Is the web the same as the book?
A few thoughts on 'pages'
What do you think? Did you guess ‘no’? That’s my guess too, but let’s consider this for a moment.
What is a book? I don’t mean in any philosophical sense (yet!) I mean physically, mechanically, what is a book?
‘dictonary.com' defines a book as:
“a handwritten or printed work of fiction or nonfiction, usually on sheets of paper fastened or bound together within covers.”
So, a bunch of pages within a kind of binding.
‘techopedia.com' defines the web as:
“a subset of the Internet consisting of the pages that can be accessed by a Web browser.”
So, a bunch of pages within a kind of browser?
They sound quite similar, when put like that.
My problem is that I really don’t think they’re the same thing. So much so, that I wrote my entire circa-fifteen-thousand-word Masters thesis on the topic.
Okay, they’re obviously not the same, anyone can see that. One is digital, one is physical, one can show videos and react to your actions and process payments and…
But, nonetheless, they are more similar than you might think. And this similarity is very much by design.
The Transition
The book ‘inspired’ the web. I could supply some linked references you probably won’t click on, or we could just consider the fundamentals of HTML, or ‘HyperText Markup Language’. It’s a bit wordy, but it is the backbone of every web page you have ever visited.
All HTML web ‘pages’ that contain text (including this page!) will most likely have at least one of the following tags within it:
The <h> tag, for headers, for example:
This is a header.
The <p> tag, for paragraphs. The normal text in this article is all contained within <p> tags.
These, and all other elements, are formatted with a ‘margin’ attribute, that by default sets exactly how far away from the left side of the window the elements will be formatted.
These are all normal functions for the average HTML page, and these are all normal functions for the average Word document.
And it makes total sense! Imagine considering how best to democratise take-up of this completely new technology in the 1990s. We needed some point of reference to help people make the switch from analogue to digital, no easy feat. By providing the analogy of the book, we gave the first builders on the web some training wheels for take up which has clearly worked incredibly well.
Similar or Different?
Didn’t I write fifteen thousand words on why they are different? Why am I arguing that they are similar?
Well, I’m not so much arguing that they are similar, but that we have deliberately made them appear similar in their structural design.
And we can see the results of this. Most web pages you visit, whilst maybe having some extra movement or actions with javascript code and the like, still ultimately conform to the structure of a ‘page’ as seen in a book. They have headers and paragraphs, and you scroll through them to keep reading.
But books, and pages, have their limits.
A book is a defined structure. There is only one way to read a book, by going page by page, start to finish. On the web, this is no different. We may have ‘links’ between pages that essentially offer us choices for the ‘next’ page we read, but even these links are linear, one way, providing extra options but ultimately not removing the same implicit ‘structure’ originally created in the book.
But the web is more than this. The web is a universe, a dimension, an environment. You only need to see the progress of Virtual Reality technologies to know this to be the case.
An environment isn’t a predefined, one-way journey. An environment is defined by the ability to choose how, when, where and why you explore that environment. In an environment you have agency, maybe even freedom.
Where to from here?
I described the tags for HTML as ‘training wheels’ to help us acclimatise to the web. But, eventually, we must remove the training wheels, otherwise they will just prevent us from doing more.
It is now more than thirty years since the internet, and the web, started to receive popular take up. Generations have been born and grown up with the internet as an implicit part of their everyday lives.
Perhaps we are ready to remove the training wheels, and start to design environments, rather than pages, on the web.
“At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world.”
(A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari, 1980)