My boss Chip German and I have had many enthusiastic conversations about serendipity, and about the possibilities of making a methodology of serendipity by using the speed and connectedness of our online world in constructing teaching and learning spaces and processes.

Today I’m getting my daily dose of inspiration from Jon Udell in a fantastic post called “Blog Biology” (the cell metaphor leads to a slight awkwardness about touching extrusions, but that’s of little moment here), and what do I see but the phrase “manufactured serendipity.” Plato would be proud: memes antedate their transmission, or perhaps this is a distributed meme that a certain cultural moment brings into focus in a new metameme. Not only that, but the phrase in “Blog Biology” is itself a link (thus enacting something of its own meaning–a hyperpoem?) that takes me to a long and early (2002) essay on blogs called “Manufactured Serendipity” on Sam Ruby’s “Intertwingly” blog. Sam writes,

Jon Udell labels this phenomenon, manufactured serendipity. Serendipity is all about making fortunate discoveries by accident. You can’t automate accidental discoveries, but you can manufacture the conditions in which such events are more likely to occur.

As you can see, Sam links “manufactured serendipity” back to an essay by Jon Udell, which is apparently where the phrase began its life, at least in this particular conversation.

What does this cross-linking mean?

I don’t think it’s merely an example of A-list bloggers reinforcing each other’s Technorati profiles and perceived authority by obsessively linking to each other.

I do think it’s an example of a persistent conversation that tries to document both process and product, and thus blurs the distinction usefully.

I think it’s an interesting way of taking the reader through the history of the unfolding drama of an instance of manufactured serendipity that retains what Frost calls “the iron-fresh scent of discovery” in his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes.”

I think it’s a way of demonstrating and empowering a long personal tail (wow–and I thought “contacting extrusions” was a chancy metaphor) by enabling a kind of recursion with one’s own earlier and still vital thoughts, something like the spiraling upward that Jerome Bruner uses as a figure for education. (A long pigtail? Someone call the metaphor police, quick.) One is constantly going back over the same ground, intellectually speaking. Progress comes not from novelty, but from altitude and perspective–and from the trickiest form of altitude, the kind that allows for up-close and far-back perspectives simultaneously. That’s apparently what Bruner means by narrative thinking vs. paradigmatic thinking, though I do not know whether or not he envisions their marriage as I do.