1、IN SEARCH OF SERENDIPITY寻找偶遇It means more than a happy coincidence. And its under threat from the internet. Ian Leslie explains .伊昂莱斯利解释：偶遇不止是一种幸运的巧合，它正受到互联网的威胁From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, January/February 2012One day in 1945, a man named Percy Spencer was touring one of the laboratories he manag
2、ed at Raytheon in Waltham, Massachusetts, a supplier of radar technology to the Allied forces. He was standing by a magnetron, a vacuum tube which generates microwaves, to boost the sensitivity of radar, when he felt a strange sensation. Checking his pocket, he found his candy bar had melted. Surpri
3、sed and intrigued, he sent for a bag of popcorn, and held it up to the magnetron. The popcorn popped. Within a year, Raytheon made a patent application for a microwave oven.1945 年的一天，在马塞诸塞州沃尔瑟姆市雷神公司（一间为二战盟军提供雷达技术的供应商）所属的一个实验室里，一名叫培西史宾赛的主管正在做例行检察。他当时站在一台磁控管旁边。磁控管是一种产生微波的真空管，用来提高雷达灵敏度。他突然有一种奇妙的感觉。在检查之
4、后，他发现裤子口袋里的一块巧克力融化了。这件事让他感到很是惊奇，也激起了他的好奇心，他派人去买了一袋爆米花，把它放在磁控管旁边。结果这袋爆米花成功膨化了。一年之内，雷神公司就申请了微波炉的专利。The history of scientific discovery is peppered with breakthroughs that came about by accident. The most momentous was Alexander Flemings discovery of penicillin in 1928, prompted when he noticed how a m
5、ould that floated into his Petri dish killed off the surrounding bacteria. Spencer and Fleming didnt just get lucky. Spencer had the nous and the knowledge to turn his observation into innovation; only an expert on bacteria would have been ready to see the significance of Flemings stray spore. As Lo
6、uis Pasteur wrote, “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.”科学发现的历史充满了各种偶然的突破。其中影响最深远的要数 1928 年亚历山大弗莱明发现青霉素。当时他注意到飘入培养皿内的霉菌杀死了周围的细菌。史班赛和弗莱明并不只是运气好罢了。史班赛有把该意外观察转变为一项创新发明的知识和机敏，而只有细菌专家才能看出弗莱明那些不请自来的孢子的重要性。诚如路易斯巴斯德说过“ 在观察领域内，机会只青睐有准备的头脑”。The word that best describes this sub
7、tle blend of chance and agency is “serendipity”. It was coined by Horace Walpole, man of letters and aristocratic dilettante. Writing to a friend in 1754, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had just made by reference to a Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip”. The princes, he
8、 told his correspondent, were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest ofnow do you understand Serendipity?” These days, we tend to associate serendipity with luck, and we neglect the sagacity. But some conditions are more conducive to accidental
9、discovery than others.英语中这种描述偶然机遇和人为因素的微妙混合被叫做西林迪普（serendipity） 。这是作家兼贵族业余艺术家的霍雷斯瓦尔波尔取的名字。在 1754 年的给友人的一封信内，瓦尔波尔为了解释他刚刚的一个意外发现，引用了一个波斯童话西林迪普的三王子 。他在信中这么提到，那三位王子“总是有新的发现，不管是无意的还是有意的，而发现的事物又不是他们本来所寻找的现在你明白西林迪普的意思了吧？”今天，我们常把其和运气联系起来，而忽略了其中人为的因素。但是满足某些条件会更易于产生意外发现。Todays world wide web has developed to
10、organise, and make sense of, the exponential increase in information made available to everyone by the digital revolution, and it is amazingly good at doing so. If you are searching for something, you can find it online, and quickly. But a side-effect of this awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, r
11、ather than an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of.万维网经历了逐渐的发展，现在已将数字革命带给所有人的那些成级数增加的大量信息组织起来，并让人们可以理解这些信息，令人惊讶的是，万维网很擅长这个工作。如果你要搜索什么事物，那你可以在网上很快地找到。但是这种惊人的效率的一个副作用就是我们的视界不但没有扩大，反而缩小了，因为我们和自己并没有在找的事物偶遇的机会变小了。When the internet was new, it
12、s early enthusiasts hoped it would emulate the greatest serendipity machine ever invented: the city. The modern metropolis, as it arose in the 19th century, was also an attempt to organise an exponential increase, this one in population. Artists and writers saw it as a giant playground of discovery,
13、 teeming with surprise encounters. The flneur was born: one who wanders the streets with purpose, but without a map. 早在互联网还是一个新鲜玩意儿的时候，其早期拥护者希望它能仿效世界上曾发明过的最好的制造偶遇的机器：城市。现代大都市在 19 世纪兴起也是对人口级数增长进行组织的结果。艺术家和作家把都市看成一个巨大的发现场地，充满了意外的偶遇。漫游者开始出现了，这些人在街道上有目的地散步，却没有明确方向。Most city-dwellers arent flneurs, howev
