Romancing the Random

Image Gallery Guilherme Marconi / brain.marconi.nu

Randomness is in favor.

The website Chatroulette provides an arena for webcam conversations with random participants. CNN’s regular segment Random Moment of the Day reflects on such occurrences as a teenage girl’s dress fabricated with Capri Sun packaging, ice billiards played in a swimming pool in central Texas, and an iPhone app that delivers content directly from the White House, with the idea that such disconnected episodes of everyday life speak to broader societal issues and values. Flarf is touted as an avant-garde poetic form derived from the random word associations that can be forged online. And in the music industry, recording artists are less likely to be deliberate as they once were in arranging the sequence of songs—both the random shuffle and the download/purchase of individual tracks are likely to make intentional arrangements irrelevant and passé.

It’s hard to know just where this new fondness for the random has come from, but certainly we seem starved for surprise and improvisation. Somewhere between the acceleration of contemporary life, the precision of communication technology, and the overall efficiency of the digital age, we seem to have developed an appetite for the haphazard. In the age of information, when it takes a second to Google a name or a date, a minute to download an entire book, we tend to operate on the premise that life is knowable.

A growing taste for unpredictability seems a natural response, then. No surprise that the word random has gone from being a neutral adjective describing the unexpected and happenstance to one that is loaded with more positive associations having to do with unscripted authenticity. Implicit is the idea that conversations, events, and encounters that occur without design will have genuine value and an almost certainly rewarding outcome.

Randomness can be complex, interesting, beautiful. Or it can be none of these. Unpredictability can be just as dull as predictability. The inexplicable and accidental have always held the human imagination, but the often uncritical way we romance the random now makes me want to search out those enterprises with a genuine literacy to them.