An Internet Dérive

Guy Debord, describing the situationist practice of the dérive (“drifting”), calls it "a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances."

He goes on to say "Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there."

Ordinarily one requires a city for a good dérive, but thinking of the internet as public space has made me wonder about the web's psychogeographical possibilities. The trick with a dérive is to find some way to take you outside of your normal and habitual ways of moving. Randomness and simple drifting are certainly a possibility, but often a set of rules, like an algorithm or a game (for instance traversing one city using the map of another) can help you find a deeper kind of randomness. Internet surfing can feel like drifting or strolling around a city, but as with physical dérives, a true internet dérive needs to take us into neighborhoods where we wouldn't usually find ourselves, following paths that make us aware of the specific character and mood of the spaces we pass through.

Here is a proposed method, which I've tried out a few times.

Begin by putting 2 or 3 disjunctive words into google (or your search engine of choice). It's surprisingly hard to think of genuinely unrelated words, so I've been working from the a page of randomly gathered words from the Free Words website. I pick the first link on the google page which isn't the Free Words page I just came from. From there, I use a simple set of guidelines to keep me moving as disjunctively as possible. I search each page for a link which is off-site -- I either choose the first such link, or if there are many, the one which seems farthest away in content or spirit. If there's no link off-site, I move around the site, hunting for one, often using the site's links page if there is one. If you come to a genuine dead-end, you can choose to either back up or end the dérive.

So far I've been able to go on this way almost indefinitely. Several times I have thought I've come to a dead end (shopping sites are the most dangerous, backwater eddies with very few outlinks indeed), but so far only one has been a genuine impasse.

Here's a dérive I did this morning:

I began at the new free words page and picked the pair of words "ukulele twiddle" which I googled. Following the first new link I found the lyrics of a song: "I Always Get to Bed by Half Past Nine"

Early to bed, I've always said, keeps us young men fit!
One evening while in gay Paree, a nice young lady said "wee wee"
I said such things aren't good for me
I always get to bed by half past nine.

These turned out to be the words of George Formby, a British player of something called the banjo ukulele who died in 1961 leaving behind what is clearly a passionate group of fans. I skipped to the home page of his fan club, looked around a bit, and then hunted for an exit on the links page, slipping onwards to the first link, the ukulele man, a rather charmingly low-tech website which offered the following advice:

*** For those of you who are new to the Internet: ***
On this web-site (as with most others)‘clicking’ on any BLUE TEXT takes you to a different page on this website, ‘links’ to other websites, or allows you to send emails directly.

After reading a bit about the site's founder, I moved on through its links page to the first outside link, another stop in the ukulele world, Catfish Carl's Closet. Scrolling down the page, I headed outward through an ad for Flea Market Music, admired some more ukes in various shapes and sizes, and then roamed onward through their links to hawaiiana dealers to Stamp Yourself Silly.

Not wanting to linger among the rubber stamps of Hawaiian images, I went right for their outbound page straight an though an ad for nerdworld. Nerdworld was a brief and refreshing dip into the parts of the web I'm more at home in, but I pressed forward, through their bizarre site of the week to a page of weather sites, the first of which was a page on hurricane Isabel.

Now I felt like strange juxtapositions were forming in my mind, and I was in parts of the internet I would never ordinarily encounter. After looking at some impressive storm pictures and wind diagrams, I went on to the Naval Research Laboratory home page and from there to the US Navy's "welcome aboard" page. Hurrying onward, from navy online to a list of naval related websites where I spied the intriguing Naval Ice Center. I saw some pictures of an iceberg calving in the Ross Sea, and went on to the Polar Science Team where I looked over the extent of the ice caps.

When I had seen enough ice, I followed a sidebar link out to NASA which had a surprisingly snazzy flash intro in which a large picture of Mars slowly comes into view. Curious, I went on into their "Flash Feature" and watched a few movie-style "previews" of the upcoming US Mars mission (what the NASA site calls "M2K4") scheduled to arrive Mars beginning January 4, 2004, before visiting the Mars project's regular site. Somehow, on Mars, I feel like I've arrived at a proper destination (it's right at the junction between science and science fiction, and outer space is arguably the geekiest version of public space). I bookmark the site for further reading, wanting to go and see whether the British Beagle lander has called home yet.

Before leaving the dérive for my more usual style of internet drifting, I assure myself there are some paths onward -- either through the JPL on to Cal Tech or through a "FirstGov" link at the bottom of every page on to a huge array of goverment agencies and information pages from census data on american housing to a list of the most popular baby names. If you want to keep going and see where they lead, by all means please do.

(For some further reading on internet dérives, check out the recent "Situationist Roaming Online" by Maren Hartmann, or either "Passage of the Flâneur" by Gaylene Barnes or "A Virtual Dérive" by Kristina Gregers Andersen, both from the early days of the web.)