Song of the Day: Nothing On My Mind, Astronomyy
I am a compulsive hoarder of hyper-links. They line the top of my internet browser and spill down the sides, barely contained by the folders assigned to the task. Some are merely standard bookmarks. Email, internet banking and social networking are used so frequently that they have become metaphorically dog-eared and torn; marking the pages which I have read and reread while underlining or highlighting most of the words and drawing my own explanatory diagrams in the margins.
However these bookmarks, although used often, are few in number. The essentials are far outnumbered by a second category; the interesting-yet-entirely-random bookmark. There is a website that offers private islands for sale while making the slightly optimistic claim that ‘Ireland’s climate is warmer than most of Europe, but with its high humidity…closely resembles Seattle.’ There are pages on governance in 18th century piracy, the Boston Molasses Disaster and an affliction known as Uncombable Hair Syndrome. I have links to the recipe for the perfect hot chocolate and subject pronouns in French as well as a satellite photograph of Hurricane Isaac at night-time, looking like a nebula surrounded by the twinkling galaxies of nearby cities.
But for me, this is one of the more amazing things about the much derided process of wasting time on the internet. It starts to mimic the internal processes of the human brain, or the quirks of certain conversations. I lose count of the number of times in a day I start of by thinking of something and end up somewhere else with little connection. And there are times when I’ll finish a conversation with someone and struggle to even remember the starting topic, so diverse was the end. The wonder of the internet is that you can follow your online thought process, through all the underlined blue hyperlinks that you turned purple, like a map of the bus network towards an obscure destination.