Dept. of Minor Observations
A repository of bulletins, field reports, working papers, and notices concerning small thoughts, odd details, internet archaeology, abandoned drafts, and gentle critiques of modern digital culture. Items are classified, stamped, and filed accordingly.
A preliminary taxonomy of browser tabs
Category 1 — The Intention Tab. Opened with purpose but never acted upon. Contains either a recipe, a Wikipedia article about a country, or a form that was 70% completed before something more interesting happened.
Category 2 — The Reference Tab. Kept open because closing it feels like forgetting. The article will be read again one day. But not tomorrow. The day of reading it again will arrive at some point.
Category 3 — The Guilt Tab. An email you opened, decided to think about because it was important, and you are still thinking about it eleven days later.
Category 4 — The Relic Tab. Pre-dates any current interests. There is not indication why it was open in the first place. Its origin is unknown. It loads a 404.
This taxonomy is under reconsideration. New categories are continuously emerging.
Draft notes toward a history of the favicon
The favicon emerged from a caching side-effect. Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 would silently request a file named favicon.ico from every server visited, logging 404 errors when none existed. Webmasters, investigating their own logs, discovered they were being asked a question by a browser that expected no answer.
Some answered anyway. A 16×16 pixel art form was born from an error.
The Department considers this an insightful origin story. Many of the web's lasting conventions began as accidents, workarounds or just plain misunderstandings that refused to be corrected. The favicon persists. The browser that created it does not.
These notes are provisional. A full working paper is anticipated but never promised.
Working notes on ambient notifications
Consider: the notification that arrives to tell you nothing has changed. The bank app that notifies you that your statement is ready. The service that notifies you that it has sent you an email. The email that notifies you that a notification awaits.
We have built information environments in which systems endlessly inform each other of their informing, recursively, without approaching anything that could reasonably be called information.
The Department speculates whether this constitutes a new category of communication. It is not signal, it is not noise, but sits so clearly somewhere in between that we still lack a word for. Signo? Nonal? Suggestions are welcome. This paper is under reconsideration pending receipt of a better word.
Towards a phenomenology of the unread badge
The notification badge, a red circle containing a number, presents
a count of items awaiting attention. For most applications, this number
bears no relationship to the actual capacity or intention of the person seeing the notification.
Observed: a badge reading 2,847 on an email application. You have
not read these emails. You will not read these emails. The number
is not seen as 2,847 discrete tasks or communications but as a single ambient
condition, like the expected high in today's weather report.
The badge was designed to prompt action. It has, through accumulation,
become background scenery. The Department suspects this was not the intended
outcome and may prepare a fuller account of what it means to design
for attention in a world that has apparently run out of it.
Working notes on the word, "Content"
"Content" is what writing became when it needed to be produced at
scale. It is also what painting became, and photography, and video,
and music, and conversation, when each of these was required to fill
a feed that urgently needed filling.
The word is accurate. Content is what remains when you remove the
question of what something is more specifically. It is the relic of a poem, a memoir, an
argument or a joke and retains only the fact of its existence as a form of
material to be distributed and consumed.
The Department does not see this is a complaint. A container that
holds everything then holds everything without differentiation - or interest.
This paper remains under
reconsideration pending a clearer sense of what was lost when we
stopped asking what was really in the container - and what was meant by it.
On streets that are named after things that are no longer there
Mill Road. Forge Lane. Orchard Close. Tannery Court. Bakehouse Close.
These street names record a working landscape that has been entirely
replaced by the streets themselves. The mill is gone, the road remains,
still named after it. The forge, the tannery, the
bakehouse, all gone. The orchard is definitely no longer close. Sometimes these have not been there for centuries.
The Department finds this form of accidental memorial curious. No
one decided to commemorate these things. The names were once functional
then they became decorative and now they are historical without having
any history. The landscape is annotated, if you give it
enough time.
Notes on the end of the Internet Archive entry
Every website has, or will have, a final snapshot in the Wayback
Machine. A last crawl after which no further versions are recorded. It will be the result of a variety of reasons, because the site was taken down, the domain lapsed, or the content moved somewhere else and this address was quietly retired.
The final snapshot is not marked as final. It can't be. It looks identical to every
other snapshot. You only know it is the last one because nothing ever appears
after it.
The Department finds this a realistic model for so many endings. Endings
are not announced, they do not look different from the moments before
them and their finality is only visible in retrospect. From a position
further along the timeline, looking back.
Draft remarks on the QR code in the wild
The QR code disappeared for approximately a decade after its invention.
It was considered a failed format. It was an answer to a question nobody was
asking. It required a dedicated app to scan a thing that your eye could not
read.
The pandemic restored purpose. Restaurant menus, check-ins, payment systems.
The QR code returned not because it had been improved but because the world
had reorganised itself around the assumption that a camera existed in every pocket or bag.
The Department is reconsidering its position on whether formats can be just be
ahead of their time, or whether timing is the format. This paper remains
under reconsideration pending a clearer view of what this distinction
would imply.
Preliminary notes on the 404 Page as self-portrait
The 404 page — displayed when a requested web page cannot be found — has
become an unofficial genre of institutional self-expression. Where the
rest of a corporate website is subject to close brand review, legal clearance,
and multiple stakeholder sign-off, the 404 page is often left to a developer to complete on a Friday afternoon.
The results are disproportionately revealing. Jokes that no other page
would permit, mascots that appear nowhere else, candour about failure
that the polished homepage would never allow. The 404 page is what is found at the back of the drawer — the place where the organisation keeps the version of itself
that it does not officially endorse or see the need to formally condone.
These notes are preliminary. A full taxonomy of 404 page types is
anticipated.
Notes on the word "Ecosystem" in product marketing
An ecosystem, properly understood, is a system of mutual dependence in
which many species coexist, with no single participant in control of
the whole. It is characterised by levels of redundancy, constant competition and the
threat of catastrophic collapse from a destablised system.
Product marketing has adopted the word to now mean a range of products by
the same manufacturer that work well together and poorly with
everything else. This is closer to a plantation than an ecosystem.
The Department is reconsidering whether to object to this usage or
whether the original meaning of "ecosystem" now requires similar scrutiny.
Both positions have merit. The paper remains open.