The Internet is weird.

More musings of an English major turned MLIS student

I am supposed to be using online serial databases to answer some invented reference questions. And no, I'm not looking for Cheerios or Frosted Mini Wheats. Serial. Cereal. Get it. Okay we're done here. (I've only made a variation of that bad pun every day since we started studying serials. I miss Shakespeare.) 

But instead I'm blogging. Because the Internet is weird. 

À la Willy Wonka, Google has finally released information and images regarding its previously top-secret data centers. And it's pretty nerdgasmic.

Source

Photo: Google/Connie Zhou

To be sure, I am no expert on how the Internet and the web works. I didn't even know there was much a difference until this week. And, I'm only just starting to understand how a search engine like Google works. (Although no single person will ever be able to fully understand how Google works. It's bigger than that.) Nevertheless, I am completely fascinated with these data centers--by the physicality of Google. All the data we create and search and use through Google products is held and traveling through these centers. Again, not clear on the all the details (have yet to read Wired's article: "Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top Secret Data Center") but still rather excited. This was an interesting line from the Steven Levy's article:

"Google has spread its infrastructure across a global archipelago of massive buildings--a dozen or so information palaces in locales as diverse as Council Bluffs, Iowa; St. Ghislain, Belgium; and soon Hong Kong and Singapore--where an unspecified but huge number of machines process and deliver the continuing chronicle of human experience."

I share this quote for two reasons: 1.) it shows the sheer magnitude of Google's operations 2.) the term information-palaces reminded me of Sherlock's mind palace in the BBC's modern adaption of Sherlock Holmes. I wonder if there's any resemblance between the two. Hmm.

As I was reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower this week, I was brought back to Walden by Thoreau. (Perks is rich in intertextuality... my inner English major has been planning a paper.) Thoreau's transcendentalist sort of autobiography is one of the many books Charlie's English teach gives him to read, and I was immediately taken back to last winter term.

This applies to the Internet I promise.

In my Early American Lit course, we read bits of Walden and I was particularly struck by a certain passage:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” 

To live deliberately. We discussed this line to death in class. Thoreau used to walk through people's property because he wanted to walk deliberately. Why do we usually walk in a straight line? Because we're following the road. How did the road get that way? So much of what is around us was put there by man, and yet we treat it as if it's been there forever. Eternal. For me, part of living deliberately became the act of thinking about the way things are and then choosing to be or not to be led by "how things are." Not walking down the road in a straight line, stopping at cross walks and crossing at intersections because that's the way they are but because I have decided to follow these "guidelines" set out by my fellow men and women.

And now back to the Internet and technology. This week I started using the Internet "deliberately." Or as deliberately as possible without going crazy. I am currently pushing keys and this text is appearing and it is going up into this space where other people can access it and don't think about it too hard because it makes your brain hurt. We take things, like the Internet and sidewalks, for granted. But they were put there. We, humans, put them there. Which is rather exciting I think. That we can create.

So yes. In recap: Internet, weird. Me, nerdy. School, nice. Books, always wonderful.