Products being designed to fulfill newly discovered "needs" are often the best gauge of cultural shifts. Given the lead times that come from market research and development cycles (and the overriding need to recoup an investment and make a buck), the launch of a new category of merchandise is a good tail-end indicator of a more significant movement within the zeitgeist.
Thus, there's something to be gleaned from the new bevy of applications designed to manage and organize Internet bookmarks. Aladdin System's CyberFinder, Onbase Technology's DragNet, and CE Software's WebArranger were all on display at San Francisco's MacWorld Expo. The assumption of these packages is that you have a good many bookmarks to manage and organize. How else to justify a separate application that replaces the bookmarking system already built into most Web browsers?
For a brief moment, allow us to reconnect to the original bookmark metaphor: a bookmark of the noncyber variety, if we recall, is used to mark a place within a book so that we can continue on from that point at some later time. True, this function did spawn its own industry - the mass production of laminated bookmarks, which, for whatever reasons, became a repository for some of the world's most appalling Christian imagery. But never did traditional media coax us to purchase a product to "manage" our bookmarks - with the possible exception of the wastebasket.
It's not as the futurists predicted - an information economy, based on the processing of facts and data. No one's processing the information they come across on the Web. Hell, no one's even reading it. It's too easy to note that a site might have some value at some vague, unspecified later date, bookmark it, and move on to bookmark the next unread site. Always traveling, never arriving. (What does it mean to talk about "surfing" the Net, other than to make a veiled reference to Sisyphus and his stone? The surfboard is not exactly a reliable means of getting from point A to point B.) As in the completist tendencies of collecting, the shared pathology of bookmarking allows the pursuit of the object to supplant any enjoyment of the object itself. Rather than moving to an information-based economy, we're still trapped within a libidinal economy of consuming desire, made pure. If you never eat, you never have to shit.
The old-media analogy, of course, would be walking into a bookstore to purchase the latest edition of Books in Print. Or walking into a library and borrowing the card catalog. Consider bookmarkings as Reader's Digest Condensed Books taken to their logical conclusion - why mess with an abridged version or abstract when you can have a work distilled down to its very essence - its title?
If the future of the Web is Interactive TV, and its proper antecedent is not literature but television - despite the fact that the Web today is largely text-based - we're wrong in our analysis. Just as we eventually commit to memory that Channel 21 is MTV, we might want a shorthand way to get to MTV on the Web, if we forget (perhaps wishfully) that we can simply type MTV in Netscape Navigator to tune in MTV Online. If that's the case, bookmarks is exactly the wrong term for what it is - a channel list. Rather than indicating a culture shift, the term bookmarks might only speak to the literary pretensions of certain network programmers. Maybe that's the only thing the AOL browser gets right - it calls its bookmark list "favorite places."
We like to think of bookmarks as bullets - many get a perverse sense of security from having them around, but most, in the end, are afraid to use them, given their ability to explode heads. Bookmarks or bullets, something bad would probably come of their use - but it's undeniably good to hold them in reserve, just in case something scary shows up on your front door. Bookmark 'em all, let God sort 'em out.
- Sucksters (www.suck.com)
