I turned on our computerized car the other day and got a pleasant surprise. My wife had set the radio to a local college station and the DJ was playing music I’d never heard before but wanted to hear more of right away.
It was a thrill the engineers at Pandora.com, last.fm, and/or iTunes strive to provide but seldom do. It was serendipity.
In the 1963 novel Hopscotch, two lovers play a game of setting out from opposite sides of the city and reuniting by chance: “She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.”
The New Yorker describes the recent online sensation Chatroulette as the return of the repressed:
The technology behind Chatroulette is fairly basic and not particularly new. But by combining video-chatting technology and randomization Ternovskiy has bucked a decade-long trend that has made the Internet feel progressively more organized, pleasant, and safe. Google (founded in 1998) makes sure you pull up less flotsam when you search. Social networks like Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003), and Facebook (2004) let you stay in touch with a network of people you already know. Privacy settings keep out the ones you don’t. Twitter (2006) feeds you information from sources you choose to follow. Now Chatroulette has come along and showed us that we want chaos, too.
What makes life interesting – what makes life possible – is chance. Randomness. That’s not chaos, that’s the order.