All in a Golden Afternoon
In a world where the veracity and usefulness of "web browsing" is brought into question, I like to remind myself that it remains a magical place where someone might embark on a journey with empty hands and emerge back in possession of extremely niche knowledges that would once been the purview of only a dozen people in the world, freely shared and very much alive. You could mingle. You could lurk.
A vast, ever-shifting library, accessible to schoolchildren and retirees alike.
Even if you could only glean the surface level, you would still be more knowledgeable on the matter compared to most people. Spend a little more time still, and you would be forgiven to start thinking that most people know what you know as a baby in this space (still one of my favorite xkcd strips), nevermind that you knew absolutely nothing just four hours earlier. Then you go about your business, carrying your day as usual, and nothing shifts your reality until a topic comes up and you casually mention a thing or two. No one gets what you're talking about, much to your amusement (or horror. I will not pretend to know what kind of rabbit holes you get yourself into.)
Wikiwalk is a dream, a meandering path to long-dead sites and defunct services, amazingly bustling forums that haven't gotten the memo that 2005 babies can now legally drink. Blogwalking is an adventure, all the rots and decays until finally, you hit a treasure trove of stories written by that one guy in rural Antigua who spent his final days collecting electrical appliances and annotating diagrams. I was never interested in half of these things. Some of them I didn't even know exist, didn't even know have a name. The usefulness of these trivia to my life is dubious, yet I can't help but feel it would be less rich without.
However, reflecting on the oft-repeated "I don't know if what I read has value, someone else has written about it", hesitation is prevalent. Many of the things I read might not have been written and posted at all. Even the most basic thing in your knowledge base might be new for someone, and your writing can be their first contact on the topic. They might be inspired to learn more. They may develop a new interest or consider a new career path. Or, if we're to disavow grandiose notion, at least amused enough for a fortnight. You never know.
Shoutout to all the divers, surfers, explorers out there, let's go down the rabbit hole.
Down, down, down