The Well and the Cathedral

I enjoyed this entry in Paleo-Future about a book from 1997 that predicts the future of the internet. The book’s author argues that it was too difficult to find information on the internet since it lacks a Dewey Decimal System. Let the indexing begin!

The lack of an equivalent to the Dewey decimal system on the Internet is a different matter. While it is true that experienced Internet users can eventually find what they’re looking for, [Clifford] Stoll and other critics insist that it takes more expertise and time than Internet enthusiasts are willing to admit. This point of contention may eventually be answered by software developments that are still just blips on the horizon. But such a development, according to many experts, including both Internet boosters and doubters, is likely to have to await a formalized method for paying royalties to those who self-publish on the Internet. Bill Gates is sure this can be managed down the line, but as things stand there are still vast legal tangles to be resolved concerning payment to original authors whose work is published by major companies, let alone compensation for self-publishing.

It didn’t take long working the desk before a person came looking for a book based on its appearance. I think the first time this happened it went something like:

“There’s this book I’m looking for. It’s for school. The cover is kind of… Salmon colored.”
“Ok- was it a story or was it a book about facts?” (This is code for “Fiction or nonfiction?”)
“Um, I think it was a story. The cover was… I guess… More orange than pink.”

This is a pretty regular occurance at the fiction desk. It turns out that people search the internet in much the same way. These studies, as reported in MIT’s Technology Review, shows that when people want to revisit a page they’d seen before, they do not go through the browser history. And when they do search for the previously visited webpage, presenting users with images of previously visited webpages give them just enough information about the look and feel of the page that they can more easily find it again. Also in the article is a reference to pollination:

Spool says that the ideas behind the prototype history tool are likely to filter into consumer products in a very different form. “What we’re seeing here is the first piece of the pollination process,” he says.

Richard Powers, author of stunning works of fiction like Plowing the Dark and less glamorous but still layered and nuanced roman a clefs like Prisoner’s Dilemma, writes about the nascent world wide web in Galatea 2.2:

For a while, I felt a low-grade thrill at being alive in the moment when this unprecedented thing congealed. But after weeks of jetting around the hypermap, I began to see the web as just the latest term in an ancient polynomial expansion. Each nick on the time line spit out some fitful precursor. Everyone who ever lived had lived at a moment of equal astonishment.

This from 1995, nearly 15 years ago. This kind of reflection means much more than just consideration of the current “term in polynomial expansion.” Listening to the voices of users of the first years of popular use of the internet can carry valuable insight. Even better are voices from the more nascent days of media theory, before the birth or popularization of the internet. If the medium is the message, where does that leave the user? Addicted to Adderal? Incapable of recalling trivia without consulting the oracle or are we more informed than ever? On my way to work I usually think of a handful of questions or concepts I want to look up that day, such as “what’s the difference between a sweet potato and a yam?” or “where does the person with the world record for the longest fingernails live?” Usually I look these things up and forget after a few weeks or months (except for an exceptionally amazing piece of trivia, such as income distribution on the west side versus the east side of Cincinnati). Many websites, especially sites for larger TV networks, are beginning to look and function more like television. We’ve all probably heard the internet called “TV for smart people.” It’s important to consider the big picture when designing for the user; it helps keep your eye on the end result.

And if we listen to Marshall McLuhan, what is all that content there for anyway? Why organize it in a sensible way? Richard Powers has an answer:

The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we’d still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it.

The man also has something to say about librarians. I had to ponder this one for a minute; it’s not insulting but it might not address the boggling array of fuels available at the pump.

“Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind” – Richard Powers