Up in Ontario

Weblogs as Wunderkammer

What is a weblog, really?

A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums -- to the "cabinet of wonders," or Wunderkammer, that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance modernity: a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman. A set of ostrich feathers, a few rare shells, a South Pacific coral carving, a mummified mermaid -- the Wunderkammer mingled fact and legend promiscuously, reflecting European civilization’s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing.

Just so, the Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization. If we hoped once to pass immediately from the Web’s Wunderkammer era to its museum age -- to fly without a hitch from What’s New to Yahoo! -- these days we’re obliged to recognize that indexes and search engines are themselves barely adequate to the job of taming the data storm, that grows far faster than their ability to filter it. We remain in a kind of stupor before the Web’s abundance, and we seem likely to stay in it indefinitely. We might as well learn how to live there.

We might also consider enjoying it while it lasts. After all, the passage from Wunderkammer to museum may have been a triumph for Western science, but it was a mixed bag for the Western soul. Wonder isn’t easily replaced once mastery disperses it, and we may sorely miss our wonder at the Web if and when the wonder goes. Better we should savor it now -- and what better form to savor it in than in its purest distillation on the Web, the blog?

I should add, by the way, that I’m not the first person to draw the parallel between the Web log and the Wunderkammer. I should also add that I have no idea who was. I saw the connection made briefly, in passing, on a Web log somewhere amid my surfing, but I can’t recall for the life of me which Web log it was. The finest search engines couldn’t find it again for me, and neither could two other bloggers I asked, both of whom remembered seeing the remark but neither of whom could recollect where. It’s out there somewhere, lost in the excess of the Web, as legendary now as any mermaid.