The Morville writings we had to read for this week lead me to some interesting knowledge about wayfinding.  Basically, we as human beings, have tools our body uses that help us remember where we are and how we got there.  Morville defines wayfinding as a “series of things people know and do in order to get from one place to another, inside or outside” (Morville 16).  Our genetic makeup allows us to find ways to remember the location of the environment we live in; in other words it finds ways to not get lost.  Now, as we humans have evolved, so have the tools we have used that help us find our location.  We first started with compasses, maps, etc., which have evolved into GPS systems and more detailed maps that give us exact turn-by-turn directions so that we pretty much never will get lost.  We are anything but lost, we are findable, or in the best terms, we are found.

In this reading, Morville defined findability for us claiming that it “is a bridge that spans the physical and digital worlds, enabling us to import and export concepts at will” (Morville 39).  We have so many gadgets now that keep us from ever getting lost that we no longer need to worry about it.  We no longer have to worry about finding our way, which was our first instinct when we made grunt noises and such, but we now have to find our way over various forms of technologies.  The Web, cellphones, computers, etc. are all new technologies we have that enable us to exert wayfinding in different ways.  Since we’re not lost, we wayfind over the Web, with Facebook, Twitter, Call of Duty, Kindle’s, and iPads.  The list can go on forever.  Since we no longer really need maps, our bodies find other ways to wayfinding because that’s what it wants to do.

From this article I have found that because we have evolved and adapted to our new environment, our approach to wayfinding has changed dramatically.  We still need wayfinding but not in the way we used to when our species was much younger.  As we have evolved, so has the technology we created to help us with wayfinding.  Morville said, “We use language to construct worlds of words that are, in a very real sense, navigable” meaning we have altered our wayfinding to fit our new environment (Morville 33).  Our new environment just happens to be the Web and the technologies we have to be on the Web at all times.