That's what they're currently calling it, anyway. This is a project I worked on for almost a year, and it's now live and downloadable at ITPapers.com
Here's some of what our friend Ted Smith at CNet has to say about our work.
What's the big idea?
According to Ed Gottsman, senior researcher at the Labs, there have been two unintended consequences of the thin-client architecture now playing in a Web browser near you. The first is that as long as moving from page to page of a display means sending a data request to a server far away, there is going to be some noticeable delay. Depending on the amount of delay, you will subconsciously perform a cost-benefit analysis as you navigate through a site - exploring less material the longer it takes to display it. Think about the difference in total number of links you are willing to click when on a broadband network vs. a dial-up. As you decide to click, you factor in some notion of how long it is likely to take to get the result and how valuable you think that result will be to you.
The second consequence of the browser architecture is a minimization of pixels dedicated to data/content on a typical Web page. This came about when everyone had slow connections, and page-load times favored "lightweight" pages: the time it took to display is also a function of the amount of data to display. Look at any Google page. I rest my case.
So if we understand Ed correctly, the Web has ironically made much more information available to anyone than ever before in human history but it has come at the cost of all of us unconsciously assessing whether we want to risk exploring and waiting long enough to find it. The Labs calls this "navigation risk" - which simply means that each of us decides each time we look at a Web page whether it will be worth the risk (in time lost) to actually click on a link.
High Density Interfaces: More than Meets the Eye - TechUpdate - ZDNet
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