Massive Amount of Scrolling
My wife started an M.I.A. station for me this evening on Slacker Radio. She began browsing Google photos while listening to Paper Planes, and happened to stumbled across Shawn Mortensen’s photography site. The photos were so incredibly cool that I hardly noticed that my wife was side-scrolling through an enormous portfolio. The experience was similar to that of reading a picture book without a cohesive story.
Afterwords, she moved on to her neck of the blogosphere, checking out Dooce and Craftzine. I noticed the similarities to the massive amount of scrolling it required to move through Shawn Mortensen’s site — except this time, she simply flicked her mouse wheel. This enabled her to move through a more complex story much faster, without any mouse or keyboard clicking, or any decisions other than scrolling.
Looking at the simplicity of these two scrolling sites, I wonder why we have landed so concretely on a set of prescribed paths to experience the web. Why not scroll along a path of interest through Wikipedia instead of clicking on a specific keyword? Do we really need to take the word “page” so literally as to treat each web page as though it belonged in a book? Or are we beginning to explore a whole new path of knowledge building?
