The Wonder of the Early Web Returns to My Intranet

Once Upon a Time on the World Wide Web, before Google arrived and established a self-fulfilling prophecy as their motto, "Don't be Evil," you could ask a question of the Internet and it would reflect what was known about the world's thinking on the subject. I used to do this quite frequently. I don't do it so much anymore because all I get back are advertisements or an algorithmic regurgitation based on partially digested bits from my search history and bottom dwelling sludge from who knows what data mining expedition.

I recall one example. Fifteen years ago or so, the phrase "shallow tasking" came to mind as a description of what's really going on inside people's heads when they claim to be "multi-tasking." I wondered if it had been used. It hadn't. It didn't show up in any of the searches. It's still a pretty lonely search result page, I see.

The internet now, thanks to Google, is garbage for this type of purpose. I can't trust that what comes back is any kind of impartial reflection of what might be happening in the world. That seems to be changing in my own little world since organizing my disparate bits of knowledge and wisdom in Obsidian.

As I add more and more bits and pieces from things I read here and there and couple them with my thoughts - Zettelkasten style - I'm seeing interesting patterns emerge. I'm seeing what I'm most interested in. I'm seeing what I'm obsessing with. I'm seeing how this connects to that which connects to those which connects to these. And I have enough references now that I can search for a word or phrase and see what my little knowledge base has been collecting. I can do this for ideas I didn't know I was collecting. And once again I have the emerging feeling of interesting curiosity that I used to get when I would query the Internet on Altavista or Yahoo or the pre-Hell-Yeah-We're-Evil Google.

Of course, there is a significant risk of building little more than a private echo chamber. To counter this, there are a number of safeguards built in to my little microcosm. This blog is part of that system of safeguards. I expose my ideas back to the cruel crucible of the World Wide Web. What, if anything, comes back by way of feedback informs my internal knowledge-base. And it grows stronger, more robust, more valuable.