Some Ideas About Surfing (2010), By Joel Colover

While surfing on the Internet, I bumped into a zine under the title Some Ideas About Surfing (2010), by graphic designer Joel Colover. Arranged as a series of xeroxed sketches preceded and combined with bold sentences in its left pages, this zine’s aesthetics presents a creative use of the “surfing” metaphor in order to rethink cyberspace and hypertextuality. For instance, by putting together several of its bold sentences, we read:

“Tab based browsing is surfing different waves at the same time. All the time. (...) On the Internet we surf the currents left by other users. Old lost content and new data supply us with the momentum we need... The Internet is not a world, it is a city the size of a universe. It can be split into different quarters, not just based on content, but also on presentation, design, architecture of the pages. This is what the invisible walls are made of.”(2010: 12-16)

Taking into account its etymology, the verb “to surf” can be related with “the swell

If we relate it to the act of riding a wave using a special board, it becomes clear that what we are actually riding is this “surf”. Concerning Jcolover’s zine, the action of surfing also seems to be used with reference to today’s exploring of the Internet. But not in a completely uninterested, flavorless or superficial way. After all, we are talking of digital multimodal environments (“surfing different waves at the same time”, minding the proper skills to do this particularly complicated task), where we drift on things left by others (there are good waves and there bad waves, and one needs to learn how to catch a really good one), as we are