Disrupting the conceptual metaphors of the web

Written byJeremy Keith. 9 comments

About Jeremy Keith

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Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer living in Brighton, England where he works with web consultancy firm Clearleft. He has written two books, 'DOM Scripting' and 'Bulletproof Ajax'. His latest project is Huffduffer, a service for creating podcasts of found sounds. When he's not making websites, Jeremy plays bouzouki in the band Salter Cane.

We've developed an array of metaphors for talking about the intangible spaces of the web. Maybe it's time to unshackle ourselves from some of them.

Dis­tance is a bother. While we might enjoy arriv­ing at our des­ti­na­tion, the process of get­ting from A to B can be tedious. Sci­ence fic­tion gives us a way to think about this tedium. Let’s roughly divide the genre into two cat­e­gories — those that abide by Einstein’s the­o­ries of rel­a­tiv­ity and those that don’t.

Those in the Ein­stein camp are faced with prob­lems of time when get­ting from star sys­tem A to star sys­tem B: char­ac­ters age at dif­fer­ent rates, the plot moves at a set speed, time passes.

Those who ignore Einstein’s the­o­ries sim­ply cir­cum­vent the light bar­rier, pass through worm­holes and other cre­ations, warp­ing space and time.

We can think about this sec­ond approach more prac­ti­cally. Take a piece of paper. Mark an A on the paper. Then mark a B some­where else. Get­ting from A to B usu­ally involves trav­el­ling across the sheet of paper. The super­lu­mi­nal solu­tion is to fold the paper so that the points are touch­ing. If space can be warped like a piece of paper then travel becomes mean­ing­less. Not only are points A and B con­nected, every sin­gle point in the uni­verse, from A to Z, are poten­tial neigh­bours. Dis­tance col­lapses. This is how the inter­net works.

The con­cep­tual metaphors of the web

The inter­net is a phys­i­cal thing. It is made of machines. Dis­trib­uted across the planet, it is laden with the bag­gage of mass: resis­tance, latency and lag. The inter­net is the phys­i­cal ves­sel of the world wide web. But our con­sen­sual hal­lu­ci­na­tion is not ham­pered by the restric­tions of space. Cyber­space, like hyper­space, col­lapses dis­tance. Hyper­links are the worm­holes that can poten­tially con­nect every sin­gle resource on the web.

Our brains have evolved over thou­sands of years to deal with the phys­i­cal world. Our think­ing is bounded by the spa­tial dimen­sions of our envi­ron­ment. When we are con­fronted with the­o­ret­i­cal con­structs, we employ con­cep­tual metaphors to map them onto phys­i­cal space. Time, for exam­ple, is intan­gi­ble. But we talk about time as if it were a phys­i­cal thing: we take it, make it, and save it.

We have used con­cep­tual metaphors since the birth of the web. We talk about web ‘sites’ and infor­ma­tion ‘archi­tec­ture.’ We use verbs of move­ment like surf­ing, brows­ing, and vis­it­ing. Faced with the lim­it­less poten­tial of an unbounded medium, we use lan­guage to erect our own bound­aries.

Dis­rupt­ing the metaphors: Ajax

Occa­sion­ally, a tech­no­log­i­cal shift is so great that it requires a cor­re­spond­ing change in our con­cep­tual metaphors. Ajax is a lin­guis­ti­cally dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy. The tra­di­tional web is ‘nav­i­gated’ by the user, mov­ing from loca­tion to loca­tion. But with Ajax the metaphor needs to change because the user’s loca­tion remains con­stant. We apply verbs from the world of the desk­top: cre­at­ing, edit­ing, delet­ing. In a faint echo of Ted Nelson’s ideas of tran­sclu­sion, in an Ajax space it is the infor­ma­tion that now moves, called up by a sta­tion­ary user.

My def­i­n­i­tion of Ajax is fairly broad. Any­thing that can com­mu­ni­cate with a server with­out refresh­ing the entire doc­u­ment is Ajax in my book. It could be JavaScript-​​driven but it could just as well be imple­mented with Flash. Every time you embed a YouTube clip on your blog, you are open­ing a worm­hole to the YouTube cos­mos. A vis­i­tor to your site can peruse con­tent from YouTube with­out mov­ing from your URL.

