Beyond physical metaphors
The World Wide Web is basically made out of pieces of digital information and links. When it arrived, we tried to explain what was going on here with metaphors. Thus terms as ‘page’, ‘article’, ‘newspaper’ etc. became common words in context of the web, even though they originally had a meaning connected to the physical world.
It seems to me that we should try to get rid of these words and invent completely new ones in order to not limit our brains and thereby innovation. Even though “everybody knows what we mean when we’re talking”, words still have the tendency to connect to old and unwanted connotations that limit our creativity.
We operate with the concept of an article because of the limited physical space in traditional paper medias. An article can only include a certain number of abstractions and thoughts that gets connected in the text, described with words. On the web there’s no limit to how much information we can connect and discuss without actually including the information in a given artifact.
The big questions therefore are: How would we structure information, if we didn’t use concepts from the physical world to come up with ideas? And what is the best way to present information when we use the advantages of the web?
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