All information technology essentially offers an abstraction from an underlying reality, enabling that reality to be understood in simpler, more human centric and hopefully better ways. Some abstractions are good; the early GUI notion of “documents”, “windows” and the “desktop” allowed early PC users to interact with a strange new tool. Some abstractions are simply bad and just confuse or get in the way (Microsoft Bob is a personal favourite)
Some abstractions such as Google’s search box are so