I hate and love the way we browse the web.
I’m almost certainly somebody with a high degree of addiction to the written word. It’s not an internet addiction; I was raised in a family that has an unholy veneration for the written word, and the advent of the internet just allowed me a greater access to a wider range of subjects. More often than not, it’s the next link to the next interesting thing that keeps me stuck in my chair. I can get stuck into a subject, and emerge with my eyeballs throbbing and the front of my skull feeling weirdly disjointed from the rest of me. I’m sure you know what I mean – hotels in Berlin? Patagonia? The Russian space program in the pre-perestroika eighties?
Hey, we all have our foibles.
For me, this love of words is so strong that I don’t bother to watch explanatory videos. If you can’t write a few paragraphs of text to explain your project, software, or website, then it’s likely that I won’t watch the video. I tell myself that the reason is for this is that my reading speed is so high, I would deal with text better – but it might be that I just love reading.
But what I dislike about the way we browse the web, this hopping between different sources, is the lack of depth that it encourages. Not in the writers, authors, and creators, but in the reading of what we see online. If a particularly good, well-researched article is published online, you’ll see a flurry of links to it within the first few days, gradually dying off over time. There’s also a major “bubble” effect, where people on the internet write about people they know on the internet, and claim that it’s important.
(Sadly, this is also part of our economy as well; it’s ludicrous to think that any of the dotcom businesses are not incredibly overvalued at the moment, including the larger companies such as Google and Yahoo! If you disagree, look at Yahoo!’s rapid fall from grace after last years attempted takeover. These companies are still as overvalued, as they have been for more than a decade.)
It’s this bubble that causes the lack of depth. Our system of search, our way we hunt out interesting things on the internet, is based on the recommendations of such a small and narrow-minded set of interests that we see only a fraction of what is available. Compare typing into Google to walking through a large bookshop, or a library; you’ll never get distracted by an interesting title on the way to your email. You’ll never linger in the economics section because you caught a glimpse of an attractive person browsing around there. And you’ll never pick up a copy of Borges’ Fictions because it has a great cover.
And that’s what I hate; the narrowing down of accidental discoveries. Because without that, we’re all reading from the same page.
Further Reading
- The Googlisation of Everything, an interesting essay by Siva Vaidhyanathan
- JPod, Douglas Coupland’s book from 2005
- The Echo Chamber, the term used to describe the internet’s effect on debate
