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.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
