i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

i spent a lot of time these days thinking about the distribution of information. it is, technically and to a point, what i do in my job, for one thing - i take information in one form, convert it to another form, and send it to people. (my job is actually much more complicated and frustrating than this, but for the purposes of this post. you know.)

but not just that. i am thinking about the information that exists in the world. and, say, the internet. what did we do before google? there were other search engines, sure, but none of them a.) encompassed the breadth of information that google does, and b.) they weren't nearly as easy for the common man to use as google is. google is a smart search engine.

take, for example, one of my latest obsessions: rochelle mazar's blog posts about the search strings that bring people to her website. not only are they sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always interesting, but she breaks them down the way only a library or an information professional could and would - by how good of a search they are. there are efficient ways to search, and inefficient ways to search, and most of us probably use both of these methods at various times. (rochelle's blog is syndicated on lj as mazar, if you're interested; i think it's one of the best professional librarian blogs out there, fwiw.)

but see, my thing about going to library school is - i'd love to be one of those people who makes the internet an easy, logical place to find information. up to date, relevant information. and teaching people to use search engines in a produtive efficient way.

so. you know. information.

the other thing is - i am constantly, mind-blowingly amazed at what the internet thinks up. livejournal, while not always a candidate for a site that gives back to humanity and the information world in a good way, is an incredible invention solely for the communities that it can build. i have flown and driven thousands of miles to meet in real life people i first encountered on livejournal. i count among my closest, dearest, real life friends a large number of people i first met on the internet. livejournal did that. how fucking cool is that?

and take the way the internet disseminates information - this winter, i watched a friend, who had just seen the charlie and the chocolate factory trailer for the first time, marvelling that johnny depp was in this tim burton film of this incredible book, and why wasn't everyone talking about this? and this is not to belittle my friend at all, because he is a smart brilliant guy who i love, but i thought to myself, everyone i know is talking about that, where the fuck have you been? because of how i use the internet, i feel as though i have information ten times faster than a whole huge chunk of the population.

and take audioscrobbler, which is such a clever unique idea that i am pissed off that i did not think of it first. (other things that i am pissed off i did not think of first: baseball, the title "the only living boy in new york", and buffy the vampire slayer.) who thought this up? ten years ago, would something like this have even been a blip on anybody's maybe-someday radar? no. but the internet made it happen, because the technology and the thirst for information allowed it to.

and there's the whole idea of instant communication, which is pretty damn cool, and the whole idea of reinventing the narrative media in storytelling (see also shoebox_project and peter_and_fran), and the whole idea of - however much the record companies hate it - shared music, this whole huge way to spread the news about a band where before you were reliant on badly dubbed tapes and mixed cds.

and that is so absolutely amazing, and also it is something that is relevant to my chosen field.

i've never really had a burning academic passion before. some mild obsessions, but never one that consumes me when i'm waiting for the train, boiling water, smoking a cigarette. these days, my default brain setting is not "pretty boys kissing" but instead "isn't the search for information a really wild and crazy fascinating thing". i suppose it's good that i've made this my chosen field, eh? (also, for the record, i still spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about rayk blowing fraser, so it's not like i've been replaced by a pod person or anything. it's just not number one anymore.)

(one of the routinely top hits to my website is "toes", which is vaguely strange until i remember that i have a couple of photos of the tattoo on my foot posted, whose image files are just called "toes.jpg". i wonder if the people who find them are disappointed. (or if the people searching for "twat" are disappointed when they get fully-clothed pictures of flowery_twat instead of porn.))