Of late I have been looking at web pages with new eyes. The cause of this is the new device I am using to view those pages, the iPad. My new view is that like most of our current communication media, the web is filled with noise, and the noise level is rising.
This is nothing new on the macro level – a search of almost any weird, irrelevant or inconsequential term will return hundreds, if not thousands or hundreds of thousands of results. "Pumpkin Chunking" returns 84,500 results, including video, pictures and Wikipedia entries. A search of "useless information" returns an amazing 23,100,000 results in 0.21 seconds. This noise is nothing new and has been commented on more than once.
However, the noise I am referring to is on a micro level, and exists on, as far as I can tell, each and every page on the web. When viewing those pages on a PC with a mouse, the noise level is only mildly annoying – a popup that appears as you hover your mouse over nothing in particular while reading, an intrusion of an ad that suddenly grows larger for no discernable reason, and which has some hidden mechanism for dismissal.
This noise escalates to a din when trying to read a web page on the iPad, due primarily to two actions that seem inherent on the iPad.
The first is the simple fact that after a time the damn thing gets heavy, and you shift it in your hand to get a better grip. Should any part of your hand hit a hyperlink on the screen you will suddenly find yourself in a new place, and on a new page. If you looked up while you shifted the device from hand to hand you might not even notice the reload, just a curious disconnect as you wonder "was this what I was reading?"
The other is related to one of the best features of the iPad, the ability to zoom by pinching your fingers on the screen and expanding. It seems there is a down side to this ability, which is the tendency I have to linger too long after the zoom. My finger is now interpreted as another mouse click, and off I go to another page I didn't really want.
The sequence (and it is now solid enough to be a sequence) is this: find something to read, load the page, see the font is too small to see, enlarge, wait for the margins to readjust to see if I need to re or un-zoom, inadvertently linger on a hyperlink, see the reload in progress, wait, go to a new and unwanted page, press back arrow, wait some more, finally read what I wanted, but now with a heightened sense of tactile caution.
I am not sure what to do about this. I realize that hyper linking is the foundation of the web, but it seems to have gotten out of control. While I have not noticed this in the courses I am developing for web delivery, it is creeping into the LMS's that are used to launch those courses. Pages that are littered with links may now become a liability rather than just something convenient. Whatever else they are, they do raise the noise level, annoying on my PC, but a serious detriment to reading web pages on the iPad.
