Weinberger's Small Pieces worked its way to the head of the queue last week, and was gulped down in one evening. There are plenty of general reviews out there already, so I'm going to dive into one area that I found a bit jarring. I'm wondering if there are others out there with the same experience:

Weinberger's base metaphor for the Web is spatial. He devotes his entire second chapter to its implications. The notion of a hypertextual space in which one can get lost substantially predates the Web, going back to earlier research and small scale commercial hypertext projects of the '80s and early '90s.

What's my problem? I don't experience the Web as a space. I never have.

In the past, I've played with other metaphors in a design sense:

One can think of the experience of sequential viewing of pages as a sort of personalized story. Back at Apple I worked with a design team on projects that tried to deliberately exploit this view. We injected characters into the interface to support narrative sense-making, and reconceived search engines as 'next move generators' that should keep the story flowing, rather than presenting lists. Weinberger touches the same themes in his third chapter about Time (about p. 60 in PB edition). Our increasingly interrupt driven media world has produced users who are adept at juggling multiple 'story lines' on various devices or in different windows or in interleaved chat streams.

A second stance is to forget the metaphor, and cop to the magical nature of the experience. After all, our experience is that naming calls on the Web. Utter (type) the right incantation and your desire appears. Mismatch your spell and your environment and you get a fizzle (404). Call the wrong thing and you get a nasty pixie - a storm of popups or some malicious code. Give instructions to your demon - we call it an RSS aggregator - and it will do the lifting for you.

But the truth of the matter is that I've never experienced the Web (or any other hypertext) as either of these, or as a space. It just is, it's a primitive. Maybe my brain was wired strangely by having worked on full text engines since the mid-80s, and complex data structures for quite a while before. Relying on a metaphor when designing systems of the sort is a way to get painted into a corner. Better to think in code, or formally. Spend enough time on it and you can end up with almost kinesthetic feel for how data structures go together. When the Web showed up, it was just another instance of structures that I'd beat on in products, or in formal efforts like the Dexter hypertext modeling group.

So other than buffing the Old Fart credentials, what's the point of this? Just this: our Generation i of kids is growing up with the Web as a given, as a primitive element of their experience. Are they going to need metaphors to 'explain' it? Suppose their typical experience leads them to the same mental frame that I reached very atypically. What's that say about design for the Web, and the social and media impact it will ultimately have, which really is Weinberger's topic?
6:18:33 PM    

An insightful post and intelligent discussion on the differences among governance, markets, and media over at Samizdata.
1:57:58 PM