While the world wide web has done a wonderful job of creating inter-operable network applications and distributed data repositories, it has also constrained our thinking about what it means live in a networked society. Despite efforts to make the web "bi-directional" it is still predominantly a one-way publication media.
This needs to change.
"The Web" means everything is reduced to electronic text and graphics that fit in a 960 x 800 array of pixels. This is an acceptable format for reading or even watching videos. Ubiquitous multimedia means we can even listen to music, radio programs or news. Content comes from a server, operated by a single corporate entity, usually a great distance away.
But watch this video excerpt from Adam Curtis "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace:"
This needs to change.
"The Web" means everything is reduced to electronic text and graphics that fit in a 960 x 800 array of pixels. This is an acceptable format for reading or even watching videos. Ubiquitous multimedia means we can even listen to music, radio programs or news. Content comes from a server, operated by a single corporate entity, usually a great distance away.
But watch this video excerpt from Adam Curtis "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace:"
Loren Carpenter Experiment at SIGGRAPH '91 from Zachary Murray on Vimeo.
The web, for all its wonders, can't replicate this simple experiment from the early 1990's. The web is about dissolving locality and proximity. To be sure, this is a remarkable achievement. But it's not enough.
We need to think about proximity and closeness.
Not so much because we are social creatures, but because proximity facilitates feedback. The web is not about feedback. EMail, for all it's benefits, does not scale well with increasing numbers of human participants. Intent and meaning dissolve as more people participate in an email thread. Twitter and Facebook have better immediacy, but limitations on content and ownership make them frustrating to use for many tasks. IRC is a collection of text lines; good for many situations, but again, it is frequently difficult to understand why someone is or isn't responding.
Proximity facilitates rich interpersonal communication and rapid feedback.
The web is wonderful, but it was designed to demolish the effects of geographic distribution, not explicitly to support tasks requiring near-immediate feedback. The web doesn't really need to die, but it needs to be supplemented by tools to support meaningful real-time collaboration.
No comments:
Post a Comment