The library in Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel conveys the peculiar horror of a place (a self-contained, bibliographic “universe”) in which every potential combination of written language is stored in infinite volumes.  In its innumerable hexagonal rooms, by virtue of endless permutation of the alphabet’s twenty-odd characters, rest the complete works of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and the great masters of centuries yet to come—but also vast tracts of senseless print that no human can decode.  The realization of such an all-encompassing collection, initially greeted with “unbounded joy,” gradually leads to “disproportionate depression" as the prospect of gleaning meaning from chaos shows its inescapable futility.  Thus Borges demonstrates that a superabundance of written language defeats its own purpose; increasing to infinite combinations, words become arbitrary— as arbitrary as the universe they attempt to represent.  Indeed, in The Library of Babel, the library itself is the universe--a complete copy of the Cosmos. 

Now consider the internet, as we know it today.  Here, surely, is the fulfillment of Borges’s strange and theoretical vision: a digital library of Babel.  Immersing ourselves in the whirring pixilated machinery of the world-wide web, we find a universe of information at our disposal, a repository of mankind’s knowledge that is greater and more comprehensive than any library ever built.  For its every useful, or insightful, or beautiful arrangement of data, however, there are thousands of hideous, insubstantial excretions.  Our total library houses millions of vain Twitter posts and excruciating Facebook updates, an overwhelming hoard of invasive advertisements, and enough pornography to fill the Library of Alexandria many times over. Through an unexpected glitch in the system, pages and pages of unintelligible symbols, meant not for human eyes, but the binary processors of some ghostly computer program, may waylay the searcher.  It is when such errors occur, and I catch a glimpse of the ephemeral inner-workings of the internet-microcosm, that I feel like the Borgesian librarian, pondering the inhuman origin of this library and its arbitrariness. And, speaking of Twitter and Facebook—how strange that an invention like the internet, which has been touted as the ultimate collective medium, so often brings out the most self-involved and narcissistic elements of its users.  We ceaselessly update our online “status,” in the hope that someone will read it and be affected, yet, stepping back, we must arrive at the suspicion that everyone else is too ensconced in their own status to notice.  This rather pointless communication degrades the power of language, accumulating until, by sheer volume, it exhausts itself.

If the internet’s vast expanses of unqualified information give us pause, the search engine props up our confidence, allowing us to keep the greater body of senseless data at bay while we pluck the fragments more likely to relate to our needs and desires.  Over time, we learn to effectively narrow the field of data before us, perhaps down to a few tens of thousands of packets of information.  Then we begin to read.  However, with the latent, nagging presence of so many alternative texts, waiting to spring from the nothingness of cyberspace into the quasi-somethingness of a computer screen, how can we be sure that we are reading the right one?  Surely, more information exists on another website (in another “hexagon”) to inform our present pursuit.  The solution to this dilemma of informational overabundance has been the digital window and the tab, in that order:  for multiple packets of information, the average computer user in 1998 opened multiple windows on screen; today’s web navigator opens multiple tabs in a single window (see Huang and White, "Parallel Browsing Behavior on the Web." Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. 2010).  This progression, though it may seem trivial, reveals our ever-increasing obsession with processing as many diverse bits of data as we can at the same time.  With separate windows the transfer of attention from text to text occurred with a delay, however slight.  With tabs in a single window, the information seeker can flip from text to text all but instantaneously, absorbing bits from one, then another, then another in the frenetic quest for comprehensiveness.  The window framed its text in isolation (if only figuratively) whereas the tab lays text upon text simultaneously. 

Most maddeningly, every text—every packet of data—is linked to another:  click the blue words and you will be whirled immediately to a cross-referenced bit of information, which in turn is cross-referenced to another, and this to another, ad infinitum.  This never-ending search for conclusive data encapsulates the intellectual anxiety inherent in the internet. Our browsing behavior must have a profound effect on our reading, and the quality of attention we afford a given piece of writing (which is writing still, albeit digital).  Moreover, our mania for information consistently leaves us unfulfilled, bombarding us with written language’s inability to form a total representation of reality, lest it resort to the arbitrariness of reality itself (as in Borges’s Library).  What a relief then, if, after hours of cycling through hyperlink after hyperlink in search of some conclusion, we were to stumble upon a single, human voice.

This voice is the root of all communication.  Writing (in its manuscript, print, and digital forms) is essentially a method of replicating spoken language in a tangible form.  To be sure, writing has capabilities that oral communication lacks, but when writing becomes separated from the voice, its meaning deteriorates.  This constitutes the central horror of Borges’s short story; if printed writing predates its human element—if it exists wholly independent of an individual’s communicative impulse and agency—it cannot signify anything.  Likewise, a reading practice that prevents the transmission of voice, through hyperlink interruptions and divided (tabbed) attention, necessarily robs us of meaning.       

I am sure to be labeled a romantic for offering a single human voice (whether it is heard aloud or interpreted through written language) as the most productive mode of communication.  Furthermore, you may well say that a text is not the same as its author’s voice, especially in our postmodern era of literary dissociation.  Nevertheless, even if we accept that we do no violence to a text (or its dead author) by absorbing it at the same time as an array of other texts, we must admit that we do violence unto ourselves.  No one, walking into a room full of talking people and absorbing their multitudinous chatter all at once, could expect to come away with anything but a headache for his or her effort to arrive at the sum of their expressions.  Is it anything less than arrogance to assume that a switch in the medium of communication could make this less true?  We must make meaning of the written word and the spoken word alike, patiently, carefully.  In our mad pursuit of instantaneous totality, tauntingly facilitated by the ever-expanding internet, we are constructing our own Library of Babel, in which language defeats itself through profusion and an infinite mass of human voices combine to produce a meaningless hum.  If we strive to become better readers (and better listeners!) we must work intensively, and accept that exclusion has its pace in understanding; we must think twice before opening a new tab or clicking the hyperlink.