A Decade of Webdesign
Transcriptions
Angela Beesley
Print version
Richard Rogers: Okay, welcome to the structures of meaning session, my name is Richard Rogers I am from the University of Amsterdam Media Studies, and the govcom.org Foundation here in Amsterdam. I am joined by three experts, or actually four experts, from what you might call the space between the front-end and the back-end.
We have Angela Beesley from the Wikimedia Foundation, famed facilitators of Wikipedia, the collaboratively authored wiki-based encyclopedia and soon to be, I would imagine, the slayers of the Britannica dragon. We have Steven Pemberton, who's on a couple of W3C working groups, on HTML and XForms. He works at the Dutch National Research Institute for mathematics and computer science also here in Amsterdam. We have Anne Pascual and Marcus Hauer from Schoenerwissen the office for computational design based in California. Anne and Marcus also work in media arts and technology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Now to kick things off, I wanted to try to highlight a couple of overarching themes behind the structures of meaning on the web, at least as far as I see them, over the last decade, and them I'm going to turn it over to the speakers. After each speaker finishes I propose we can take only very very urgent questions at the time. After all three have had their turn we can open it up. Now there is one content note here, meaning note; the transcripts of all the talks, the ones that actually were not made in full, will be available on the web site www.decadeofwebdesign.org.
Okay: structures of meaning, I just wanted to throw up four themes. Theme one quality of information. Recently when some US congressman, when they voted to debate the certification of Bush's election victory, some of the Representatives in House argued that the challengers were getting their information from blogs, that the challengers of the US election were getting their information from blogs. Now blogs became the latest way to fill in the old chestnut, the old idea of the web as a rumor mill. Now suddenly we can trash the web again, but is it so easy to do so and should we ignore those who question the quality of information. Secondly, theme two, relatedly: reputation. Gaining it, keeping it, managing it. Remember when we had all these little award icons, and listing of top five cool sites and things? I dragged out my collection from 1999 inspired by one of the previous speakers; this is my dead awards collection. All of these awards are completely dead and buried. Later as we move from hit counts to link counts, so hit economy to link economy, as an indicator of reputation another shift occurred, so we were no longer in charge of our own site descriptions. Metatags and things mattered less. Others were determining how we would be described.
Theme three. Information recommendation, which again is related; With such initiatives, recently, as delicious, books we like, and certain social software, we are creating information recommendation devices authored more by tribes and communities than by much larger greater conversations. So the web is become, at least in information recommendation terms, increasingly more tribal.
Theme four, the last one, semantic web. Now there always has been this massive tension between allowing the web to organize information in itself and creating classification systems that we should squeeze our information into. The question I would like to pose to the speakers as running theme is: are we tagging ourselves to death? I would like to turn it over now to Angela Beesley from Wikipedia, Angela.
Angela Beesley: Hi, I'm Angela Beesley, I'm from the Wikimedia Foundation and I will tell you a little bit more about what that is in a moment here. I'm going to be talking about Wikipedia and how that's been designed through open source principles.
To start it off, what are wikis? The first wiki was started in 1995, which was c2.com. This was a site where programmers come together to basically discuss programming topics. A wiki is simply an openly editable web site, that can cover any range of topics. Where anyone can come along and create a page. You don't need to know any programming languages to do that. Wikis have a very low learning curve so they are really open to anyone.
One of the reasons why it very easy to do is because wikis have a simplified syntax. I am going to show you an example of that. This is actually an edit screen. This is where you edit the wiki, so it has an editing toolbar on the top as well, so you don't need to know bits of syntax, you can just click on icons. Things like the double square brackets will create a link to another page in the wiki. So simply by typing things any user can come along and create web pages straight away.
A more common feature of wikis is that all user actions are logged and are very easily reversible. So if someone makes an edit, you can easily revert it was a bad edit.
There are three terms here, which are very commonly confused. There is Wikipedia, Wikimedia and MediaWiki. So I'm going to talk a little bit about those and tell you the differences between them. Very quickly, Wikipedia is essentially an encyclopedia, Wikimedia is the foundation that runs it, and MediaWiki is the software that it runs on.
