The Vastness of the Internet is in its Tiny Weird Crevices

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine

The dimensions of a crack in the earth are all relative.

I’ve used the Grand Canyon before as e metaphor for the vast un-human scale of the internet. I talk about and ask people who have stood at the edge and looked out to described the feeling.

We are dwarfed at the immense scale.

It boggles our senses.

How can we make sweeping conclusions about all of its detail?

But you can look at the opposite end of the scale.

This weird retweet popped into my scan.

Why is someone retweeting something I said more than a year ago?

Even more, why are they retweeting a link to a student’s blog post that I know is dead because his domain is gone?

That sets my curiosity going. Even when I have 503 other things I ought to be doing. Who is “Lewis”?

As best as I can tell, @wardenton is a fan of Edward Norton and or Fight Club. This person (?) has a twitter stream of maybe 6000 retweets of various Fight Club related tweets

But wait, there are ones to Chuck Palahniuk’s fan site … yep, the author of Fight Club and apparently a sequel that will be in the form of a graphic novel (well the source of the interview is Hustler, YMMV).

I’m guessing that the handle @wardenton is some anagram-ish play on the actor Edward Norton. If you remove the letters “Wardenton” from “Edward Norton” you get “Rod” — maybe that’s the person’s real name?

And in seeing among one of the retweets that Edward Norton is from Baltimore (my home town), I end up on Norton’s Wikipedia page, where it reveals his grandfather is James Rouse, the master planner who designed the city of Columbia MD (where Norton actually lived) and the launch of the revitalization of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor which happened when I was a teen, Harbor Place.

What does this string of stuff mean? Not much. My hunch is someone is developing some sort of twitter bot or entity that intends to use the fight club references. It’s just one tiny crack maybe in the middle of the Red Wall limestone of the Internet Grand Canyon, but it leaves me ending up in other curious cracks of information.

It’s tiny and vast at once, that crazy internet. And if you do not wander down the little cracks sometimes, you miss out on the flecks of golden serendipity (c.f. Bags of Gold).

Or you get bubkahs. But the trip is its own reward.

And if you are too busy with your LMS or inbox zeroing or candy crushing or whatever you do online to slip down into and explore a crack in the internet, well too bad. You are missing out on the real bullion.

That’s where you will find me, in the crevices of the internet.