While reading through the chapters of Morville’s Ambient Findability I found a particular focus on the construction of our navigational abilities, and it’s transcendence from a simplified combination of natural elements to the sophisticated “maze” that human navigation has developed in to. What I found so interesting about Chapter 2: A Brief History Of Wayfinding is the relation shared by the constantly developing human mind and the advancing technology that surrounds us. We act accordingly to our environment, by incorporating sensory stimulates in relation to our current physical standing the ability to navigate successfully through our surroundings is achievable. This capacity is also transferable to the technological realm. With the Internet so readily available, (Smart phones, laptops, tablets…) it is absolutely necessary that we maintain an overall appreciation of the varied level of risk associated with having access to infinite amounts of information at our fingertips. With such a large platform to traverse it would seem possible that we may unknowingly impact our physical world by our actions online. We alone are responsible for what we search for, as well as anything that we might upload or download, and while it is our cognitive thought processes that instruct us what we publicly write, or what we read or see it is society’s responsibility to determine our level of appropriateness. On the World Wide Web the line of public versus private is so very blurred that we lose focus on where we were headed in the first place, our navigational abilities online contrasts with the way in which we navigate the natural world.
In concern to my own level of personal privacy it would not be a stretch to pronounce that I, like most Americans, treat it as something that demands the respect and appreciation of others. Whether it is an invasion of my personal space or the unpermitted publication of private conversation/documents for the world to openly interpret, there is something uneasy about the growing pace in which we share our information. Morville understands that in order to adapt to our online environments, we must properly react to the ever-constant change. New surroundings mean unfamiliarity and, like the “Cataglyphis ants”(Morville 18) in Saharan Africa we must adjust to survive.