Many of the design chal­lenges thrown up by Ajax aren’t tech­no­log­i­cal prob­lems. Instead, they are caused by a clash of con­cep­tual metaphors. Why doesn’t the back but­ton return me to the pre­vi­ous state of the cur­rent page? Why can’t I book­mark the changed state of the cur­rent page? The back but­ton and book­mark­ing both rely on the browser’s his­tory stack. But the his­tory stack is an arti­fact of the con­cep­tual metaphor of the web as a place. It is a map of your trav­els. If, thanks to Ajax, you no are no longer trav­el­ling, you don’t need a map. There are no maps for these territories.

Con­vey­ing “pres­ence” on the web

The web is not a tan­gi­ble place. With­out phys­i­cal dimen­sions, there is no way to con­vey pres­ence. Pres­ence is a by-​​product of loca­tion. In our every­day three-​​dimensional world, our senses are attuned to notice when oth­ers are shar­ing the same space as us. We are aware of their pres­ence. We can fur­ther sub­di­vide pres­ence into units of prox­im­ity: near, far, and every­thing in between. That sub­tlety is lost in the dimen­sion­less realm of the web.

There have been quite a few attempts to attain pres­ence in non-​​dimensional space. Vir­tual worlds like Sec­ond Life go to great lengths to repli­cate the con­cepts of near and far. Most of the effort involves pro­duc­ing a three dimen­sional envi­ron­ment on the two-​​dimensional plane of a screen. The more con­vinc­ing the graph­ics, so the think­ing goes, the more real­is­tic the environment.

This same think­ing drove devel­op­ment in another area where ‘vir­tual real­ity’ has his­tor­i­cally been chased as the ulti­mate goal. The gam­ing indus­try has spent years aspir­ing to more advanced visual real­ism and graphic com­plex­ity. While Microsoft and Sony were locked in this bat­tle of the poly­gons, Nin­tendo took an entirely dif­fer­ent approach with their Wii con­sole. Despite the com­par­a­tively weak graph­ics, the expe­ri­ence of wield­ing a wiimote as a ten­nis rac­quet, a gui­tar, or a steer­ing wheel can be incred­i­bly immersive.

Immer­sive online expe­ri­ences are not nec­es­sar­ily going to be found in vir­tual worlds like Sec­ond Life. The feel­ing I get when I check Twit­ter is the clos­est I’ve ever come to jack­ing in to the Matrix. Twit­ter isn’t graph­i­cally rich. It isn’t even tex­tu­ally rich; com­mu­ni­ca­tion is lim­ited to 140 char­ac­ters or fewer. Yet those nuggets of text con­vey more pres­ence than I could ever get from the Meta­verse. Where Sec­ond Life seeks to repro­duce the phys­i­cal bound­aries of the ‘real’ world, Twit­ter is mak­ing good use of the distance-​​collapsing nature of the web.

The recre­ation of bar­ri­ers on the web is often held up as the very paragon of inno­va­tion. Nowhere is this more appar­ent than in the cre­ation of so-​​called Rich Inter­net Appli­ca­tions. Rather than mak­ing use of the lim­it­less nature of the web, many of these appli­ca­tions seek to recre­ate the con­fined bound­aries of the desk­top. Is this the limit of our imag­i­na­tion? Faced with a medium that has lit­er­ally no lim­its, we seek to impose the lim­i­ta­tions of other envi­ron­ments; the fixed dimen­sions of the printed page, the sin­gle user model of the desk­top com­puter. The desk­top envi­ron­ment may have rich sur­faces, but as Nin­tendo and Twit­ter have shown us, it’s the expe­ri­ence that counts.

Licensed under Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion 2.5 Generic.

Further Reading

• A Brief History of Time - Stephan Hawking
• Buy "A Brief History of Time" from Amazon
• Metaphors We Live By - George Lakoff & Mark Johnson
• Buy "Metaphors We Live By" from Amazon
• The Stuff of Though - Steven Pinker
• Buy "The Stuff of Thought" from Amazon

Comments on this article

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