{"id":2486,"date":"2015-06-19T17:54:55","date_gmt":"2015-06-19T17:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joshworth.com\/?p=2486"},"modified":"2020-11-23T19:26:06","modified_gmt":"2020-11-23T19:26:06","slug":"the-infinite-scroll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/the-infinite-scroll\/","title":{"rendered":"The Infinite Scroll"},"content":{"rendered":"

I remember the first time I looked at a blog. It was a tech blog by an engineer I worked with in the late nineties. I remember being very confused, not by the words that were written, which were fine, but by the format itself. I couldn’t figure out why the thoughts were going backward in time as I read down the page.<\/p>\n

When you read a page in a magazine or a book, the thoughts and paragraphs proceed in an orderly fashion from top to bottom. The words and letters in front of you all occupy and represent a single, static piece of space-time real-estate.<\/p>\n

This “blog” thing, with its stupid name, had the entire concept of how to visually represent linear thought completely wrong. Why was I being asked to swim upstream in a writer’s stream of consciousness? Was this some kind of Japanese invention created by people who were used to reading their comic books backwards?<\/p>\n

It was only when I took note of the date-stamp on each titled paragraph that I realized I was supposed to be reading this with a completely different mindset. The bold titles weren’t subheads leading me into a subsequent idea, but rather an indicator of a completely separate thought that occurred and was published at some other time entirely. I needed to discard the top-down sorting paradigm of the printed page and replace it with a time-inclusive method, like the one I used for reading my email inbox or the posts on a message board.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Which Way is Up?<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

When it comes to representing or understanding time in a digital designs, we really don’t know which way is up. Which direction represents the past and which is the future? Is the future the thing we just read at the top of the page, or the thing waiting for us down at the bottom?\u00a0<\/em>In an instant message thread, the next message appears at the bottom of the screen,\u00a0while\u00a0the ones from the past scroll to the top.\u00a0On social media feeds, the\u00a0exact opposite is true.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Even today, Apple mail lets the user have the final say on which way is up.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

Newness and Nowness<\/h3>\n

Over the course of the past 15 years we’ve all internalized the\u00a0“newest-on-top” method\u00a0of info-consumption to the point that it’s become\u00a0a core component of\u00a0online literacy. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and\u00a0pretty much every blog or\u00a0news outlet is\u00a0presented in the form of a “feed” where the words that get top billing are the ones that were uttered just now.<\/p>\n

In a feed, it doesn’t matter if it’s a political headline,\u00a0a\u00a0witty comment about what’s on TV, a photo of your neighbor’s remodeled kitchens, or\u00a0the results of your seventh-grade science partner’s “what condiment\u00a0are you?”\u00a0quiz. If it’s new, it belongs on\u00a0top.\u00a0We remain\u00a0perpetually enticed by the possibility of something revelatory\u00a0appearing in the next nanosecond.<\/p>\n

The feed-form, to its credit, eliminates the\u00a0illusion that the future is something we can know or discover. The\u00a0future has no place\u00a0in a feed. It’s\u00a0a design that encourages us to be conscious of the present\u00a0moment, to\u00a0embrace the “Now,” and keep our minds from drifting into temporal\u00a0realms over which we have\u00a0no\u00a0control.\u00a0Just as you can never truly predict what will happen in the next moment\u00a0\u2013\u00a0a fly might land on you, the power might go out, you might have a brain aneurism, etc. \u2013\u00a0you can never\u00a0scroll upwards any further than the top of the page. “What’s coming next?” you ask? On a printed page, you simply scan down the page to find out. But with\u00a0a web feed, the future is, quite\u00a0accurately, the thing that hasn’t yet happened. Or at least the thing that hasn’t yet loaded.<\/p>\n

With the never-ending updates appearing at the top, it’s not the unfolding of a story that compels us to continue reading downwards, it’s the\u00a0fear\u00a0that we might’ve missed something.\u00a0We scroll down into the past, scanning the headlines, hashtags and summaries for some\u00a0important item\u00a0that we should probably\u00a0pretend to care about if anyone asks. The further down we go, the less relevant things\u00a0feel. We\u00a0begin to smell the dank must\u00a0of yesterday’s news. Sure, it’s fun to delve into the archives\u00a0of someone’s blog (try it<\/a>!)\u00a0\u2013\u00a0but the\u00a0deeper we\u00a0dig, the more we begin to feel the\u00a0suffocating weight of the\u00a0ever-growing mountain of nowness on the surface above. So we look around for some “back to top” arrow\u00a0that can sling\u00a0us back to the action on the front lines of the headlines.<\/p>\n

By feeding into this fear of missing out, (or “FoMO” as annoying people refer to it), the feed-form has taken a\u00a0toll on the modern psyche by removing the sense that the future and the past are stationary items that we’re free to access\u00a0whenever necessary. Unlike a page made of paper, which\u00a0acts as a permanent record of a particular moment, a feed-form web-page is a moving vessel headed for\u00a0the future, leaving the past in its wake.<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

\"boatpluck\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s only once you pluck an item from the ever-flowing data-river\u00a0and\u00a0immerse yourself in a story or article that you’re able to resume the\u00a0downward progress through a static record of sequential ideas.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

They lived happily ever after. Once upon a time.<\/h3>\n

Presenting new information at the top of a page is a fine and sensible\u00a0idea, of course. Most importantly, it\u00a0encourages users to keep coming back to see what’s new.\u00a0But I wonder if my initial confusion about how to read that first blog was really just a jolt to my\u00a0internal sense of how to read a story.<\/p>\n

Our brains\u00a0are constantly looking for connections between bits of information to try and form them into a larger, coherent pattern. If the snippets\u00a0fit\u00a0together in a satisfying, harmonious way,\u00a0they form a story. And\u00a0the order in which details\u00a0are presented is a key component of any good story. (If you doubt that, try binge-watching all episodes of\u00a0Breaking Bad<\/em> in reverse order.)<\/p>\n

That’s why I’m always curious about why people seem so unfazed when a feed presents the end\u00a0of a story before the beginning. Like if your friend live-Tweeted his hangover\u00a0a few hours ago, you would see:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"hangover<\/a><\/p>\n

And, much like the heroes of the 2010 R-rated comedy hit The Hangover<\/em>, we’re forced to re-assemble the story using the\u00a0fragments of information\u00a0we can pick up\u00a0as we stumble around. The timeline of events and the trajectory of memory are laid out in opposite directions. There are no surprise endings, only surprise beginnings.<\/p>\n

The ancient ability to\u00a0assemble thoughts and events\u00a0into a story allows us to find their hidden meanings, subtexts and thematic connections. By regularly exercising a\u00a0tool of online literacy that requires us to discard\u00a0our natural sense of story\u00a0structure, are we\u00a0unwittingly diminishing\u00a0the very mechanism by which we\u00a0process and understand the chaos\u00a0around us?<\/p>\n

Only time will tell, I guess. I’ll post any new findings\u00a0at the top of my blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is the web messing with our sense of time and story?\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,11,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","category-media","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4070,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486\/revisions\/4070"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}