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Serendipity: the art of finding what we are not looking for |
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Written by Debbie Smit
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Sunday, 03 September 2006 |
Serendipity is such a perfect word for what it defines that it may have been serendipity itself that inspired Horace Walpole to coin it. The word comes from the original name for Sri Lanka, Serendip, the setting for the Three Princes of Serendip, a fable of three nobles who make discoveries by accident. Through their sagacity they deduce, for instance, by the kind of abductive reasoning used by Sherlock Holmes, that the road that they have been travelling on, because the grass has been grazed on one side only, must have been shared by a mule blind in one eye.
Serendipity also has an antonym; zemblanity, as coined by novelist William Boyd. Zemblanity is derived from Novaya Zemlya (or Nova Zembla), a cold, barren land whose geography contrasts with the tropical lushness of Sri Lanka. Zemblanity means to "make unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design".
Some of the most notable serendipitous discoveries are penicillin, gelignite, post-it notes, LSD, silly putty, the Rings of Uranus, polyethylene and velcro.
There is plenty of debate in the field of informatics about whether or not the internet is a danger to the joy of chance discovery.
Journalism teacher William McKeen, in an article for the St Petersburg Times (from Florida, not Russia) argues that "browsing" the internet is in fact a misnomer. According to him we no longer browse as we would in a library or when we read a newspaper, but make directed searches for information that we need. In this way, the efficiency of modern technology reduces the space within which we can “make fortunate discoveries accidentally”.
Anyone who has ever been lost on the internet would disagree. Surfing the web is incredibly time-consuming and requires plenty of patience before you find what you are looking for (or not). The reason people can spend days surfing is that the internet has a way of sucking you in. You begin by searching for something specific and end up drifting off to some distant unknown land –– a serendipitous experience if ever there was! Although it may seem to be a good way to cramming a lot of useless information into one's brain very fast, it is ultimately what one does with the information retrieved that matters. After all, Alexander Fleming's penicillin mold would not have been much use if he had merely remarked: "Look at that! This mold is eating my experiment," and then chucked it. True serendipity does require a bit of creative thinking.
A project called Max (short for Maximise your Luck) led by a professor of Informatics Engineering at the University of Coimbra, uses a software agent that browses the web, in a simulation of the typical human browsing behavior, searching for information that may interest the user, especially information that the user is not focused upon. Max offers the user information that may lead to serendipitous insights. Stumbleupon.com tries to harness serendipity (counterintuitively, I guess, since randomness cannot be predicted) by sending out automatic links to users according to their personal preferences. Although sites like this may seem to have your best interests at heart – hooking you up with like-minded surfers, telling you about things you may not have discovered yourself – they are invaluable to marketers. Once they know your preferences you're likely to keep having targeted advertising thrust at you (unless you're a paid customer, in which case you can turn it off).
A good blog can provide an important alternative to the print media, if the blogger has an ear to the ground. Bloggers are quite capable of breaking stories and although quite often opinionated, can provide an interesting slant on a new story.
The web does have its fair share of zemblanity. If you ask for "dirty sex" that is precisely what you will get. You'll also put yourself in line to get a lot of unsolicited spam telling you how to "get bigger" or "last longer".
If you know what to avoid, as in life, surfing the web can be full of happy accidents that happen while looking for what you are not finding.
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