“The Internet is a vast, interactive museum engineered by curators and augmented by other visitors’ preferences”

The Internet is a vast, interactive museum engineered by curators and augmented by other visitors’ preferences. Look at this! it says. Click here! Come down this passageway! It lacks physical constraints, but also circumstantial contiguities; all points of passage through it have to be, in some sense, primed. You cannot casually ask about the background image of a Web page and be directed to a secret circus a short walk from where you stand. The stories you uncover through your smartphone are stories, basically, asking to be found.

Nathan Heller, “Air Head”, The New Yorker (1 February 2016), 67.