City of News: cataloguing the World Wide Web through Virtual Architecture

" How do we explore the digital box of fragments that pastes together disjunctive arrays of images and sets of data into a seemingly continuous display? " … We " need to develop new modes of perception with which to receive, absorb, criticize, and produce new combinations of information " M. Christine Boyer In a 1995 article, appeared in " Le Monde Diplomatique " , the French theorist of technology, Paul Virilio, describes the phenomenon of the loss of orientation experienced by the exponentially increasing crowd which is relentlessly enthralled in cyberspace. Virilio observes that the construction of information superhighways, which are globalized and instantaneously updated, presents us with a threat, a menace to our perception of what reality is, of what it means for us to exist, as individuals, here and now. Induced by the splitting of the sensible world into real and virtual in parallel with the " invention of the perspective of real-time " , this threat causes a shock, a " mental concussion " , that hooks the happenings of events to a globalized monorail track. We have extended Virilio's concern to the varied world of the Net, and observed that for many, the Web is a wasteland of information, a Babel without dictionary, an encyclopaedia with no table of contents, an unstructured territory without a map. While web crawlers and search engines help us locate general topics information, even while using these tools, we often experience, with Virilio, " information anxiety " , and loose our bearings in the " flatland " of our regular browsers, under the vast horizon of the information superhighways. In order for any kind of information to be presented to us in a way which is not fragmented or disruptive of our current activities, for it to become a part of our cognitive space, and be remembered and integrated with the flow of our mental activities, we need to be able to map, directly or by analogy, some of the real-world architecture back into the computer display. We need to build a display environment, a tailored information landscape, which helps people construct a cognitive map to organize, sort, classify, remember, integrate, the variety of textual or visual information presented. In accomplishing this task, we have been inspired by the existing literature in the field of spatial orientation, from a cognitive psychology perspective, as well as the literature on mnemonics. Our …