A little bit more about the Wikimedia Foundation. This is a non-profit organization. It was founded towards the end of 2003. To basically manage Wikipedia and all its sister products which includes Wiktionary, a free content dictionary, Wiktionary was created because people started to have dictionary definitions in Wikipedia, and other people would say that Wikipedia is supposed to be strictly encyclopedic, so that spun off into its own project, Wiktionary. One of our larger projects is Wikibooks, which is a collection of open source textbooks for educational use.
A very recent project is Wikinews. It is still in beta testing at the moment. It is really just a project to see whether we can apply the principles of Wikipedia to a news site, so actually people coming along and writing news stories. Wikisource is a collection of primary source documents, so it is not something that people would edit so much. They can upload texts and then can use as a source in any other projects.
Wikiquote is a collection of different quotations. The Wikimedia Commons is a repository of images and other media files that are used by all the other Wikimedia projects, and can be used externally as well because all of those are under a free license.
Wikipedia itself is, of course an encyclopedia and was started four years ago. We just had our fourth birthday. In the first eight months we had eight thousand articles, which was quite a big thing, because before Wikipedia there was a project called Nupedia, which managed to create about thirty articles in two years. Nupedia had very much stricter controls over who was allowed to edit and a very controlled review process, but it turned out to be very slow. So they opened this up a little bit more and said let’s use a wiki to write Nupedia articles, and this took over very quickly and Nupedia soon died out because it just wasn't producing articles at any sensible rate. So that was the birth of Wikipedia.
It is very international project. It started off in English but within a couple of months there was German and then French. One of the core policies of Wikipedia is that the encyclopedia is written from a neutral point of view. We try to avoid any bias and if there are two opposing points of view we describe both of those in the article rather than taking any particular side.
All the content on Wikipedia is freely licensed. It is available under the GNU Free Documentation License, so it is re-usable. People can take it, modify it, use it commercially or non-commercially. This is an example of one of the internationalization features we have. The interface and so on is completely internationalized. So this is a screen shot of the Hebrew Wikipedia. As you can see, it is using right-to-left writing, and the logo is on the other side, which would normally be on the left side. We’ve got about 100 languages, but only twenty-one of those so far have over ten thousand articles. The other is just really beginning.
Some statistics; we got 1.35 million articles in total, this is across all different languages. The English Wikipedia alone has got 450 thousand, which actually makes it larger than Britannica, and Encarta combined. The Dutch Wikipedia is just about to come up to its fifty thousand articles milestone. According to alexa.com ratings, we are now in the top 100 web sites. So it's a very big project. Over four years it’s developed well over a million articles.
This is a screen shot showing some of the larger Wikipedias. The dark blue line is the Dutch Wikipedia and the red one is the English. They are both growing at a similar rate but are different sizes at the moment.
There are a lot of social rules within Wikipedia, about how people can edit and so on. There are also some technical constraints that affect what people do on the site. For example, we can protect pages and block users. The technical parts of the software affect how people are using the site and what they can do with it.
There is also a lot of openness. The software doesn't constrain what people can actually add. People can format pages in pretty much any way they like. There aren't that many technical constraints. It is very much up to the users and the community to determine what can go on the site. Policies just emerge from consensus-based processes. People will suggest a policy and then, if there is agreement on it, it will just become policy. There is no top down process run by just one person. It is very much community driven.
Contributors construct their own rule space. One of the policy pages on Wikipedia says "ignore all rules". So there is quite a lot of openness to what contributors can do. But there are certain norms, which are either enforced by the community or in some cases by community leaders. Some people are more trusted to enforce policies than other people would be.
One question that is always asked about Wikipedia is, "can the content be trusted?" I think it can. We have a lot of review process. People say it is not peer reviewed, but in many ways it is constantly being reviewed. We’ve got things like recent changes, which show every single change that is made to the content, and people are constantly checking that. We also have the watch list feature, which allows you to watch particular articles in your area of expertise. So the articles are constantly being reviewed.
One thing we are rather keen on doing is developing a stable version. So users worried about coming to an article and not knowing whether the last entry could be trusted would have the choice to view a stable version if they wanted to.
