Jorge Borges’ Internet Prescience

The basic idea of the Internet was imagined some sixty plus years ago. Though the idea may seem dubious, even a cursory glance at Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” will show a remarkable similarity between the infinite Library and the World Wide Web we know today.
The Library contains every single combination of letters and punctuation possible. This means “for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences.” The same is very true of the Internet. Those unfortunate individuals without a spam blocker can receive hundreds of junk emails and spam every day. This makes identifying genuine emails extremely difficult. Scholars know to rarely, if ever, use the information highway as a resource, because web pages themselves are usually full of incorrect or sketchy details. Wikipedia, for example, is a community-based encyclopedia that allows any member to post information. While most information is double-checked, falsities can last for hours.
Hours, however, are nothing compared to the amount of time it would take to cross the Library. Borges’ narrator very carefully describes the Library as “infinite,” because though there are a finite number of books (albeit a number too huge for the mind to grasp), these “same volumes [are] repeated in the same disorder” eventually. This is again true of the Internet. There were 18,000 websites in August of 1995. That number jumped to 50 million in May of 2004. As of November 2006, the number was 100 million. The web, while not yet the size of Borges’ mythical Library, is growing at a dumbfounding rate. However, many of these websites are basically duplicates, which essentially “differ only in a letter or a comma.” For example, if you search for “life cycle of a bear” on Google, you get 2,060,000 hits, all ready and willing to fill you in on the details of winter hibernation (and if you’re willing to get more adventurous, just search for “e.” Apparently there are more than 7 billion websites containing the letter “e”). The sheer repetition is mind-bogglingly superfluous.
There are plenty of differences, however. For example, in the cavernous, soulless Library the books are jumbled in no apparent order, and while Borges’ narrator is certain that a true catalogue of all the books exists, the odds of finding it “can be computed as zero.” On the Web, however, there are a myriad of search engines, headlined by Google, that sort through the Cretian labyrinth of information to return with a germane web site. The biggest difference between the Library and the Internet, however, is that the Library has always existed and will always exist. Its books have always been there, created by some unknown force. The Internet, however, is fluid. It is constantly changing, being updated and added to and hurt and fixed. Where the Library is an inanimate object, a solid rock, the Internet is a living organism. Its users create the Internet’s content, and thus a greater understanding exists of the Internet.
It’s time for this blog to end now, as I’m sure that you have something else you need to do online. Remember, your “Vindication” is out there; you just have to find it.

- Sikatanon

~ by gablogger on October 5, 2007.