http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_1.html#kelly
(...)
"Someone watching me surf the Web, as I jump from one suggested link to another, would see a day-dream. Today, I was in a crowd of people who watched a barefoot man eat dirt, then the face of a boy who was singing began to melt, then Santa burned a Christmas tree, then I was floating inside mud house on the very tippy top of the world, then Celtic knots untied themselves, then a guy told me the formula for making clear glass, then I was watching myself, back in high school, riding a bicycle. And that was just the first few minutes of my day on the Web this morning. The trance-like state we fall into while following the undirected path of links may be a terrible waste of time, or like dreams, it might be a productive waste of time. Perhaps we are tapping into our collective unconscious in a way watching the directed stream of TV, radio and newspapers could not. Maybe click-dreaming is a way for all of us to have the same dream, independent of what we click on...."
Douglas Coupland:
(...)
"The Internet toys with my sense of permanence. Every tiny transient moment now lasts forever: homework ... emails … jpegs… sex acts … we all know the list. Yesterday I looked up a discontinued brand of Campbell's Soup called 'Noodles & Ground Beef' and was taken (via Google Books) to page 37 of the February 1976 issue of Ebony magazine, to a recipe for 'Beefy Tomato Burger Soup' that incorporated a can of the aforementioned soup. You'd have thought something that ephemeral would have evaded Google's reach, but no. Transience is now permanence. At the same time, things that were supposed to be around forever (newspapers!) are now transient. This is an astonishing inversion of time perception that I've yet to fully absorb. Its long-term effect on me is to heighten my worry about the fate of the middle classes (doomed) as well as to make me wonder about the future of homogeneous bourgeois thinking (also doomed as we turn into one great big college town populated entirely by eccentrics, a great big Austin, Texas)...."