14、er. In 1952 a French sociologist called Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe asked a student to keep a journal of her daily movements. When he mapped her paths onto a map of Paris he saw the emergence of a triangle, with vertices at her apartment, her university and the home of her piano teacher. Her moveme
15、nts, he said, illustrated “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives”.不过，大多数城市居民都不是漫游者。1952 年法国一位叫保罗亨利 雄巴德劳维的社会学家要求一位学生每天都记录下她当天的行踪。当雄巴德劳维把这位学生的路程图放在巴黎地图上时他看到的只是一个三角形，三个顶点分别为她的公寓，学校以及她钢琴老师的家。雄巴德劳维提出，她的移动表明了“个人实际生活中的巴黎是多么狭窄” 。To some degree, the hopes of the internets pioneers h
16、ave been fulfilled. You type “squid” into a search engine, you land on the Wikipedia page about squid, and in no time you are reading about Jules Verne and Pliny. But most of us use the web in the manner of that Parisian student. We have our paths, our bookmarks and our feeds, and we stick closely t
17、o them. We no longer “surf” the information superhighway, as it has become too vast to cruise without a map. And as it has evolved, it has become better and better at ensuring we need never stray from our virtual triangles.从某种程度上来说，互联网先锋们的希望已经满足了。你在搜索引擎上打入“乌贼” ，马上就会被带入维基百科讲述乌贼的页面，没过多久你已经在阅读关于儒勒凡尔纳和普
18、林尼的文章了。但是我们中的大多数人使用互联网的方式类似于那位巴黎学生。我们有自己的路径，自己的收藏，自己的馈送，我们和它们亲密无间。我们不再在信息高速公路上“漫游”了，它已经过于巨大，无法不借助导向而自行游览。而且随着它逐渐进化，它越来越擅长保证我们不会偏离自己的虚拟三角。Google can answer almost anything you ask it, but it cant tell you what you ought to be asking. Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Centre for Civic Media at Massachu
19、setts Institute of Technology and a long-time evangelist for the internet, points out that it doesnt match the ability of the printed media to bring you information you didnt know you wanted to know. He calls the front page of a newspaper a “discovery engine”: the lead story tells you something your
20、e almost certain to be interested inthe imminent collapse of the global economy, or Lady Gagas latest choice of outfitand elsewhere on the page you learn that revolution has broken out in a country of whose existence you were barely aware. Editors with an eye for such things, what Zuckerman calls “c
21、urators”, are being superseded by “friends”people like you, who probably already share your interests and world viewdelivered by Facebook. Twitter is better at leading us to the interests of people beyond our social circle, but our tendency to associate with others who think in similar wayswhat soci
22、ologists call our “value homophily”means most of us end up with a feed that feels like an extended dinner party.谷歌可以回答你问的几乎一切问题，但是它不会告诉你你应该问什么。伊桑祖克曼是麻省理工学院的公民媒体中心的主管，也是长期以来的互联网支持者，他指出传统印刷媒体能带给你那些你不知道自己想知道的信息，而互联网还没有做到这一点。他把报纸的头版称为一个“发现引擎”，头条报道告诉你一些你几乎一定会感兴趣的新闻，像是全球经济之将倾，或是女神卡卡的最近衣着等等，而头版上的其它新闻可以告诉你在
23、一些你都不知道存在的国家里发生的革命。祖克曼认为有这种慧眼的编辑（他称其为“图书馆馆长” ） ，现在正在被脸谱网提供的“好友”取代，这是一个像是你我这样的群体，其兴趣，世界观可能本已差别不大。推特微博可以更好地让我们接触到自己社交圈子以外的人的兴趣，但是我们还是有倾向于和自己想法相似的人相互结交的天性。社会学家称其为人类的“价值类聚” ，这意味着我们中大多数获得的信息流就好像是一个延长的晚餐聚会一样。One reason why television viewing has held up relatively well, defying predictions of its demise,
24、is that, compared with the internet, it is good at serendipity. Danny Cohen is in charge of BBC1, Britains most-viewed channel. He told me that a new programme on a difficult or obscure subject can still inherit a substantial audience from a popular show. This is, in some ways, a mysterious phenomen
25、on. “I could understand it when changing the channel meant getting off the sofa,” says Cohen. “But now?” Despite remote controls and far more channels, we still willingly succumb to the choices of the broadcasting curators.和很多预测不符，看电视这一行为并没有消亡，其仍然很受欢迎的一个原因在于和互联网相比，电视更善于创造偶遇。英国最多人观看的电视台，BBC 一台的负责人丹尼柯
26、亨告诉我一个受欢迎的节目结束后接上一个主题较为艰涩难懂或是不为人知的新节目之后，还是有想当数量的观众会不转台继续观看。这在某种角度来看是一个神秘现象。柯亨说过：“在必须从沙发上站起来换台的时代我还能理解这一趋势，但是现在呢？” 尽管我们有遥控器和多得多的频道，我们仍然心甘情愿地让电视台决定我们观看的节目。Cohen worries that even as the volume of media has grown exponentially, “our propensity to explore it is diminishing”. Driven by the needs of adver
