In one sense, computer users do navigate from place to place, moving from the Finder/Desktop from folder to folder, across disks, into word-processing, graphics, video, and audio programs, and even out to the network, where they traverse the World Wide Web and enter into other user's computers. But "navigation" puts perhaps the wrong spin on what I see happening here: users are not going anywhere. Rather, the world is brought to them. As Virilio ironically puts it,
[W]ith the revolution of instantaneous transmissions, we are witnessing the beginnings of a type of general arrival in which everything arrives so quickly that departure becomes unnecessary.This situation leads to a couple of potentially troubling (but probably familar) problems, such as the impulse for computer programs to move menu items (which are accessible but relatively invisible) into the interface itself in the form of toolboxes (as with Aldus PageMaker) and button bars (as with Microsoft Word). Symptomatically, these movements foster the idea that everything important is visible, that the distance between desire and result should be near zero, that the World Wide Web really extends inclusively over the entire world. Certainly these are only tendencies, and ones that are commonly reversed by other factors, but there appears to be a clear shift toward what we might call interface inclusiveness.
Click here to read linearly or click
on a link marker below.