mtl3p

I might be getting out of my depth here, but . . .

“The most innovative thing about Flock is that it’s trying to do away with the notion of “browsing.” Co-founder and Marketing Vice-President Geoffrey Arone says the term is an increasingly irrelevant description of what people do online. Essentially, Flock’s software is intended to serve less as a window into static Web content than as a customizable conduit for participatory Web services, from Flickr to del.icio.us to the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia. (from a businessweek article)

(commentary by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang)
This, to me, is a really interesting concept. The metaphor of browsing is one of the most familiar expressions of the notion that the Internet is a space. The idea that the notion of browsing is obsolete, and that social software is playing a role in rendering meaningless our old spatial metaphors for understanding the Internet, dovetails nicely with Ross Mayfield’s observations about how kids don’t think of the Internet as a thing, but as a verb. ”

link

My first reaction was “oh . . . smart” but after thinking about it for a few minutes (that’s a long time in the blogosphere) I kinda think that Alex is confounding two seperate ideas.

1) that social software is changing the conception of the web from static information to dynamic information (information that configures itself in revelance to you)

2)internet/web being an action, not a thing

Alex is saying that just because browsing is ending (arguably) that spatiality is over. I would say that what has changed is that we are no longer browsing over static terrains. The terrains re-configure themselves, move in real time in response to us (and our network). That cheesy 90’s metaphor of flying over grids of information no longer feels right. That’s why we can’t use the term browsing, not because there is no longer spatiality, but because the term implies a passive object that we browse.

But the idea (and feeling) of the spatiality of the web is still there. What has changed (or is changing) is that it moves back.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2005 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.