27、tisers keen to hit ever more tightly delineated targets, todays internet plies us with “relevant” information and screens out the rest. Two different people will receive subtly different results from Google, adjusted for what Google knows about their interests. Newspaper websites are starting to mak
28、e stories more prominent to you if your friends have liked them on Facebook. We spend our online lives inside what the writer Eli Pariser calls “the filter bubble”.柯亨担心即使随着媒体内容级数增长， “我们探索这些内容的倾向在逐渐减弱” 。随着广告商需要对准描述越来越精确的个人，今天的互联网强制灌输大量“相关” 信息，把所有其它信息都屏蔽掉了。两个不同的人在谷歌上搜索同样的内容会得到有着微妙差异的结果，谷歌根据其兴趣对搜索结果已经进
29、行了调整。如果你的好友在脸谱网上标出喜欢某新闻，新闻网站会把它们放在更显眼的位置吸引你。我们在线的时间现在都生活在作家艾利普雷舍所谓的“过滤泡泡”的内部。To escape it, we can leave our screens and walk outside. But some of our most serendipitous spaces are under threat from the internet. Wander into a bookshop in search of something to read: the book jackets shimmer on the t
30、able, the spines flirt with you from the shelves. You can pick them up and allow their pages to caress your hands. You may not find the book you wanted, but you will walk out with three you didnt. Amazon will have your book too, but its recommendation engine doesnt even come close to delivering the
31、same stimuli. Similarly, a librarian isnt as efficient as a search engine, his memory isnt nearly as capacious, but he may still be better at making suggestions to a reader in search ofwell, something.要想逃离它，我们必须离开电脑屏幕，走到外面去。但是即使现实生活中一些最充满偶遇的空间也受到互联网的侵袭。漫步进入书店寻找读物：书套在桌子上闪着亮光，书脊在架子上挑逗着你。你可以拾起书，轻抚其页面。你
32、可能找不到你想要的书，但你离开时会带走三本原来不想要的书。亚马逊也会有你要的书，但是它的推荐引擎完全不能提供类似的刺激。同样的，图书管理员效率不如搜索引擎，他的记忆力更是远远不如，但是对于那些想要找什么书刊翻一翻的读者来说他提出的建议可能仍然要比搜索引擎好很多。But there is a reason why Amazon is successful and bookshops are closing: in a world of infinite choice, efficiency is hard to resist. The pleasures of the bookshop or t
33、he library are easily outgunned by the knowledge that we can order or download a book instantly, or find the information were looking for within seconds. Serendipity, on the other hand, is, as Zuckerman says, “necessarily inefficient”. It is a fragile quality, vulnerable to our desire for convenienc
34、e and speed. It also requires a kind of planned vagueness. Digital systems dont do vagueness very well, and our patience with it seems to be fading.但是亚马逊这么成功，而书店正在关闭是有原因的：在有无限选择的一个世界里，效率的魅力是很难抵抗的。书店或图书馆给予的愉悦很容易就会被我们可以即时购买下载一本书，或是在几秒内找到想要的信息这些知识所掩盖。另一方面，如祖克曼所说，偶遇“必然是低效率”的。它是一种脆弱的事物，在我们对方便和速度的渴望面前不堪一击
35、。它也需要一种故意的模糊感。数字系统可不太擅长模糊，我们对其的耐心似乎也在消减。Googles aim is to organise the worlds information and democratise access to it. But when everyone can get the same information in more or less the same way, it becomes harder to be original; innovation thrives on the serendipitous collision of ideas. Zuckerman
36、 told me about a speech on serendipity he recently gave to an audience of investment managers. As he started on his theme he feared he might lose their attention, but he was pleasantly surprised to find that they hung on every word. It soon became clear why. “In finance, everyone reads Bloomberg, so
37、 everyone sees the same information.” Zuckerman said. “What theyre looking for are strategies for finding inspiration from outside the information orbit.”谷歌的目标是组织全世界的信息，将信息的获取权民主化。但是当每个人或多或少都是以同样方式获取信息时，要拥有创意就越来越难了，创新要借助思想的偶然碰撞才能繁荣。祖克曼告诉我他最近给一群投资经理人进行了一次关于偶遇的讲话。他一开始讲述主题时还担心无法抓住观众的注意力，但是他很高兴地发现他们对每个词
38、都听得很投入，这让他很惊讶。很快，他明白了背后的原因。祖克曼说：“在金融界，人人都读彭博网，所以所有人获得的信息都是一样的。他们真正寻找的是在固定信息轨道之外发现灵感的战略”。The internet has become so good at meeting our desires that we spend less time discovering new ones. To update the Rolling Stones, you can always get what you want. But you may not get what you need. 互联网在满足我们的渴望上表现得如此好，以至于我们在发现新渴望上所花的时间越来越少了。滚石的一句歌词可能需要改一改，你可以一直拥有你想要的，但是你想要的可能不是你需要的。Ian Leslie works in advertising, is the author of “Born Liars“ and tweets as mrianleslieIllustration by Brett Ryder
