The Rabbit Hole and Metaphor

Lewis Carroll, Dan Simmons and obsession

“Curiouser and curiouser!”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I recently read Dan Simmons’ novel Hyperion, the first novel in his Hyperion trilogy. Anyone who has read the novel knows that Simmons created a remarkably rich fictional world: you can fall down the rabbit hole, as it were, reading fan-made wikis, which provide more detail about the novel (and its sequels) than you could ever hope to consume in a few lifetimes’ worth of reading.

But this isn’t really a post about Dan Simmons or Lewis Carroll or Hyperion or Alice in Wonderland. Rather, it’s about how technology has allowed us to consume and comment upon more culture than previous generations would have thought possible. For every successful TV show, there’s an accompanying wiki created by fans; here’s the wiki for Sons of Anarchy.

We are today inundated with cultural output. And the internet has allowed fans to comment upon that culture, as a group, in a way that would have been impossible only twenty or thirty years ago. For those rabid consumers who fall down the metaphorical rabbit hole, this is a goldmine. For those who merely survey the culture before moving onto something else, this is mystifying. The notion that one could be so obsessed with Hyperion (or Alice in Wonderland or Sons of Anarchy or any of a dozen other examples) confounds many people.

The internet has allowed specialization and obsession to flourish.