So many technologies in the internet space are hung up on the old way, last year's thinking. Thinking about major blogging platforms "wordpress", "moveable type", etc. Typography is an important discipline that endlessly compels the font geeks. All of western civilization is built on print. Gutenberg built the printing press over 500 years ago and ushered in an era of transformative, awe inspiring change. Literacy thrived and civilization prospered. In short the printed word is and has been great. But I think it is well time we consciously abandon the print metaphor in our design, technology, and most importantly our thinking. Marshall McLuhan once famously said:

"The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."

By which I think he meant to drive home the point that the technology, the process, the medium, is what defines things and how we relate to the world and moreover what is even possible to understand in the world.

When it comes to the internet and contemporary publishing technology we must remain vigilant of the old metaphors and assumptions that belie our experience and by extension our understanding. If we see the world in terms of print we will only see the web as merely a vehicle for said print. But if we escape the metaphor of print we will see new things. Of course, this is easier said than done. We grow comfortable with old things, change is abhorrent to many, and disruption makes reaching the destination difficult. But I worry that old ways of thinking, even if they are forgotten modes, have a way of forcing the blinders upon us.

The web has achieved a degree of sophistication and professionalization now that is profound. There is a certain stability and foundational heft to the technology. I wonder if it makes us too complacent. I wonder if lurking in the dark recesses of the technology world is the hobgoblin of print. And we continue to feed it and appease it because it is what we understand. In short because it is old, and, by necessity, familiar. What happens when we imagine a world where nobody can read? In a sense there seems to be usability research to suggest that in fact on the web nobody reads. There is a great refusal to read. I think what people do today is parse. They segment things and categorize according to their interests and motivations. Search engines, parsing automatons, are the captains of industry today. And in this space people carve out experience and try to share experience. But print remains because it is the preeminent and dominant force. But even as we speak there are technologies afoot to subvert the social order of print. But even as these forces work to subvert print they are simultaneously imprisoned by it.

Think about a tool like Twitter. An amazing technological revolution. But at the end of the day what is the defining characteristic? 140 characters per tweet. The printed word reins supreme. Think about programming languages. At the most rudimentary level most primitive types are strings and numbers. We count the number of characters in a string and we apply mathematical wizardry to conjure meaning out of a stream of 1s and 0s. But doesn't this all point to a prison of print? We care about words, because we are the prisoner of words.

The ability to describe the alternative universe is difficult because it must be imagined without words, it must be experienced without the vestigial baggage of past metaphor. But as a thought experiment, imagine, if you will, for one moment what alternative delimiter, besides 140 characters, could be the defining characteristic of something like twitter? If not words and characters, then what? Perhaps time is the answer. I can post something on twitter, youtube, etc and you will experience it for a fixed duration of time. Some sites and technologies will cater to the 30 second increments, others 5 minutes, others an hour or more. Everything could be defined in how much time must be spent per unit of experience or information. In a certain sense this is already well established in other mediums. Think about film. When it comes to movies we have a reasonably well defined system of the time duration to expect, around 2 hrs. An indulgent director spends 3+ hours, many will be turned off by the excess. Pay full price for a film that lasts only 1.5 hrs and you might feel ripped off. The film industry knows this and structures their experiences around these constraints. Television has the well defined sitcom, or mini drama. There are animated shorts, etc. Time is part of the inherent structure of the format.

Time is a useful dimension and perhaps viable design metric. But it certainly is not the only constraint. There may be many others, number of photos, number of gestures required to complete task, who knows. Even marketing could be creatively reconfigured in terms of alternative dimensional units of experience. But for all of this to happen we have to shake off the mantle of print and literacy. At the very least, we must examine the print metaphors that continue to dominate the technology landscape. And by doing so new experience, design, and technology becomes possible.