The Boredom In Your Eyes

Oliver Burkeman, writing in the Guardian, takes a look at the boring banality of the web. Or at least the boring banality of some things on the web. It's actually pretty amusing, in a boring sort of way.

It is generally agreed that we are more bored today than ever before. Some surveys put the percentage of people who yearn for more novelty in their lives at around 70% and rising. As the scholar Lars Svendsen explains in his book, A Philosophy of Boredom, until at least the 17th century being bored was an elite privilege, bragged about by princes and the nobility. The paradox is that boredom seems to have become democratised in exact proportion to the explosion of reasons not to be bored: books, affordable international travel, and the mass media, for a start. And here is an even stranger paradox: in the age of the internet, when the average person has access to vastly more genuinely fascinating information than at any point in history, what are the sites that consistently achieve cult status, from the birth of the web up to the present day? The boring ones. A ripening cheese. A coffee pot in a Cambridge University computer lab (the first webcam, and now a dusty artefact of online history). A camera trained on a street in a Scottish village where nothing ever happens. And I do mean nothing: so little, in fact, that it would be more interesting to watch paint dry - which, incidentally, you can also do via the web, at watching-paint-dry.com.

Some incredibly boring websites, it's true, hold the promise of sporadic but genuine excitement - a webcam trained on the US-Mexican border might conceivably show an immigrant crossing it illegally; the webcam trained on Mount St Helens might show it erupting. Even the Virtual Holmfirth webcam, positioned to broadcast a live view of events taking place on the pavement between Sid's Cafe and the parish church, might catch a West Yorkshire youth engaged in antisocial behaviour. (If that ever happened, by the way, we would probably identify the epidemic of boredom as the cause of the antisocial behaviour.)

Watching paint dry as a web event. Do go over and look at the roster of websites he has collected. There are several I have heard of, quite a few others that I had not. But they are astonishing when all put together like that. This is how people spend their time? Really? Why don't they start a blog or something?