Digital content: Are we lost without spatial navigation?

The Problem With the Web and E-Books Is That There’s No Space for Them, according to Mark Changizi. Changizi argues that prior to the emergence of the internet and ebooks, our information storage and retrieval mechanisms were primarily spatial in nature and could be physically navigated. That is, to locate a specific piece of information, for example population statistics, you would use your own existing knowledge and visual cues to remember where the relevant information was and to locate it: the census reports located on the bottom shelf in your office, with familiar paragraph structures and blocks of text to act as cues for navigating to the right information quickly. Essentially Changzi believes this type of spatial navigation process harnesses our brains' natural capabilities, but crucially depends on "fixed spatial placement within the book and on the page" - something which, in his view, web and ebook content generally lacks. Similar spatial cues don't exist when you try to find information online for example. Many people don't remember URLs, often they may even be subject to frequent change, and they aren't arranged in a spatial way like shelves in a library. Instead you typically use a search engine to find what you want.

Is finding digital content really that counter-intuitive?
I am not so sure about this. To me it seems pretty inefficient to always navigate information spatially in this way compared to the full text searching capabilities offered by digital content. Is "spatial navigability" really so essential? And does online and electronic content fundamentally change the information search process at such a basic level? I am no cognitive scientist but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that people's information behaviour is changing, and this is not necessarily a 'bad' thing. Kuhlthau's Information Search Process model is also a useful reference point here. Kulthau's research shows that the ISP Model (a constructive sense-making model of the stages involved in the information seeking process) applies as much in the digital environment as it does in the printed world (Kuhlthau, Heinström and Todd, 2008).

Digital publishing can offer added value compared to fixed spatial placement
Navigating information spatially in print may have made sense when this was the only option. Take an atlas for example: the idea of representing the world on a series of static, fixed, 9" X 12" printed pages bound together may have been a useful way of locating places when this was the best we had. However does it make sense to continue doing so, just because your brain might be used to the visual and spatial cues included in a printed atlas, when we have Google maps - an undoubtedly far more suitable way of storing and navigating geographic information? It is hard to imagine that the answer is yes.


Kuhlthau, C.C., Heinström, J. and Todd, R.J. 2008. "The 'information search process' revisited: is the model still useful?" Information Research, 13(4) paper 355. [Online] Available: http://informationr.net/ir/13-4/paper355.html