Less is More (or how I made my way from BBS to Google in 20 years)

Memory: It's 1980-something and I'm looking through some floppy disks for our Commodore 64. I find one labeled BBS and figure that it's some sort of game- what else is the C64 for? After a half hour of trouble shooting, I've got phone lines connected to our modem and I'm online, only to find out that BBS stands for Boring-Boring-Stupid. I suddenly regret my stubborn curiosity because I now only have 15 minutes of "computer time" left, most of which I spend loading up The Nodes of Yesod.

***

Memory: It's 1991 and I'm over at my friend Tim's house. We play Sim City for a while before he decides to show me this new thing they've got. He loads up CompuServe and we browse around for a few minutes before I tell him that I'd rather get back to building our city.

***

Memory: It's 1995 and my family installs America Online for the first time on our home computer. By this time, I'm in high school and although I'm still interested in video games I'm also very interested in this new form of technology that's beginning to permeate past Compute Magazine and into the mainstream.

***

Memory: It's 1999 and I'm back home from college. My parents are talking about ditching AOL and I'm glad. Other Internet Service Providers have taken its place and now AOL seems somewhat confining since the service wants to control every aspect of my online interactions. I've been away at college using an "ISP only" to explore world wide web. I'm now used to "surfing the net" and getting lost in different pages. AOL wants to bring it all to me, and I'd rather go out there and get it.

***

Memory: It's 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. I'm creating a presence on livejournal, myspace, facebook, youtube, and wikipedia. I'm also visiting the pages for about 10-15 webcomics, news sources, and blogs that I enjoy reading. I'm surfing the net less and less because I'm finding things I like and don't have time to go looking for other things.

***

Memory: It's mid-late 2008 and I'm loading a bunch of applications into my iGoogle homepage. Most of them are designed to bring content from all over the internet directly to me in one place so that I don't have to go to multiple sites a day just to get it. My spirit of exploration and adventure is still there, but it's nice that I don't have to spend so much time blazing through trash just to find things I enjoy.

***

Now: I don't know exactly when it happened, but somewhere between the time I said hello to AOL and the time I streamlined content into my iGoogle page I followed the philosophy behind the Paradox of Choice.

Basically, it boils down to this- choice is a good thing, but too much choice is stagnating.

Too many options paralyzes us and forces us into this place where we can't really do much because we're too busy trying to figure out what we'd like to do. The unlimited world of the web was great for a while- surfing the net was filled with potential and excitement. There were places to explore and new things to see. But, eventually it simply became too much. It was too time consuming and there was too much information.

What Google and other sites that are allowing modifiable content are offering is the chance to customize a limited experience on the web that's filled with options- just not so many options that we're overwhelmed by the experience.

I like that.

I like the less is more philosophy behind the Paradox of Choice and I like that Google is smart enough to allow me limited interactions on the web, but ones that I can optimize and control- unlike AOL who always wanted to force certain things into my online experience and didn't allow the user to define the experience.

And how's this for irony- from what I remember of that BBS program, it looked an awful lot like my current iGoogle homepage. It just took 20 years for me to appreciate it.