Bookmarks

     I used to have very few websites in my Bookmarks folder. Sites tended to either be visited daily, or just once, and I remembered the urls of the ones I frequented and simply typed them in. Then there was this Livejournal (yeah, I know) that gave tips about writing fantasy fiction. I had no interest in the fantasy genre, but the tips tended to center on characterization and setting and believability and stuff like that, and it was a good read. Then I stopped visiting that site for a while, and when I wanted to visit it again, I couldn’t remember the address. It took a good couple Google searches to relocate it, and then into my bookmarks folder it went. And I started bookmarking more stuff habitually. Today my bookmarks sprawl, downwards, outwards in folders, some sorted into categories (school, work, inspiration, music), some not. Books you read one at a time, so maybe you only need one bookmark, and it's static, the text never changes. I don't use physical bookmarks; when I stop reading, I try to mentally store the page number, then when I continue I flip through until the text stops being familiar. With websites, the content is dynamic, and scattered, and non-linear; a book you can point and say, yesterday I read chapters 3 to 6 and right now I'm up to page 227, but it's not so easy to retrace the reading you do in your daily internet surfing.

     People used to write articles about the corrupting influence of television, about a generation raised on passive and mindless and violent entertainment, instead of good solid parenting. Now that the internet has replaced TV as the dominant western entertainment medium for many, the passivity issue has been dropped, and now it’s an issue of how far down the rabbit hole your kids are. What types of sites are they’re seeing without YOUR knowledge? What influences are they getting? It’s harder to tell than it used to be, unregulated by daily timeslots. Just think about how many sites you can visit in 30 minutes, how many TVtropes or Wikipedia or Reddit or Snopes articles you can read through! The internet is making us consume more in terms of sheer text than ever before, but the text is spread out across different sources, some of it perhaps misspelled, some of it perhaps less meaningful. But I would think that the amount of text which we consume every single day far surpasses that of which was common if we were living a century earlier, even if much of it is less sorted, less organized, and less utilitarian. However else the internet may or may not fragment us, it certainly fragments our influences. We used to be able to look to a bookshelf for our inspiration and our knowledge, but now the internet is fulfilling that role more and more. Now, the amount of text that makes up just the URLs of the websites we visit each day might exceed the text we read from books. So that’s why I started bookmarking both sites I visited frequently, and also sites I found interesting or informative. It’s also why I started writing down the titles of the books I read.

     On the internet, our identities are boiled down to a profile page: a collection of interests, hobbies, favourite quotes, and the connections we have with other people. But that’s also sort of how we define ourselves: a collection of hopes and fears, the adjectives with which we try to embody, the different identities we align ourselves with, the people we know, where we are, where we want to be, and where we were. It’s important that we place markers to commemorate how we got to where we are, because that’s how we understand ourselves.

     Now I think I'm gonna reorganize my bookmarks.