People outside the realm of Facebook have talked about frictionless experiences before, but they have always talked about it in relationship to digital mediums. All the way back in 1996, Bill Gates was envisioning "frictionless capitalism" made possible by online, commercial communities.[1] Much more recently, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, said that "when you reduce friction - make something easier - people do more of it." This is how he introduced the X-Ray feature on the new Kindle Touch which reduces friction in several ways. Now a reader who needs to know a definition, cross-reference, character bio, or other bits of reference information, they merely hold their finger over the word/character in question and are treated to a variety of sources instantly. Nicholas Carr, commenting on Bezos's address, outlines other points of reduced friction and gives his take on the new technology:
The friction in this case is the self-containment of the printed book, the tenacity of its grip on the reader. The reduction of the friction is the replacement of text with highly responsive hypertext. What people do more of is shift their focus and attention away from the words of the book and toward the web of snippets wrapped around the book - dictionary definitions, Wikipedia entries, character descriptions from Shelfari, and so forth. It's easy to see the usefulness of X-Ray, particularly for reference books, manuals, and other publications of a utilitarian nature. But Bezos is not X-Raying a cookbook. He's X-Raying a novel: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. He is, in a very real sense, treating a work of art as though it were an auto repair manual. Which is, of course, what the web wants a work of art to be: not a place of repose, but a jumping-off point.
When Amazon delivers a copy of The Remains of the Day to your Kindle, Bezos goes on to explain, the company "has pre-calculated all of the interesting phrases" and turned them into links. My, what a convenience! As a reader, I no longer have to waste a lot of mental energy figuring out which phrases in a book are interesting. It's all been pre-calculated for me! Here we have a preview of what happens when engineers begin to recreate books, and the experience of reading, in the image of the web. The algorithmical mind begins to run roughshod over the literary mind. Needless to say, there are also commercial angles here. Clicking on an "interesting phrase" will no doubt eventually trigger not just Wikipedia and Shelfari articles but also contextual advertisements as well as product recommendations from Amazon's store. Removing the edges from a book also serves to reduce friction in the purchasing process.
In my mind Carr picks up on a lot of important points here that will be relevant in our later discussions of Facebook. A book is no longer a self-contained entity with a clear beginning and end; now it serves as a launch pad for diversions into hyperlinked references. I grew up having to look at context to determine the meaning of unclear words or phrases which, could be argued, made me a better reader (and, perhaps, conversation partner). A frictionless version of that same predicament requires the opposite experience as it radically decontextualizes a word, phrase, or character from its literary surroundings - not to mention the interruption in style and mood that a hyperlinked book most readily provides. Here Carr makes a content/form distinction that we could categorize as genre. We don't teach (or rather, haven't taught) students to read a sonnet the same way they read a newspaper clipping. Our expectations of the two genres should be different with respect to literary style, message, and even accessibility. The way information is transmitted in this frictionless technology at least moves in the direction of flattening genres and their corresponding expectations.
Whether or not this kind of interface is bad is, I suppose, debatable. My saying that there is some benefit in having to work through a difficult passage rather than clicking on it doesn't make it true. Maybe people will still be able to be swept away in a novel without the semi-constant desire to click on words and characters (if only to see if they have an entry - a motivation I can personally attest to), but that isn't what Bezos is counting on. Remember that he said that when friction is reduced, frequency of use is increased. If that is true, there is no getting lost in compelling stories, other worlds, or quality prose. Instead, readers are led astray into a forest of hypertexts and their return is of no concern.
But at least everyone will be lost in the same, "pre-calculated" forests.
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So I wonder if we'll get to a point where students won't know how to use an index or gather meaning from context, but I fear the point when they won't be expected to. Maybe my academic interests are coloring this discussion. While I whole heartedly mean everything I've said here, I don't think I need to know how to do long division (though it would be helpful on occasion), or use a slide rule, or sundial. Would people on the verge of the next technology (calculators and clocks) rant like I am? Is there something special about literature or am I just sensitive to the subject and want students to go through the "friction" that I had to go through in order to understand Shakespeare or the frictionfull, Chaucer?
I'm probably biased in this discussion because I value literature and critical reading skills, but in either case it is important to see that the brains behind significant aspects of our online experiences are attempting to remove friction in important ways. And, I think, a lot of those reductions and (not yet fully realized) consequences are analogous to what is happening with social media, and Facebook particularly.
Even if there isn't something special about literature, would we say the same thing of community, relationships, and/or friendships? A lot of the same frictionless philosophy saturates Facebook. Zuckerberg's vision of frictionless experiences is a "perfected" form of Bezos's where it won't just be used more often, but it will be used constantly and unthinkingly (and, as it turned out, unknowingly).
We'll begin our frictionless-Facebook journey next time.
[1]. Chris Werry, “Imagined Electronic Community: Representations of Online Community in Business Texts,” in Online Community and the Future of Internet Commerce, 10. For more on friction and internet commerce see: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/08/antitrust_20.php
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