Drinking from the firehose

Drinking from the firehose

Herbert A. Simon, the Nobel prize-winning economist, caused a stir last year when he revealed that he had stopped taking daily papers and now read only weekly and monthly journals. At his age, he said, (he is 83), the commodity in shortest supply is time – and he was damned if he was going to waste it on articles that people hadn’t spent much time composing or thinking about.

As ever, Herb was ahead of the pack. The maturing of the Internet has highlighted the extent to which we now live in an attention economy. When we die the phrase ‘So much information, so little time’ will be found engraved on our hearts. And the problem intensifies with every passing day as the Web acquires another 5,000 -- or is it 10,000? -- sites clamouring for attention.

Reading on the Net has been famously likened to drinking from a fire-hose. Already there’s more stuff out there than any human being could absorb in a lifetime. Faced with the cornucopia, there are basically only two survival strategies. One is to be ruthlessly selective, limiting oneself to a familiar set of sources and ignoring almost everything else – the cognitive equivalent of turning off the tap.

The other is to rely on others to do the filtering for you. Up to now this has been done by the big search engines like Yahoo!, by the browser companies Netscape and Microsoft or by hucksters like Disney. Because so many millions of people turn to these sites every day they are known as ‘portals’ or gateways, rather as early railway depots were regarded in the Wild West. And just as railheads generated frenzied land speculation in the 19th century, so sites like Yahoo! have become the subject of insane stock-market speculation.

There is however one important difference between the Web and the Victorian railway business -- the entry costs are infinitesimal. Anyone with a few dollars and a bit of imagination can create a portal. And last October a professor of philosophy in New Zealand did just that. Denis Dutton reckoned that Yahoo! & Co. were a touch too bland for the discriminating browser, so he set up Arts and Letters Daily as the Thinking Person’s Guide to interesting, stylish or original writing on the Web.

Like all good ideas, it’s breathtakingly simple – a single, old-fashioned page with three columns for ‘Articles of Note’, ‘New Books’ and ‘Essays and Opinion’. In each column are annotated links to various online articles spotted by Professor Dutton and his staff of three. The page is updated every day, with new suggestions appearing at the top and old links falling off the bottom. On the masthead is a discreet request to ‘bookmark this page’, but what it really cries out for is designation as your browser’s default home page – so that it is the first thing you see when you log on.

Arts and Letters Daily works because its filtering is discriminating, eclectic and quirky. It garners things from all over the Web that one might otherwise miss. This weeks selections, for example, included a hitherto unpublished Borges story, a column by Umberto Eco, an article by Emma Tennant on the history of the tulip and a terrific London Review of Books piece on how publishers building online archives are swindling authors. Arts and Letters Daily is proof that there is intellectual life on the Web beyond the inanities of Wall Street’s favourite portals with their imbecilic ‘Cool Stuff!’ and ‘Hot Picks!!!’. And if it does include the occasional link to this column so what? Nobody’s perfect.