We're losing all our serendipity to Google

I’M a great believer in serendipity, using it as a perfectly adequate substitution for hard work. The word means happy accident or fortunate mistake.

It was apparently coined in the 18th century by Horace Walpole after he heard of the Persian fairytale The Three Princes of Serendip. The princes had a happy knack of making discoveries without meaning to. The princes were from Sri Lanka which was once called Serendip. So there. Put that in your pipe and smoke it at the next table quiz.

Unfortunately like table quizzes, serendipity is under threat — we are told. As usual it’s the internet that is to blame. Having accounted for TV sets, books, newspapers, social skills and vandalism; ‘The Web’ is now shrivelling our ability to stumble upon information and people. The theory is that, before we would read paper newspapers and exclaim “By Jove” as an interesting article tucked away at the bottom of page 16 caught our eye. Or we would bump into someone on the street. Now the perceived wisdom is we are chained to our desks or staring at smartphones. Google and Facebook know so much about us that they feed us only the information they think we would be interested in.