The icon and exclusivity

More and more frequently I see the standard text link, which has fuelled the internet for as long as I can remember, being replaced by picture links - and specifically icons. This change has come about as a result of necessity, aesthetics and convenience - but it's consequences are often overlooked.

The icon system - on desktops, on mobiles and online - promotes an incredibly exclusive mentality. It's almost like a clique - people who know their icons looking down on people who don't.

It started on the desktop. Apple's Macs have long sported a dock as opposed to a windows list, making navigation easier and more aesthetic, as well as creating space for many more applications, and of course the ability to launch an app as well as just change focus to it. Windows followed suit with Windows 7 in 2009, and Linux's dominant OS, Ubuntu, introduced it's own in April this year (although docks had been available for installation years before then).

Although the advantages on the desktop were trivial - mainly aesthetic and convenient - icon based app launching and focussing became a real necessity with the growth of smart phones. On these devices, icons are important as they are appropriately sized for the human being's big fat finger. Moreover, they are more capable of communicating what they do as buttons on the smartphone's tiny screen. Imagine trying to use a window list and a text-based main menu on a touch-screen phone!

The same is becoming increasingly ubiquitous on the web - icons replacing text to communicate. Look below this post - as well as posts on almost every blog, newspaper site and media company on the web. You will see a small battalion of icons, each linking to a different way to share the article. On blogspot it's email, blog, tweet, facebook and google's +1. And it's not just on sites; browsers are using icons too. Microsoft recently launched an ad campaign showing off  Internet Explorer 9's new thingy-ma-jiggy, which saves sites as favourites, and displays them as - you guessed it - icons. Space, aesthetics, brand identity... it's smiles all around.

Unless you're new.

Imagine a child on the internet (and not miniclip) for the first time, or someone in a developing country who rarely gets the chance, or even someone like my mum, who's simply never been interested before but is now being told by her boss to get involved in social media. What's the orange square with a funny shaped B? Or the blue square with an f, or the white plus on the black background with a colourful bar on top?  The web is becoming increasingly intimidating for new or infrequent surfers because of these icons. That means everyone in the cloud is in the loop, in the clique and in the bubble - and everyone out of the cloud will be stuck there for a long time. While that may seem fine to you, the reader, right now - the chances are you're inside too - it could well change the web for the worse a few years down the line. You've been warned.