The linear web


The internet is vast. It encompasses so many realms that were once only reachable via tangible items and places. That of course is no longer the case. We can purchase physical goods with the click of a button—gone are the markets of old. Social interactions are personified by the posting of pictures and sharing of other web places—gatherings are now rare. Perhaps these are a bit exaggerated, but there is a certain sentiment about the change itself. Our mirror to the world so to speak is this connected web of digital things. We view the web in various ways and forms, starting with the desktop computer, capable of so many things yet relegated to simple tasks such as communications and entertainment. One of the most integral parts of the desktop computing experience is the web browser, the vehicle which we use to navigate the murky internet waters.

The web browser is ancient. Web pages are old scrolls. While vast, the internet is slow and stupid of the future. A web page consists of bits of information arranged like a document; it flows like a book, each of its pages like chapters; and to some degree the presentation changes—a novel to a picture book or an encyclopedia to a three-dimensional popup coffee table book. The linear web shows this information in a linear way. The information is contained to these websites and cannot easily be displayed or traversed without these troublesome references to books—bookmarks, favorite pages, back, forward, history.

I propose a new web, one that is not linear. It utilizes the same data, it’s stored and accessed the same way via a browser, but it is interfaced in a webbed-fashion. It behaves like a hive mind, accessing the billion bits of information ahead and those trillion bits before. Imagine a living web that can be circumnavigated like a globe, new nodes appear and disappear within the sphere and you can traverse it however you please. This web is truly its namesake.

View an example of this new web, aptly named sphere web.