Moving on to the software that we use. This is called MediaWiki. It is used by Wikipedia and our other projects and also by a lot of external sites as well. It is one of over a hundred wiki engines; a wiki engine is just a type of collaborative software that allows people to edit in this way. MediaWiki itself was primarily developed for Wikipedia. Before we were using MediaWiki we were using UseMod, but it turned out to be not scalable enough for such a large site as Wikipedia. So the wiki engine was re-written from scratch in PHP and it uses a MySQL database backend. Over time, it became more scalable than most other wiki engines. It is also use by a lot of other web sites, sites like Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki. There are all sorts of different content sites, not just Wikipedia, that are using MediaWiki.
Functionality includes a lot of quality control features. Versioning: we store every version of a page that was ever written. So every edit that been made is saved so you can go back and check who’s added what and when things were added.
The watch list allow people to keep an eye on certain articles and make sure they are not being vandalized.
Another feature is the organization of name-spaces and categories. Name-spaces keep a discussion of content separate from the content itself. So if there is a dispute on an article, that would happen on a talk page rather than the article itself. The categories are very user driven; the software doesn't impose any particular category structure. Any user can come along and create a new category and that hierarchy has been built up over the last six months, since the feature was introduced. So it provides a rather different approach to categorization rather than being handed out in advance. It is very much being built up over time.
There is also administrative functionality. Pages can be protected. Usually this is done if a particular page is being vandalized a lot. It will be temporarily protected until that is sorted out. If there is dispute over an article, it will be protected to force people to discuss it rather than edit war over it.
Blocking of users or IP addresses is a function of the software as well. So if a particular person is being a problem they can just be blocked from editing completely.
There are a lot of extensions, which makes it quite different from some other wiki engines, allowing math tags for mathematical formulas and so on. There are a lot of different types of formatting that people can add very easily through these extensions. Even hieroglyphics can be added to the wiki. The wiki interface itself is available in over 30 languages.
This screen shot shows a version comparison. This is page history, so every time someone makes an edit you can go in see exactly what's changed, with the old version on the left and the new one on the right. And the words that have been added have been highlighted in red.
(Technical difficulty)
Richard Rogers: Hi, whilst we're waiting, I am just wondering if there might be any questions from the audience?
Steven Pemberton: Yes, Steven Pemberton. So, the web was actually originally designed for exactly this sort of thing. I mean Tim Berners-Lee was doing exactly this sort of thing with his first browser. It is because almost all servers don't support the "PUT" part of the HTTP protocol that you have to make all of this extra software. Don’t you think it is a shame that you have to do that, when it is actually already built into the technology and shouldn't you be pushing for servers who actually did it right rather than this approach?
Angela Beesley: I don't know, there is a lot more to the software than people simply uploading there text to the web. There is so much functionality I don't think you can do that without having specialized software designed for this purpose.
Steven Pemberton: But it would allow you to do, for instance, WYSIWYG editing, and then you just do save, and just like it ought to have done it just goes back to the web server. I mean that... for instance, the W3C site is exactly like that, it’s a wiki. Everyone on the team is allowed to edit any page, but we just use WYSIWYG software and we just hit save and it sends it back to the web.
Angela Beesley: I mean at the moment what we've got in terms of WYSIWYG is simple writing extensions that will allow that. So yeah, it’s a shame that is just can't do that without having the extension of the software.
David Garcia: Maybe I'm pre-empting something you will come to later in your talk. There have been a few articles recently about a split in the Wikipedia community. Some people wanting to re-instate some of the more hierarchical protocols for quality control, are you going to comment on that in the rest of your talk, or if not could you comment on it now?
Angela Beesley: Yeah, there is a little bit of a split, but really the foundation is trying to address both sides of that. To see if we could come to some sort of compromise, this is what the part "stable versions" was about. It will give people the chance to mark an article as being authoritative and you would have these hierarchies saying yes this article is now authoritative and so on. But the live site itself will still be editable by anyone. So it is all mixed and the best of both worlds. Then people have a choice, if they need stable version they can go to that but they can still edit the live one, too.
David Garcia: So the things like the Wired Online article kind of hinting at a big division, you feel that's been resolved by the process you've indicated, too.
