Lesson: Making Decisions
The first web browser most of us early digital natives used featured only one tab. If we wanted to have two different things open at the same time, we were forced to have multiple browser windows cluttering our screens. In the early 2000s, Opera and Mozilla Firefox adopted the tabbed interface style which started a revolution in the way we consumed web content. We no longer had to decide to “move on” from one page to the next. We could simply open our new link in a new tab and continue along the way. What’s wrong with that?
Plenty.
The ability to keep multiple browser tabs open at any given time has changed the way we think about the content we consume. More than that, it changes the way we treat content we’ve finished with, but aren’t quite ready to abandon. This has created a generation of digital hoarders, who refuse to close browser window and tabs, constantly “holding on” to stuff we no longer need–keeping distraction just one tab click away.