Bottomless Media: How Screen-Scrolling Fuels An Anxious World
“When information becomes abundant, attention becomes a scarce resource” — Herbet A. Simon, economist, psychologist and Nobel Laureate.
Scrolling is a relatively new behavior in the compendium of human doing. Humans have evolved through our ability to perform a series of singular actions unrivalled by any other species: throwing, clubbing (the Neolithic kind), endurance running, walking upright, wielding tools, manipulating objects and using speech. Scrolling — the behavior you see on commuter trains and subways, in airport lounges and doctors’ waiting rooms, in the lulls between conversations— is perhaps the the trademark action of modern humans in the Information Age.
Architecturally, scrolling is a natural response to the verticalization of smartphone screen design, an offshoot of the increasing seamlessness of our digital experiences. It is a way of showing somebody chunks of content without interrupting their navigation flow or requiring them to click on a killjoy Next button. Scrolling makes it easy and pleasurable to peruse lots of content in seamless bursts — a smart design choice for economizing on valuable digital real estate.
But what does this seemingly negligible action really mean. What does it truly mean to scroll?
