What randomness looks like. A 2d random walk. (wikipedia)
There’s a cute meme zooming around Facebook now, in which people are encouraged to write 25 “random” things about themselves in a note, and then tag 25 new friends.
These exercises always annoy me, since their understanding of “random” is so busted. If you were to ask me to tell you 25 things about myself right now, they absolutely would not be “random.” They would be calculated, overly valuing the contemporary, and far too attuned to the performance of talking about myself.
How to solve this massive pile of egoism?
What if, instead of prompting myself for 25 things (and hence talking about 25 things I’m interested in, not 25 random things), I instead generate 25 prompts with the computer’s random number generator, and then I use my psyche’s word-association to generate the facts? The facts still aren’t random, since I can’t escape my tendency toward performance, calculation, and presentism, but it makes it much harder to succumb to those traps.
For prompts, I’ve decided to use words chosen at random from the computer’s American English dictionary (though I’ve stripped out words ending in “’s”). And then I’ve put the program online here:
Generate 25 random words in American English
I also wrote a version that pulls 25 lines at random from Ulysses, but the page always times out before it can display any information. Alas.
Tags: egoism, facebook, randomness, ulysses
February 1st, 2009 at 15:23
Yeah yeah yeah. Except we are all on Facebook because we *like* participating in massive piles of egoism! However, your random generators are awesome! I like that the computer gets bored with Ulysses and falls asleep reading it. Take that, Joyce!
February 1st, 2009 at 15:24
nice. i knew there was something bothering me besides the fact that the 25 random things meme asks you to tag-back the person who tagged you, which bothers me tremendously.
February 1st, 2009 at 22:29
Michelle, you’re right about the egoism, but it’s the use of the word “random” that grates on me. The meme should be called “25 things I’m telling you about me to make you think I’m awesome / want to do me,” because that’s what it’s really about. I developed the randomized prompts precisely to try to break that level of obviousness. I still haven’t decided if I’d write one or not, though. Not out of like, you know, a thing, but just since it’s, you know, work.
February 2nd, 2009 at 8:24
Randomness looks like Central America.
July 23rd, 2010 at 17:55
i agree wiv dude who wrote the articl e
u can neva b ramdom if u wana b
but u can b crazy like my friend called kimberly langton
August 16th, 2010 at 3:17
Awww… I write a random 2D walk program pretty much every time I learn a new language, so I was excited about the graphic.
I do think it’s funny that computers won’t read Ulysses, either.