Deciding where to start on my CyberFlâneur journey was easily the most difficult part, and one of two large differences of flâneur’s of the past. The start of the journey in the 19th century was the front porch, while the journey of the CyberFlâneur is much more ambiguous. My start however begins in the group chat for my old World of Warcraft guild, where my friend Asher links to an article on Investing.com about an art auction in London that is accepting only BTC and other cryptocurrencies as the means of bidding. While this was an interesting piece of information, the article was incredibly short, and I began searching the page for anything of interest when I came across another article, this one an update on the semi recent crash of a Tesla that was engaged in autopilot, this article again on Investing.com. And looking at the sidebars I noticed all the articles linked on the page were for this website, and while I do find the world of investments interesting I didn’t really need another piece of news, just with an investor’s bias and information relevant to such individuals.
Moving on, I went back to a Wikipedia page I had open from a previous browsing session for the Arduino Uno, a microcontroller board that I had seen in a few videos by popular YouTube personality William Osman. I continued down this path of looking at Wikipedia pages for electronics for a while, but, much like with the first few articles I looked at, I continued to go in circles on the Wikipedia website, not finding much of a reason to leave the site to look for information. If I am comparing my digital wanderings to the wanderings of the flâneurs of the past, I have simply walked around a cul de sac a few times.
The final street I went down was thankfully less of a bust. I visited my old pal YouTube, which if I was an actual flâneur would be my go to street for seeing intresting wares and interesting people. My journey started on my recommended page, where I watched a video about Mario Kart Speedrunning. From there, I found a neat series titled Down the Rabbit Hole, with the most recent episode catching my eye as it is a telling of an old internet tale, The Final Fantasy House. Finally, a journey concluded when I saw from the corner of my eye titled “Global Climate Change (Parody of Gangnam Style) (Climate Change Music Video)” and I continued down the rabbit hole of this channel, Watersurf, and a few of the other music videos on the channel (though Global Climate Change remains my absolute favorite.) If I ever needed to explain why I love the internet so much, this video sums up every single reason. However, with that video, I had been on the web for quite some time and needed to go be productive, and my CyberFlâneur journey ended. However, it ended with my going in circles on just three websites. And while I saw a diverse amount of stuff, ranging from actually informative to just goofy, I can’t say that CyberFlâneur lives up to the myth of the Flâneur entirely. However, this browsing I was able to do was all done on my phone. And with that mobility, my wanderings aren’t restricted to the middle of the day on a busy street. I can wander from Arcade to Arcade anywhere, at any time, and that is why the art of the Flâneur is still alive and well today.
