The Invisible Browser
I think it was Donald Norman in “The Invisible Computer” who pointed out that as technologies get more and more common, and perhaps accepted, they recede into the background of our lives and become invisible. Witness the electric motor in the 19th century and the microprocessor in the 20th. (How many microprocessors do you have in your life today?)
Are we witnessing a similar “technology blindness” to the web browser? Is Internet connectivity and usage so ubiquitous that average users take it for granted? A recent survey by Google, reported at TheNextWeb.com, suggests that the average American (almost 92%) do not know what a web browser is and cannot contrast it to a search engine (like Yahoo, Bing, Cuil). Whether this has ramifications on Web 2.0 and education remains to be seen.