Shoestring Century

A theme of this blog is how the internet may well be enabling the greatest cultural revolution since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. I’ll start by paying tribute to a very small and seemingly insignificant corner of  the web:  The Captcha space at the bottom of your screen, which asks you to manually type in a short phrase to confirm that you’re not a spamming piece of software.  The understated poetry of Captcha reflects the linguistic abundance of the web as a whole.  Words can now be stacked and arranged in new ways.  Yes, our attention spans are dwindling and we’re losing touch with The Cannon (only temporarily, I predict), but we are more surrounded by words than ever, and this is good for the human brain.  Somewhere, a programmer decided to make the most of his Captcha-writing assignment and invent a new, ultra-concise form of poetry.  Observe:  the internet is not full of idiots.