Many Eyes

You might already be familiar with the ways in which all of our movements are tracked on the Web: As we click from page to page, server software watches us, noting the patterns of movement. Often this information is used to increase the usability of sites, as designers notice successions of users walking into blind alleys and backing out before reaching their destination.

But probably more often than it improves usability, server software tracks our movements in order to target us with ads. And sometimes—who knows how often—our movements are tracked by governments or other agencies possessing uncertain motives.

As our texts become increasingly networked, such data gathering will become ubiquitious. From an author's standpoint, we'll gain better understandings of how people move through our own texts. We will become less focused on writing texts and, instead, sometimes oriented more broadly to the field called user experience design (UxD) (Morville, 2004).