Internet Blackholes

How did I end up watching footages of the Boston marathon bomb and the manhunt for the perpetrators? Before that how did you end up reading an eleven-thousand-long story on Jawar, one of the bombers, on Rolling Stone? Let us trace back using browsing history as mental recollection is no option right now.

You are scrolling down Facebook feed and click on an Aljazeera Maidan article about Egyptian prisons. There you encounter names like Ibn Sheikh Liby and Ramzi Yusuf. You google both but the Wikipedia page of Ramzi Yusuf mentions a supermax security prison in where he is incarcerated. You follow that/google it and at the Wikipedia page of the facility, there is a list of some of the notorious inmates.

The name Dzokhar Tsarnaev capture your attention. Isn't this the kid who bombed the marathon? Click on his name and there you are on his Wikipedia page. Skim through the profile, paying attention to the controversy over the Rolling Stone cover. Sure, you wonder if you had seen this controversy before? What happened to him - he is in death row.

Google this guy's name, then the Rolling cover story. Well, the writer is really good. You are hooked! An hour letter you have finished reading the story and you are wondering if you are a slow reader. How long was this piece that took you this ling to read? Copy the whole thing to a word document and use word count, you think. No brainer, right? It is over eleven thousand words or thirty pages long.

Somehow you are still obsessed with the story. Now it's time to play cop. How did they find him? And soon enough, you are watching minute-by-minute footage tracing the bomber's movement before and after the attack. Turns out, the police did an outstanding job - they created over four thousand hours of footage. Is that even possible? No time to reflect and question! You are trapped in a black hole - you were sucked in hours ago.

Boy, is it easy to become lost in the oceans of meaningless information given the vast amounts of information available on the internet at our fingertips? The worse thing about it is how interconnected is everything. You glide through volumes and volumes of information without breaking a sweat, wasting away time and intellectual resources that could have been allocated for more beneficial outlets.