When I’m in a used book store, I always look for Judge Dave and the Rainbow People. It’s a book by a Federal Judge who once presided over the Western North Carolina district. I’m sure the district has some sort of number and that the man has a name. Finding these out would require the use of Google, which is easy enough to do but would violate the intent, if not the execution, of this post. See, I could find Judge Dave and the Rainbow People on Amazon no problem. Sometimes, however, the search is as much fun as the finding.
Google specifically, and “Big Data” prophets in general, promise that they will get so good at what they do that we will be able to stop searching soon. Some of this is cause for celebration, for sure. Better directions, service and product locations, and other similar applications of location based services promise to save consumers more than $600 billion a year in the near future. This according to McKensie and Company. (Or is it McKenzie? I don’t know. I could Google it.) This is great. Google’s services are great. I think there are some extraordinarily talented people within a 50 mile radius of me who could do a remarkable amount of good work with Big Data.
But I want to be sure we don’t loose something along the way. One could, and I have, spend hours in places like The Battery Park Book Exchange looking for Judge Dave and the Rainbow People. I have not yet found it. But I have found books on the architecture, history, and culture of the place I have made my home which have enabled me to do a much better job of working with and for the people who live there. I’ve been inspired and engaged by things I never knew I was looking for. And I would have missed out on them if I had found what I was actually looking for.
For some reason, and I have no basis in fact, but I associate this kind of search with Ben Holden. I think of Ben walking across the campus at Warren Wilson, not really aimlessly but seemingly aimlessly. Ben would run into this person or that person and strike up a conversation. That might be true when he was walking around downtown too. He would listen, absorb, and synthesize information. That could be sort of a Big Data prototype, but I think of it as kind of the opposite. Then again, I’ve always been more of a lumper than a splitter.
i call this concept “serendipity in a world of convergence” and i outlined a book on the topic in 1998. i never wrote the book, so you don’t need to look for that one.