retro-quotes, #36

"When you’re researching, following up leads and tangents every-which-way, a strange hovering exultation can grip you. Trawling for data, marshaling the knowledge, pattern-recognizing and connection-making, there can be a sensation of heading towards a supreme moment of comprehension, in both the gathering-everything-together and breakthrough-to-higher-understanding sense: where the forest and the trees can both be apprehended clearly.  More often than not, though,  fusion reverts to confusion: that feeling of imminent omniscience collapses, leaving just a clutter of knowledge-scraps, like an unfinished or gone-too-far collage"-- Olga Teer, from Datapanik in the Year 3000: Euphoria, Overload, and Modalities of Self in Networked Culture, ed. Mosi Drensloyn (Routledge, 2005)