Om Malik asks Is “stream” as a design paradigm over? and whether it is still suitable for blogs.
Relate this to his post from last January, Can we ever become Post-Social?, (which I've linked to before) and the two thoughts are intrinsically connected in my mind.
To be effectively post-social we need to stop thinking in terms of streams and audience. Everything needs to be driven by intent rather than the current model of 'consumption by default'.
Like Blogging, RSS, and Imposture Syndrome – Brandon Writes...
"Then it clicked... the internet I miss didn't include my mom. It was a bunch of nerds, creating stuff, showing it off, and most of the time doing it for free for others to enjoy ... The internet of the 90's, was a weird little place, where we didn't all have to understand each other's fandoms and interests, but that didn't stop us from sparking up a conversation, linking to one another, or making friends."
So much this.
Om's post got me thinking about when I first moved to the Today/daily page format. I was worried that people wouldn't get a page not in reverse chronological view:
I really like the idea of "Today" but am not sure if it will work as the blog front page. People are so used to reverse-chron ... that I don't know whether they will adjust.
The traditional blog format and then social networks have conditioned us to 'new', we worship at the alter of recency – all else is forgotten within a matter of minutes. We have largely lost the reward of permanence our efforts should provide.
How do we get that back without losing the special magic a blog provides?
We still have vestiges of the 'old web' in forums, IRC (yes, people still use it) and chat apps, where the most recent items appear at the bottom.
A common complaint about the web is that it is still discussed and used in physical terms such as pages. We haven't achieved peak web functionality because we are still firmly rooted in the real world equivalent. Maybe it's a generational thing and we'll only get past it when the old guard are no longer around.
For my own part, I can't readily conceive of alternatives without flights of futuristic fancy into visual and spatial computing, significant advances in AR & VR, and neural interfaces that are probably decades away.
Trying to reimagine text based presentation for the web only succeeds in returning to variations on the status quo because that makes sense to my pre-internet, analogue mind. It's like deciding whether to organise a card based system from front-to-back or back-to-front when you really need a complete shake up that puts the Dewey Decimal System to shame.
But there I go with another physical analogy.
Still, unless the way we learn, entertain ourselves and communicate changes significantly, the notion of pages and 'top-down' presentations will continue to make sense. It's how we fiddle round the edges that might lead us in (slightly) new directions.
Pedantry moment: IRC isn't Web-based. ;-)
I don't think the fascination with "pages" is an "old guard" thing so much as it is a consequence of URLs. URLs are great and I'm yet to see anything to rival them in the Internet space, but they do necessarily force you into thinking: this resource is in this place, that resource is in that place. Where those resources in turn have links to other places, we call them pages and we usually write them in HTML. To replace pages but retain universal addressibility, an alternative non-HTML implementation would need to also provide for some means of navigation. Eg Gemini has hyperlinks too (still very "page" based). Ditto PDF (yup, still page-based).
When people come up with alternatives, they always seem inferior in some way or another. Some systems (Compuserve, AOL, BBSes etc) have used keywords for navigation, but these are limited by the directory owner and they'd biases. Others have used spatial metaphors eg Second Life and metaverse experiments, but these often fail at making meaningful address systems so you can't eg bookmark a "place" and share the link on an established Web PAGE (fun fact, VRML didn't suffer so much from this problem... but sorta failed anyway - maybe people just don't like interfaces that aren't page-like?).
And of course, "pages" provide some of the best options for accessibility. If we can't bring everybody with us, I'm not interested in moving to a 'new' Web!
Hey Dan. Thanks for your thoughts.
I know IRC isn't web based but you get the point ;)
I completely agree with the notion that if we can't bring everyone with us then we shouldn't change. I just feel that it's a bit limiting sometimes but, as I said, I can't think of anything new that would replace the page-based architecture and do believe that it would take a major reworking of how we learn and communicate for us to come up with something.
