Paradox of the Web: Fragmentation & Aggregation
I was recently reading an article on Read Write Web about a proposed social media dashboard that will “let users integrate all their social networks from around the web into one central dashboard. He calls it the DiSO Dashboard.”
Regardless of what you think of this idea, it got me thinking about the paradox of the Internet: it facilitates fragmentation which in turn creates demand for aggregation.
What’s interesting is that we don’t like having our choices limited; however, once we have too many choices we need a way to make sense of all the overwhelming choice we so desire.
Perhaps this isn’t unique to just the web, but instead unique to human nature. According to Nielsen, the average home receives 118 channels, but only watches 16.
It seems that we want it all, but then we don’t know what to do with it all once we get it.
