A Step Sideways — We must save serendipity on the internet
For my master thesis I talked about the flâneur, serendipity, cities, skeuomorphism, surrealism, filter bubbles and more… Here’s an excerpt: « After hours of wandering through the web’s arcades, highways, tunnels or tiny roads, the cyberflâneur might end up on a website without having any idea what brought him/her there in the first place. Baudelaire’s « flâneur », strolling through arcades and passages of 19th century Paris, made his way into cyber space to become a cyberflâneur hopping from link to hyperlink, from previous page to homepage. The parallels between the Internet and a city where one could wander and flâner are numerous. In fact, the “fortuitous encounter” that André Breton and the 19th century surrealists loved so much could easily be linked with serendipity, that is nowadays an inherent part of the way we use the web. […] »
