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Clicktrance
Aug. 31st, 2007 02:06 pm"Clicktrance" is my word of the week. If you've ever sat surfing barely-connected articles on Wikipedia, or the archives of webcomics, or abject tat on Ebay, or playing Solitaire until your arse goes numb, your eyes dry out and your shirt is ruined by unnoticed drool, well, clicktrance is already your friend. Clicktrance is the intellectual equivalent of edging; just enough stimulus to keep the act/reward gristle in your brain happy, not enough for you to go away properly fulfilled. The only thing that breaks me out of a Wikipedia clicktrance is the cat demanding food.
People who used to flick around in cheap book-club encyclopedias respond to Wikipedia and tabbed browsing like a fat kid responds to cake. I've got fin de siecle artist biography icing on my chin. Like cake it's got very little nutritional value: not a lot really goes in and stays in, because your brain is idling. It's like singing along to emo if you're over thirty: no real engagement.
There's a funny thing about clicktrance: Although the path taken is almost entirely random, people seem to drift towards common topics. In XKCD it's velociraptors. With me it's theoretical physics. The effect is certainly not direct or deliberate, not so much a gravity well as a strange attractor. Bicycle history drifts to asteroid deflection via Lorentz distributions, and the attractor is always one or two clicks away. I couldn't orbit Einstein more closely if I'd printed off a list of "pages that link to Einstein" and trawled them.
I wonder why that is? Is Einstein the money shot, dodged unconsciously to prolong the clicktrance?
People who used to flick around in cheap book-club encyclopedias respond to Wikipedia and tabbed browsing like a fat kid responds to cake. I've got fin de siecle artist biography icing on my chin. Like cake it's got very little nutritional value: not a lot really goes in and stays in, because your brain is idling. It's like singing along to emo if you're over thirty: no real engagement.
There's a funny thing about clicktrance: Although the path taken is almost entirely random, people seem to drift towards common topics. In XKCD it's velociraptors. With me it's theoretical physics. The effect is certainly not direct or deliberate, not so much a gravity well as a strange attractor. Bicycle history drifts to asteroid deflection via Lorentz distributions, and the attractor is always one or two clicks away. I couldn't orbit Einstein more closely if I'd printed off a list of "pages that link to Einstein" and trawled them.
I wonder why that is? Is Einstein the money shot, dodged unconsciously to prolong the clicktrance?
