Down the rabbit hole Wikipedia
History of the Idiom "Down the Rabbit Hole" Elaine Zelby at Medium
The first use of the phrase falling "down the rabbit hole" comes to us thanks to the great Lewis Carroll who introduced the term in 1865 in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In the story, Alice literally falls down the hole of the White Rabbit, taking her to Wonderland. In this case, falling down the rabbit hole meant entering a strange and absurd alternate universe, which many believe was supposed to represent a psychedelic experience.For well over a century, the term went unused in common parlance. Until... the internet. The internet gave us infinite things to pique our interest to the point of distraction and unlimited ways to stay trapped in the metaphorical rabbit hole. Today, when people say they "went down the rabbit hole", they usually mean that they got sucked into spending way too long reading about or researching something on the internet.
But why rabbit hole? Why not "into the spider's web" or "caught in the beaver's dam"? In a fantastic piece written in the New Yorker, the author notes:
As a metaphor for our online behavior, the rabbit hole has an advantage those other fictional portals lack: it conveys a sense of time spent in transit. In the original story, Alice falls for quite a while — long enough to scout out the environment, grab some food off a passing shelf, speculate erroneously about other parts of the world, drift into a reverie about cats, and nearly fall asleep. Sounds like us on the Internet, all right. In the current use of "rabbit hole," we are no longer necessarily bound for a wonderland. We're just in a long attentional free fall, with no clear destination and all manner of strange things flashing past.
The Rabbit-Hole Rabbit Hole Kathryn Schulz at The New Yorker (2015)
...Carroll did not, of course, invent the rabbit hole; that distinction belongs to rabbits. But, with the publication of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," he did turn those holes into something that people could fall down—literally, in Alice's case (or as literally as a fictional fall can be), figuratively for the rest of us. That was in 1865. For most of the ensuing century and a half, the phrase maintained a modest profile, always present but far from omnipresent; you might say it just burbled along. Lately, however, we have begun talking about rabbit holes incessantly. If you set up a Google Alert or open a search window on Twitter, you can watch people plummet into them in real time...In its most purely Carrollian sense, then, to fall down a rabbit hole means to stumble into a bizarre and disorienting alternate reality.
These days, however, when we say that we fell down the rabbit hole, we seldom mean that we wound up somewhere psychedelically strange. We mean that we got interested in something to the point of distraction—usually by accident, and usually to a degree that the subject in question might not seem to merit.
...How did "rabbit hole," which started its figurative life as a conduit to a fantastical land, evolve into a metaphor for extreme distraction? One obvious culprit is the Internet, which has altered to an indescribable degree the ways that we distract ourselves.
...By the standards of fossorial animals—those that burrow or live underground—rabbit holes are not particularly impressive. The average groundhog displaces nearly two tons of soil while building its home. Badgers can dig tunnels a thousand feet long. Prairie-dog homes are known as towns (and divided, like New Orleans, into wards), but could more aptly be called nations. In 1901, scientists found one such town in Texas that covered twenty-five thousand square miles and contained some four hundred million prairie dogs, making it, population-wise, almost twenty-five per cent larger than the United States.
...By far its most famous post-"Alice" use appears in "The Matrix," in a context that is unmistakably dystopian. (Morpheus, on offering Neo the red pill: "You stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.") Conspiracy theorists, likewise, love rabbit holes, for the suggestion of a hidden reality beneath the semblance of things, and even the cheery and the sane increasingly use the phrase to describe anything that is dark, unpleasant, or byzantine.
...The modern rabbit hole, unlike the original, isn't a means to an end. It's an end in itself—an end without end, inviting us ever onward, urging us to keep becoming, as Alice would say, curiouser and curiouser.
'rabbit hole'' Meaning and Origin Dictionary.com
'rabbit hole' Definition and Meaning Merriam-Webster
rabbit hole: at r/EnglishLearning Reddit
Rabbit Hole Syndrome: Inadvertent, accelerating, and entrenched commitment to conspiracy beliefs ScienceDirect
Embracing the "rabbit hole" Dr Paul Harrison at Medium
A few days ago, I was in a meeting with a student who was working on her end of trimester assessment. She was telling me that she was struggling to know what to write about because she was constantly going down "rabbit holes" and had thirty tabs open at once (this assessment is one where each student in the program is required to develop their own critical case study).When she told me about her struggle, my initial response was to empathise and try to work with her to find solutions that could avoid these rabbit holes. But as we spoke, I shifted my thinking and suggested that maybe it wasn't a trap at all. Maybe this messy, tangled process was actually the whole point of what I was asking our students to do.
It made me wonder why we're so quick to see curiosity as a problem instead of what it really can be; the spark that leads to discovery.
