Marino’s text is more than just a continuation on The Library of Babel, but instead enhances upon the idea. Specifically when Marino adds, “It began when I read that story .” It is not so much the words in the sentence itself, but instead the hyperlink embedded in the sentence. Instead of looking physically (by physically I mean having to walk from one hexagon to another and manually picking out a book with one’s hands etc) for the next book or annotation one can immediately head to the next with just a click. By doing so Marino is showing that the interwebs is a place where choice is immediate, and it is much easier to fall down the rabbit hole of searching—everything is at your fingertips in almost an immediate fashion. This is a bigger beast than the library in Borges’s story because of that immediate access for people who can connect to the world wide web. And the choices can be even more overwhelming than within the library in the story due to the fact that most of the hyperlinks pressed often lead to a multitude of other possible hyperlinks. On top of that this speed makes the possibility of information even more fragmented, because one can switch so fast from one idea to another. This makes me question the choices the rest of you made. Did you click on the hyperlink in that sentence? Did you click a different one? Did you stop at just one? What were the choices you made, and how did time limit those choices?
I think it’s interesting that you felt like Marino’s work reflected the immediacy and overwhelm of internet searching through hyperlinks as opposed to searching through the stacks of a physical library. The thing that kept it from feeling this way for me was all the dead links, or sometimes just links to websites that I didn’t recognize and couldn’t figure out how to navigate. It also made it a bit hard for me to pick out any sort of narrative throughout the text. I ended up feeling like I missed a bunch of information, but maybe this is reflective of all research. I feel like this revival of the text accidentally reflects the new internet it sits in compared to when it was originally published. I’ve been hearing a lot more news about dead sites and dead internet theory, and between the dead links and just the unfamiliar formatting of older websites, it feels like I’m looking a text that is breathing, but barely, in a sense.