We are all ticks, an odd, highly-intelligent species of ticks with eyes, brown, blue, green, hazel, glaucoma-hazed or bloodshot, when we're on the Web doing who knows what, all of us sniffing out our personal form of butyric acid. On the Web, depending on our respective reasons for being there, here, we traverse the plane between an existence as a simple animal, at least as simple as a human browsing the Web can appear to be, and a multiform animal. If we want to use the Web to check the score of the Clemson versus Wake Forest basketball game, we're simple animals on a no-brain, caveman-like quest for water, which is just outside of our caves because it's raining. We open our browsers and the home page is Yahoo.com, which has a link to sports that allows us to easily find the water from the sky that immediately quenches our thirst. (We discover, to our delight, that our beloved Tigers have won again!) With our tongues wet, we click on the "X" in the top-right corner of the screen and move on to something else. In such a case, the Web is a simple environment that produces only what we're after and we can be ticks with eyes and do what we need to do with our eyes closed. All the other information that makes the Web a complex space--the real news, gossip about celebrities, politics, the horoscopes--is all but ignored. On other occasions, a trip to the Web can turn us into multiform animals. When we are on the Web to research academic articles, we are wide-eyed ticks who are doing more than browsing. We are digging for specific articles. The environment of the Web is saturated with more information and sometimes we are frustrated because there isn't quite enough information. We still go through the process of perceiving butyric acid (articles that appear to be promising), but the prospects on whose backs we pounce increase because we are actively foraging as opposed to waiting, like our simple, eyeless, eight-legged, blood-sucking counterparts.
The Web as an environment space is a commodity that has been branded and the architects of the Web are going through great pains and reaping great rewards to ensure that users can have a great degree control of their environments so that the content that's useful to the users can be more accessible through personalization. The search for butyric acid is easier to come by if the home page of your favorite Web browser is modified to include links to your most frequent Web destinations.
Speaking of this home page... The home page is the orientation point of Web browsing. It's the branch on which the tick waits in a death-like state for as long as eighteen years to mount its attack. Every Web browser, whether it's Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Firefox has a setting that allows the user to choose a home page that will appear whenever the browser is opened. The user starts at the home page and goes off to fetch information from this page and that page, often returning to the home page in between trips out into the Web, like birds retrieving food or materials for building a nest. There's no need for one to question how to return to the home page because there's a soft button shaped like a house on which the user can click that takes them immediately home. No line of bread crumbs or rope tied to the ankle and a rock at the entrance of the cave are needed.
With the example of the Web as a space and us as either simpletons or high-minded primates making environments out of it, we should easily be able to associate with what the tick and other animals have done to survive. They have their stimuli, as do we. Our respective Web environments include our stimuli. A tick's environment is a little different than a spider's or a jackdaw's. Your Web environment is different than mine. Would you like to compare browsing histories?
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