Search Me

Spent all day yesterday glued to the web, like some mad Estonian hacker or Berkshire pornographer. My web time was actually on less criminal activities, looking for ideas for content for this new website I am writing. As to whether or not looking at existing stuff out there will generate suitably fresh and new and sticky content for my site remains to be seen.* But I live in alchemist's hope.

But, fuck these is a lot of crap out there. I had a middle aged woman talking at me from my PC about how she could fulfill my dreams - professionally rather than pornographically. And I downloaded a 28 minute mp3 which was designed to make me more relaxed and happy and successful. (It actually just gave me a mild headache and general feeling that gun laws should be relaxed in this country.) And I was asked to subscribe and buy and read and contribute and watch and listen and..well just about everything other than just jumping head first into the screen of my PC with all my credit cards on me.

Like watching day time television, after a few hours on the web I think you lose the will to be part of the same species that creates all that crap, coupled with a vague feeling of loss and hunger and fear (and the gun law thing again - in some mild desire to actually be in charge of your own destiny). Eventually I just ended up doing searches for completely random groups of words like 'butter and tennis' and 'self help and sausages' and 'France and valour' just to see how random the whole idea of trying to relate everything to everything really is. (Don't bother with any of these searches by the way. You will probably just get redirected to here. Like I said, there is a lot of crap out there. And the ever-attentive Waunch has just reminded me that this game already exist in a slightly different form as google whacking.)

And when you do do an entirely normal and legitimate search, you just get a young Eastern European girl offering to rub herself with the noun you used, and some survivalist in Utah telling you that you have not really thought about the political ramifications of the verb you used. It's just all a bit too random, and governed by the monster search companies who want me to want them to design my life for me. At least with microfiches you could make that amusing swishing noise when you were scrolling through the pages. And in libraries, you did have that relief of going outside to fart every so often.

The whole personalised search option that Google has come up with is all very well, but could easily just turn the web into a self-validation tool. (househusbandnot to self: "Oh, I need to know about life. I'll search househusbandnot. Ah, there we go just as I thought. Badgers did rule the world just after the dinosaurs froze.")

I'm sounding like an old git now, which is one of the things I do try and avoid on househusbandnot. But by the end of yesterday, my eyes were spinning like Dr Seuss's drugs dealer, I felt deeply less informed than when I started, and I tried to click on mrs househusbandnot when she got home from work to go and get me a glass of wine. And I have to do it all again today. Roll on Web 3.0 when I am in charge.

*Brian Eno was right. We have all become editors.