Friday, November 9, 2007

Is Web Surfing Dead?

The conversation wandered into browsing, and the social mediated solutions such as StumbleUpon and Me.dium I commented that browsing was something that I just didn’t do anymore […] I was trying to make some sense of this, and mentioned that I thought browsing was analogous to channel surfing or radio station scanning. Channel surfing was a habit from when we had something less than 100 channels to choose from […] As soon as you get hundreds of channels through satellite, scanning is way too inefficient to be of any use. I wonder if the death of browsing isn’t the same thing?

I tend to agree with his premise. I’m not sure if I miss the old days of browsing out of nostalgia, or if I actually miss the useful things I’d happen upon from said browsing experiences. I could go down my list of bookmarks from when the internet was young (the Wayback machine still has it archived), and only a handful are left around the web as properly maintained sites. That those few sites are there means that a lot of the same types of content that existed in 1996 exist today, but because of the myopia induced by Google, a lot of our focus tends towards Wikipedia and blogs.

Don’t get me wrong. I eat and have a roof over my head because blogs and New Media exist - so I’m not suggesting Google go out and abandon their preferential treatment right away. Blogs, though, gave rise to niche content. Niche content gave rise to concepts of targeted advertising and pushing of relevant content. That, in turn, is giving rise to the attention economy.

Now we’re all consumed with the minute details and nuances of that which we’ve defined for ourselves as our interests. My browsing habits can best be described as concentric circles, these days, instead of meandering paths. It could be that I’m an expert on what I want to know, or it could be that I’m in a rut. It seems that I vaguely remember folks from the newspaper industry making (self-serving) claims that our individual intelligences would suffer if we learned only what we wanted, instead of the broad spectrum of information they gave us on a daily basis.

Yes, surfing is gone. I no longer need to surf. If I want a dose of random websites like I had back in 1997, I can simulate that with Boing Boing or the project.ioni.st.

I don’t think that we don’t surf now, with the glut of pages and choices. I think we can’t surf. In the blogging world, everyone is concerned with PageRank and who gets the TechMeme headline, that they’re too afraid to link to someone that could be viewed as a competitor. At the service website, a certain level of hubris is required so that all links must lead inward - you allow the user to see a link that points away from your site, and you could lose that user, and blow your ROI (and if you do send them away, make sure you target _blank!). All of our web experiences become informational cul-de-sacs.

Yet still, the chaos and churn of the modern web creates a useful and evergreen landscape for us to learn from and communicate with.

Browsing may be gone, but maybe we didn’t need it in the first place.

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