What the Internet Can Tell Us about the Human Condition

Thanks to the web, we have so much information at our fingertips it's almost frightening. This applies not only to long-lost friends, acquaintances, etc. but also to books, people, music and films from the past we feel we would like to track down anew.

I am concerned here not so much with the personal level - curiously enough, a lot of people have evaded the digital map and have left no trace or imprint behind them. No, I am thinking more of all those instances of public life corresponding to my teenage and early adult years (roughly the 'fifties and 'sixties). Information on the people, books and music of the times are easily conjured up through the likes of YouTube and Wikipedia. Almost anything from that vanished era can be summoned up with ridiculous ease.

To take just two examples: Russ Conway and Michael Hollyday. You can listen to some of their music on YouTube and learn about their careers in detail through Wikipedia.

So, what does this tell us about the human condition? Well, if my experience is anything to go by, now that so many things are are within easy beck and call, two things happen:

First of all, when I embark on a "journey into the past", my mind goes a complete blank and I can't think of a SINGLE THING I want to read or listen to. Nothing comes to my mind! I encounter the same phenomenon when I want to put a new electronic dictionary through its paces. The only thing that ever springs to mind to test the muscle of the new software is... "maison".

The second thing is that, having listened to, say, the piece of music, my reaction is often: is that it? A feeling of disappointment mingled with surprise. How to explain this feeling? Is it that the object of our fondly cherished memory is not in fact all that fantastic? Perhaps, but I wonder if the the real problem doesn't lie elsewhere.
Could it be that what we really like is the thrill of the chase rather than the achievement of "closure"? Or, to put it rather differently, we would get much more of a thrill if, for example, we were to switch on the radio and quite by chance hear that long-forgotten tune, or again to wander into a bookshop in search of one thing and again, quite by chance, come across a long-forgotten book. In short, we want the past to come to us and not the other way round.