The Online Living Room

Google (yes, I know we write a lot about them in this space) has now begun to allow its users to personalize their home pages with panoramic tableaux that change with the time of day and the season. The overarching goal is to make the user's home page less sparse and more like his/her real life living room or reading room, maybe with a relaxing sunset and bucolic trees. Currently, users are restricted to six themes, but Google promises to introduce more piecemeal.

This brings us to an interesting topic, with many implications for web design. To what extent should the online space mirror the real world? What role does verisimilitude play in the online experience? Since its inception, the digital space has done its best to match-up with the tangible space. The desktop, the mailbox, and the notepad (just to name a few examples) all have analogues in real life. More provocatively, digital simulacra and virtual worlds, calling themselves metaverses, have now sprung up, replicating all that the real world has to offer (malls, restaurants, clubs, places of business) albeit in digital form. But should web designers really be trying to replicate reality, with all its foibles and quirks? It seems to me that the online space is at its best when it allows us to do things that would be impossible in real life; for example, could the user-driven content revolution really have happened within the confines of offline media and its attendant power structures? Unfortunately for Hilary, it probably couldn't have.

It all boils down to escapism. By making you provide your zip code, Google promises that its skins will match what you see outdoors. Strangely, however, blizzards, floods, and arid deserts don't find their way into the theme lineup, though there is a windy "Bus Stop," in which a man gets his hairpiece blown off his head. As the legion of office workers who have JPEGs of beaches as their wallpapers will contend, usually what we see on the screen is better than what we see outside.

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