I’ve really enjoyed Chris Messina’s two recent posts on Chrome. His background (Mozilla, Flock) and experience thinking about next generation UI’s and UE’s is on fine display; I particularly enjoy his reconcpetualization of the browser and its experience.
Factory City: Google Chrome and the future of browsers
Factory City: Musings on Chrome, the rebirth of the location bar and privacy in the cloud
In the second, more recent post, Chris discusses the cognitive break inherent in Chrome’s vision of the web. In removing the URL bar in favor of a single search interface, the web transforms from one spatially and locationally grounded (in URL’s, permalinks and bookmarks) to a fully-mediated, amorphous zone of information. In this new web, there are no wrong answers or incorrect URL’s, because the algorithm always has information relevant to the intent of our information need.
As Messina notes, the tradeoff is such “that our fundamental notions and expectations of privacy on the web have to change or will be changed for us. Either we do without tools that augment our cognitive faculties or we embrace them, and in so doing, shim open a window on our behaviors and our habits so that computers, computing environments and web service agents can become more predictive and responsive to them, and in so doing, serve us better.”
That is, in embracing the mediated web, we trade (to some extent) our agency, any sense of privacy, and most importantly, our extant strategies of finding and reminding for new, less conceptually transparent ones. To embrace the web in Chrome’s model, we must embrace the algorithm, and essentially invite it into our minds. This new lens is all-or-nothing, and it casts away our strategies of past, those operationalized in pre-web design patterns.
On one hand, one might be able to argue that the web is so vast that inviting the algorithm home might make sense. Perhaps it is better to browse with Google on your shoulder, assisting your navigation and selecting your best information choices. Where I run into difficulty with this model is that Google is placed at a meta-layer above the web; it becomes the lens through which the web is experienced. This model is troubling at many levels, but I particularly resent the idea the web should be mediated. Slightly repurposing JPB’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Of course, this isn’t a question of morals; the web is a market, and there will always be a choice to opt-out or not participate in Google or anyone else’s schemes. The gray area emerges when we consider Google’s place in the market, and the sheer power they exert in the configuration of consumer preferences. Thinking as an educator – we lament the so-called death of the book. In five years, will we lament the death of the URL, in an age in which all authority is conferred through the end-product of a citation-based algorithm?
All of this comes with a grain of salt. Personally, I believe our current spatial metaphors of the web will exist for the imaginable future. As revolutionary as these ideas seem, we change slowly, and the browsing and searching patterns of billions of web users are already well-established. Further, this sort of change is essential – we’re constantly reconfiguring the web and our experience of the web – I just question how much we need to do that with Google looking over our shoulder.
This is a good distillation of the points I was attempting to make — thanks for clarifying my thinking! ;)
As for your final point, which is not surprising coming from you (given you and Terrell’s leanings on privacy), I support your assertion, but worry that the weight and complexity of the web will invariably require us to outsource some aspect of our consumption of the web, or else be overrun by it.
As it is, we see FriendFeed as a wonderful mediation for seeing what our friends are up to — if we have 5 friends. If you grow that number, say to 20, 50, 100 or more, we’re suddenly caught up in the slipstream and prioritizing relevant and useful information becomes a daunting, if not futile, task.
So unless we are able to increase our own built-in cognitive abilities through augmented cognition, we’re going to need to have external services that help us deal with the tsunami of information not just available to us, but that washes over us constantly. This is when true user agents become necessary — and picking a user agent should come down to the quality of service it provides you (at what cost). If the monetary cost is zero because it’s leeching on your data capital (as Google does), should we complain? Or should we bask in a moment in time when we are able to co-exist with machines that are indeed working for us?
Personally I’m conflicted on this. I believe that if we bake in escape and choice into the model of this system — and create a symbiotic ecosystem — it will be good. If we let the majors determine the landscape, and dictate how we play or where we play, then that’s bad, and should be fought at all costs.
My pleasure! Those were fantastic posts, and they’ve inspired a lot of thinking on my end.
To your point about complexity, I am in complete agreement. The web is too big, and services such as Google search are essential to information management. I see navigation (URLs and clicks), storage (*marks) and search as part of a triumvirate of information management. Each of these serves a role and is adopted from a cognitive process, and to-date we’ve seen them as separate due to their enactment in separate toolsets and methods.
Questions of control complicate this unification. We’ve developed strategies, but if those strategies are compressed into a single interface, if the meaningful distinctions between them go away – then what do we have left, and what competencies will we retain? This is where your thinking about metaphorical shifts on the web resonate. If we leave the other skills behind, if the search box becomes the true “Omnibar”, then there are all sorts of tradeoffs. Compared to privacy concerns, the thought of having all knowledge mediated by an algorithm is particularly frightening.
But then again, how much of this is new or different? This is an evolution – and maybe we’ll just have to work hard to retain information skills.
“[I]f the search box becomes the true “Omnibar”, then there are all sorts of tradeoffs.”
I’m not sure Google is really doing anything very revolutionary here, other than identifying an existing trend. People are already using Google as an “omnibar”, they’re just doing it from the Google.com search box. Chrome just takes this idea and runs with it.