The Information Activist Librarian

I recently read and replied to a post over at Stephan Abram’s blog Stephen’s Lighthouse.  He posed the question “What will the browser look like in 5 years?”

I stated:
“I think there is a fundamental flaw in their view of the browser of the future.  For now, the OS limits the computer to a solitary activity, but browsers don’t have to be so limited.  As a doctoral student studying collaborative information behavior, we librarians, library system-designers, and general system-designers have always assumed information behavior is an individual task, however research is demonstrating that this is just not true.  The only reason that people use computers alone is because they are designed that way.

What will the browser of the future look like?  Think way outside of the box.  It will look more like MMORPG than the current one-to-one interaction.”