[P. J.] [RU] [FR]

In Search of Degeneration

The means of communication develop rapidly, and this is all right. Today, people just cannot imagine themselves without the Internet. What earlier had to be dug out in the libraries, or procured from the acquaintances, is now accessible in a couple of mouse clicks. The Web has twined the world. But doesn't it remind a neglected boxroom?

The triumph of the search engines has killed the reason. The personal activity of the Web users gets reduced to zero. The Internet is employed in an essentially utilitarian way: just type a few keywords in the search box, pick a few pages of the heap, and extract the necessary information from them; nothing in addition. Nobody is interested in what else could be found on the site. Why? It's much easier to type yet another keyword in the box.

It comes to that the users cannot get what they what even if they get to the right place. Modern Web pages are complex in their organization, they display their content in a dynamic manner, adapting to the actions of the visitor. But it is exactly the actions that the user would like to avoid! Hand it all to him on a silver platter with a golden border! An anecdotic situation: somebody from France is seeking for the site of painter Guy Levrier, coming to a page in English on a mirror site; then he/she becomes trapped, being unable to find the link to the French version, as well as unable to switch to the main site free of the extremely annoying Ucoz advertising that so bothers the visitor on the mirror. The visitors do not read what is written on the page they have just found; they only look there for the sought keywords...

The very word "browser" has lost its original meaning. The first Web surfers used to check the links on the sites they visited; they browsed the Web in the exact sense of the word, opening it for themselves in their own unique way. Today, the hypertext nature of the Web pages attracts no attention at all, and a traditional plain page will satisfy most needs. The Web get the same for everyone; it is how it is pictured by some google.

Browsers transform into an appendage of the search engines, mere search terminals. Virtually, they are to entirely disappear as independent software, becoming the components of other programs, the function of the operating medium (as Microsoft has long since suggested).

Some time, probably, search engines will be implanted directly into the brain, so that people would not get engaged in nobody knows what, just listening to the inner voice coming from the outside.

Maybe this is not bad, indeed. I only pity the naive idealists which hoped to find themselves in the world through the Internet. One can find nothing there but sheer banalities.


[Assorted Notes] [Unism]