Monday, June 20, 2005

Pond of Consciousness...

Minds are peculiar things. Well my mind is a peculiar thing; I can't speak of other minds as I've only experienced the peculiarity of mine.

I just recently realised how my mind parallels the Internet (in a microcosmic, tangential sort of way). I've always noticed how my mind tends to wander from place to essentially unrelated place. For instance, I might be reading an article about something reported on Fox News... I don't watch Fox News that much... in fact, all I really watch on Fox is "24"... Kiefer Sutherland isn't a great actor but the show demands little of him... I couldn't stand his father, Donald... the movie, "M*A*S*H" with him and Elliot Gould was so inferior to the TV version... Alan Alda was the perfect Hawkeye... Mobile Army Surgical Hospital... funny I remember that... I wonder if they still have MASH units... I read an article in Time about how new medical techniques are saving the lives of soldiers in Iraq... am I going to renew my Time subscription... man, I have more magazines than I can keep up with... maybe I'll dump Smart Computing and New Yorker... I think the reason I don't read as many books as I used to is because I get so many mags... I remember I used to run over to the library every day at lunch and load up on the sale books... sometimes they'd be like a dollar a piece or even two for a dollar... I'd have a trunk-full... that's how I discovered Stan Lee's "Dunn's Conundrum", that was a book ahead of it's time, with it's super-secret "Library" and electronic audio and video surveillance... Nixon might have got some of his ideas from that book... ummm, I never read "All the President's Men", I wonder why... I'll have to look for it... it's probably being reprinted because of Felt's revelation... I don't think the guy's a snitch, like some say, but he isn't quite a hero either... who would be considered a hero... even soldiers are just doing their job...

And then suddenly I would wonder, How on earth did I get to heros from this totally unrelated article about Fox News? Sometimes it'll be fun to backtrack, to find the random mental links that lead me from that place to this.

I recognised the parallel when I realised that I do the exact same thing on the Internet. From one Web page I'll click an interesting link, then from that page I'll click another, and another from there, until, sometimes hours later I have no idea where I started or how I got where I was.

I guess my sentient wanderings might qualify as "stream of consciousness" but the often circular, non-progressive manner of my thoughts might be more accurately called a "pond of consciousness".

What, then, would we call the random connections of hyperlinks as we click from the known to the unknown? As we venture into a vast galaxy of Websites with little idea of what to expect. Are there as many Web pages as there are stars in the galaxy... I read somewhere that the number of Web pages was approaching 100 billion... how would anyone even know that... oh, I just noticed the other day on a McDonald's sign, it said: "Billions served"... I remember back when they used to count the number served by the millions... I saw in the newspaper that Ronald McDonald now has a new "healthier" image... I wonder if other food related icons might be going on a diet... how about the Pillsbury Doughboy, lean and mean... it seems everything is about make-overs these days... I know who could use a make-over...

1 Comments:

At October 18, 2005 4:47 PM, Blogger invadesoda said...

I got hooked on 24 this year. Fourth season was awesome, I hadn't paid much attention to it before. Generally one show is all I keep on top of. For three years, Alias was the show I kept up with, but they ruined it this year when they decided not to have cliffhanging suspense anymore.

I can still hear Dina Araz saying,
"Ev-e-ry war has cas-ual-ties."

 

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