Digital Dérive

When I was told that my first homework assignment this summer was to surf the web for a half hour without a particular goal, I knew I had it in the bag. I’ve been dicking around on the internet since the days of dial-up modem.

I was not sure how one is supposed to begin a “digital dérive” so once I booted up my web browser I decided to start with something from my recent Google searches. My latest search at the time was “do dogs enjoy music,” which prompted me to head over to YouTube to try and find videos of dogs dancing to music. I am happy to report that dogs do in fact seem to enjoy music, and I spent the next 10ish minutes watching videos of dancing dogs. Dancing dogs eventually brought me around to videos of singing dogs, which brought me to videos of crying dogs, which brought me to videos of dogs welcoming home war veterans. These videos started stirring up some emotions so I decided to abandon my dog search and find something else to do.

Last week I saw the new film Baby Driver, and I guess it is still on my mind because the next thing I typed into my search bar without even thinking was “Baby Driver.” The first thing that caught my eye was some click bait bullshit. It was a headline that read “Anthony Bourdain Lashes Out at ‘Baby Driver’ and Ava DuVernay Comes to Its Defense.” I did not know who either Anthony Bourdain or Ava DuVernay are, but the thought of anyone talking smack about Baby Driver was enough to get me to open the article. Turns out Anthony Bourdain is just some chef that has a show on the Food Network or something, and his “lashing out” that the headline refers to is a single tweet, pictured below.

Needless to say, I was underwhelmed by the actual content of the article. I did not bother reading the rest to find out who Ava DuVernay is but I’m fine with that because at this point I had become preoccupied with Twitter. The remainder of my half hour searching the web was taken up by scrolling through my Twitter feed. Most of it was meme-related, which was when I realized that this is basically where I end up every time I get online.

This exercise was an odd one, considering that aimlessly wandering the internet is pretty much what I do anytime I have free time. What I learned today is essentially that if I spend enough time on my computer without a specific goal in mind, I will inevitably end up wasting my time on memes. It’s a sad prospect, but in this day and age is there really any other way to live?The way I look at it, I spent thirty minutes online, and I was entertained for about 15 minutes, bored for about 10, and pissed off for like 5. That’s a ratio I can live with.