"...the internet, that empire of hyperbole, in which everyone clamors for each other’s attention by perpetually exaggerating the importance of what they want to say."

Missed Connections

Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, and whether the internet has changed the way we think.

By LAURA MILLER

"What Figuring lacks is meaningful links, the connective tissue—narrative, argument, character—to make these elements feel like a significant whole instead of a grab bag of mildly cool factoids. In its place is a lot of vaporous palaver about art, truth, beauty, and genius. There’s an epiphany on seemingly every page, and almost anything can set Popova off. A mere five paragraphs into the book and she’s describing a morning when she noticed a leaf apparently suspended in midair that, when examined more closely, turned out to be dangling from a spider’s web:

Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider—and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it.

It’s not as if a writer can never legitimately attain this pitch of lyricism, but you’ve gotta earn it. It takes Fitzgerald all of The Great Gatsby to get to the famous last paragraph about Gatsby’s belief in the “orgiastic future” and Americans beating on, “boats against the current,” etc. Popova reaches for the orgiastic present on Page 3. This overwriting also seems a legacy of the internet, that empire of hyperbole, in which everyone clamors for each other’s attention by perpetually exaggerating the importance of what they want to say. This. Spiderweb. Is. Everything."