A case for mindless browsing

So many apps, life coaches and philosophers to save us from mindless browsing, but I see mindless browsing as unavoidable. Not because of some technical or legal thing, but because mindless browsing is a good thing. We need it. Mindless browsing is like a walk through the woods, just looking for what is happening, navigating a huge amount of information that is hardly important at the moment – oh, the cherry tree is blooming – but could be important later. The ‘outside’ is made up of myriads of tiny details – wind is moving the leaves, slowly and irregularly, the birds are singing, insects flying through the air, the earth feels soft and damp and smells of freshness after the rain, the movements of clouds and the sun are inexorably changing the lighting. We are, however, spending time in concrete boxes where nothing ever moves, and even seal off the sounds and air flow from the outside. Within those boxes we sit and lie and enter other, flatter spaces of our screens, which nonetheless…