...In a culture that is dominated by metrics, objectives, and measurable outcomes, curiosity (the kind that might result in you opening thirty tabs or lose hours exploring a seemingly unrelated idea) is often framed as indulgent, inefficient, and maybe even counterproductive.
The metaphor of "falling down a rabbit hole" is often portrayed as a problematic trap, suggesting an unproductive spiral into irrelevant minutiae. Yet history shows us that intellectual wandering, with all its messiness and unpredictability, is not a deviation from learning but an essential part of it.
...Curiosity and creativity doesn't follow a straight line. It loops and detours, challenges, and redefines. It takes us to places we didn't plan to go, and that, I would argue, is where the magic happens.
In education, the traditional narrative often emphasises the end goal, i.e., the assignment, the grade, the degree. These tangible outcomes serve as markers of achievement, yet they obscure the true essence of the educational process; the learning journey itself.
...When education and knowledge are treated as a product, something controllable and commodified, students become customers, and curiosity, an unruly, unquantifiable force, becomes a liability. The result is a system that values and rewards compliance over creativity, and predictability over innovation.
Knowledge, in this framework, is reduced to a means to an end, often framed as a pathway to a job or a credential rather than a dynamic process of discovery and growth. This transactional view diminishes the transformative power of learning, stripping it of its intrinsic value and reducing it to a checklist of outcomes.
...One of the most remarkable aspects of intellectual wandering is the potential for serendipity; the happy accidents that can redefine our understanding and open new doors. These moments are not entirely random but arise from curiosity and a readiness to explore the unexpected.
...When we shift our focus from the end product to the learning journey itself, we recognise that it is this process where true growth occurs. The act of exploring, questioning, and discovering is where we develop critical thinking skills, resilience, and a deeper appreciation for the complexities of knowledge.
...By embracing the rabbit hole, we reclaim the joy of learning for its own sake. It cultivates a mindset that values curiosity over completion, process over product, and the intrinsic rewards of discovery over extrinsic validation. We learn to celebrate not only the answers we find but also the questions that guide us.
Serendipity and accidental insights remind us that the most profound discoveries often come when we least expect them. They teach us that the path to understanding is not a straight line but a winding journey filled with detours, surprises, and moments of wonder.
...The rabbit hole, far from being a distraction, is where the magic of learning truly happens. It is in the uncharted and the unexpected that our wandering minds become our greatest asset.
Going Down the Rabbit Hole: Characterizing the Long Tail of Wikipedia Reading Sessions Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Gerlach, Robert West at arXiv
"Wiki rabbit holes" are informally defined as navigation paths followed by Wikipedia readers that lead them to long explorations, sometimes involving unexpected articles. Although wiki rabbit holes are a popular concept in Internet culture, our current understanding of their dynamics is based on anecdotal reports only. To bridge this gap, this paper provides a large-scale quantitative characterization of the navigation traces of readers who fell into a wiki rabbit hole.
Falling Down the Rabbit Hole: Exploratory Search and The Case for Personal Information Environments AMY RAE FOX, ROBERT KAUFMAN, and JAMES D. HOLLAN (pdf)
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome: A Clinical and Pathophysiological Review Giulio Mastria et al. at Biomed Res. Int. (2016) via PubMed
Down the Rabbit Hole: Challenging traditional psychoanalytical theories of Wonderland in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass Becki Heath (docx)
ALICE'S WONDERLAND: A PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS Nandini Karuppan Chetty (pdf) via ResearchGate
SPOOFING PROOFING: THE LOGICAL-NARRATOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION OF CARROLL'S ALICE BOOKS JENNIFER DUGGAN (pdf)
The Thing about Rabbit Holes Gokul N K at Medium
...Rabbit holes are the crux of the internet because of the way internet was built and how it became popular. Hyperlinks forms the core of web and internet. Hyperlinks make sure that the content is not duplicated but at the same time all the relevant data is available and is referenced in the context of the current topic. Google was one of the first search engines to understand the importance of hyperlinks and benefitted hugely from it. It is still reaping the benefits of the same. Google search is a popular gateway to the world of internet today. While there are many more factors that contribute to the ranking of a page on Google today, hyperlinks still form the core of their ranking algorithms. We can safely say that the web was designed to work as a rabbit hole considering the way hyperlinks work. Every time we click on a hyperlink we are entering a possible rabbit hole....The bookmarks and bookmarked rabbit holes grow with time. We have all been there. Most of the times we may not be able to pursue all the bookmarked rabbit holes. Even if you don’t have the enough resources to go after every rabbit hole, it makes a lot of sense to share your journey of exploring those rabbit holes with interested parties so that they can dig deeper into the rabbit holes that pique their interest. You may end up collaborating with them at a later stage or they may ending doing something substantial. You never know.