Ghost in the machine: The architecture of information spaces
There exists a new spirit.
Fifteen years ago, in 1998, Peter Morville & Lou Rosenfeld could argue that the Web was the unifying factor for many different technologies and wildly diverse types of content. We cannot anymore.
In 2013, the Web is but one piece of a larger mechanism: our focus has moved away from the single artifact to consider the ecosystem they participate in, this complex, distributed, information-based beast.
Constantly reshaped and reconnected over an arbitrary number of different interacting channels by an ever increasing amount of actors, ecosystems force us out of the Web, a “simpler” world where the lenses provided by library science or graphic design seemed to be enough. Not anymore.
Information has gone mobile and has bled into physical space, but mobile itself is not the revolution, it is an enabler. The revolution is in what constant access to dynamically remediated information is allowing us to do, in how it allows the digital to seep into physical space, in how it turns receivers into writers constantly weaving new subjective narratives.
Being constantly jacked-in changes our relationship with computing and information, introducing a new need for context, place and meaning that is deeply rooted in both our ghost, our cognitive side, and our shell, our physical body. We live and thrive in cyberspace.
This is a new spirit. It is the spirit of a different order, bringing not unity but multiplicity and complexity; bridging our many disembodied self, connecting people, places, objects through ever-changing semantics that defy or enhance physical proximity; transforming information spaces into durable architectures, and ultimately reshaping reality. The language this spirit speaks is that of information architecture.