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Ted Gup's Essay 'The End Of Serendipity'

585 Words3 Pages

Karen Grohs
CTY Writing Persuasion and Analysis
30 January 2017
Serendipity’s Survival In his essay “The End of Serendipity” Ted Gup gives his perspective on the expanding capability of attaining information. He accepts as an overlooked danger of technology which is even more prevalent today. He demonstrates his belief that the increasing proficiency in acquiring information disrupts the exploration one undergoes to gain that said information. As an example, Ted Gup, the writer of the essay, tells of his childhood when he had prolonged searches for information using huge, thick encyclopedias. As a result of using the time-consuming encyclopedias, he would learn about many other subjects and, inevitably, became diverted from his immediate …show more content…

There is a hidden contradiction in Gup’s essay. Although he points to his learning lifestyle as constantly becoming sidetracked, he still uses a dictionary which is designed to maximize efficiency in finding information. Gup’s version of serendipity is an illusion. When it comes to serendipity, it is human curiosity that always prevails. Since humans are naturally curious, to varying degrees, and normally want to explore and obtain new information, Internet or no Internet, what only changes is the method we use to explore. An excellent metaphor to our current situation is the invention and refinement of the automobile. Before that, people would have to travel by horse and it would take days to only travel a few miles. Even worse, any relatively long journey were extremely difficult to undertake. Cars changed everything. Although the original cars weren’t the fastest, with refinement, people can now travel miles in only minutes. Did they lose anything in the long, perhaps even, muddy journey? No, of course, not. It is the exact same situation with serendipity. Like cars for a journey, the Internet simply speeds up the finding and learning process. If one desires to learn literally anything, one can simply ask the internet. I, personally, can’t remember how many times I or another of my family members wondered about something

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