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Abundantly abundant abundance
October 10, 2007
From my column in Thursday's Guardian:
The Facebook app Dramatic Whitespace is more than just a bit of silliness (though it's certainly that). It's a sly comment on the net's reigning design ethic: the cramming of as much stuff as possible into every bit of available space. The thought that a pixel might go to waste seems to fill site owners with dread.
The worst examples of data overload can be found inside the social networks themselves. At Facebook's main rival, MySpace, people seem to compete to create the densest, ugliest pages imaginable. Photographs, videos, music snippets, wacky fonts and assorted digital bling are thrown together into eye- and ear-assaulting jumbles.
But professional media sites are little better ...
Read.
Advertisement: Coming this spring: Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Preorder now from Amazon.
Comments
Internet looks quite neat to me: can anyone without an ad-blocker can tell me how it is like without?
Posted by: Bertil ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.roughtype.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 11, 2007 05:02 AM
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Nick's next book:
Nick's latest book:
"Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company
"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews
"Riveting stuff" -New York Post
Greatest hits
Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians
The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar
Flight of the wingless coffin fly
Other writing
The end of corporate computing
Nick's first book:
Order from Amazon
Visit book site