? Newspaper sections? Organization is not the anthesis of serendipity; in fact, it helps encourage those meaningful discoveries by sorting data into “things that will probably be relevant” and “things that will probably not be relevant”. Is it perfect? No, but no system is, and I don't think the internet is any more guilty of organization than the Dewey Decimal System.

If you want an example of how online serendipity works at its best, look no further than Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free, online, user-managed encyclopedia that has gained a reputation as a timesink due to how easy it is to get lost in absorbing everything. Each page has a multitude of links on it, integrated into the text of the article itself, pointing to places where the reader can find out more about what they want to know. For an example, I looked up “Serendipity”. The first ten links are as follows :

• Words Hardest to Translate, a list of the 10 hardest English words to translate into other languages (serendipity is on the list)

• Horace Walpole, the man who was the first to use the word serendipity

• Horace Mann, the recipient of the letter which contained the first usage of serendipity

• “The Three Princes of Serendip”, the Persian legend from which the word serendipity was formed

• Sri Lanka, which used to be called Serendip (and is the setting for the aforementioned legend)

• Arabic, the language from which the word Sarandib (which was roughly approximated to Serendip) originated

• Persian, the culture from which the fairy tale originated

• Amir Kushrau, author of Hasht Bihisht, which was the book the fairy tale was written in and was translated into Italian in 1302 (therefore delivering the word into the hands of Horace Walpole)

Some of these are more interesting and relevant than others; but I found myself opening two new tabs, and I hadn't even made it out of the etymology section. You could argue that I just got distracted, and that providing a multitude of places to 'jump off' only serves to cloud the point; but ultimately, isn't all serendipity just distraction? You notice two headlines close to each other on the front page, you see a library book with an interesting title you didn't look up, you take a moment to look up from your steaming coffee to suddenly find an old friend you'd been trying to contact for years. If serendipity is truly a “happy accident”, then there is going to be no foolproof way to get a perfect hit every time. If the internet is going to create more 'hits', then it must also make more 'misses'.

But it is still by far the ideal platform for spontaneous discovery. Social media combines with media creators both new and old to spread ideas worldwide in an instant, and meet infinite chances for happy accidents along the way. So go ahead, search some keywords, open your Facebook, fire up your instant messenger.

Discovery awaits.