Angela Beesley: I think it will be resolved; it is not actually resolved yet. And we are still discussing how to resolve it.
Geert Lovink: Could you give a bit of context for those of us who do not know what caused this split or debate?
Angela Beesley: I think part of it is because as Wikipedia got bigger, people began to rely on it more and more as a source. It is no longer just a project to create an encyclopedia; it really is an encyclopedia that people are using. So the need for things to be trustworthy really increased just recently since it’s hit the media so much. I think that is a part of what it is about, people just getting really worried about if they can trust it.
Geert Lovink: (?)
Angela Beesley: I don't think there is one particular instance, no.
(Technical difficulty end)
Angela Beesley: Okay, looking at some of these features again, quality control, I mentioned recent changes already. There’s also the page history, which I should you a screen shot of, so anyone can check exactly what's been changed. If we've got a problem user, if we find a particular user adding bias or writing something that is not factual, every user has a list of all of their contributions. So if you find a problem you can go back through their contribution list and check their edits and make sure those are all right.
Besides the content on Wikipedia and its sister projects, there is also a large community around behind that, which is something that people just coming to the web site and reading it will often don't notice. It is a very strong community. In anyone month there can be as many twelve thousand different editors. So there are a lot of community features to try and keep those people together. That includes talk pages; every article has a talk page attached to it. So if anyone wants to discuss a problem with the article they can go there.
Every user can put up a profile page about themselves, as well. So people are wondering if they can trust a person they can always go to the profile and see what sort of person is editing it.
There are different access levels as well. People can apply to become administrators, which gives them a few more technical features they have access to, such as page protection or blocking of users. There are also automatic user-to-user emails to try and encourage people to communicate more. And there is automatic message notification. You can leave a message on the wiki for someone and they will be notified of that next time they come online.
As I said, all of Wikipedia is free content. All Wikimedia content is under the GNU Free Documentation License and the software is under the GNU General Public License. This means it can be freely distributed and modified. Another thing the license means is that authors have to be attributed by anyone using the content, which encourages people to contribute because they know if their work will be used, then they will be attributed. The way Wikipedia does this is through the page history. If you click history on the top of any article you can see a list of who has contributed to it. The license means it also remains non-proprietary. Though people can use it commercially they can't lock it down, they would have to keep it under the same licenses. So any re-use of or any modification will still be under "GFDL", so Wikipedia can then re-use any improvements that people make to it. One advantage of this is that it increases a sense of shared ownership, because no one person owns an article. Anyone can come and edit and modify it at any time. So it really belongs to the project rather than any particular user. This decreases some problems we might otherwise have if some person wrote an article and they wanted it to stay in a particular way.
The web design of the site is split between developers and users. Developers create the skin framework and then it is very much up to the user to customize that and tailor it to particular projects. So for example, the English Wikipedia might not have the exact same design as the Dutch Wikipedia. Developers with provide default skins and they also create extension tools that help the users with editing the site. The users can format the site content in anyway they want. They have access to certain HTML tags such as tables, so they can format things in that way if they want to. Different projects would have different formatting. So all Wikipedia articles will not be formatted in exactly the same way as textbooks or Wikibooks for example, it is very much up to the users. And users can create user style sheets and edit the interface. They can also create new skins, which happens quite rarely.
Right here is an example of a user created skin. Some one has completely changed the design. It doesn't look like the typical Wikipedia design. This feature is often used by other sites using the MediaWiki software. They don't want their site to be confused by Wikipedia; they will make a completely different design like this.
Users can create individual style sheets, so you can have Wikipedia looking a particular way for you. There is a problem with this in that users can't always be trusted in the design things very well. This is a screen shot of my skin of Wikipedia. This is how I see it. The one on the left is how it looks before you scroll, and the one on the right is after you scroll the page, which is just a complete jumble of links, rather unreadable. So that is one of the downsides of letting users do this, is that they don't really know what they are doing. They end up with a screen looking like that. Here are some screen shots of the largest Wikipedia; English, German, and Japanese. It is completely up to the users how they decide to format their pages. This is the front page you see if you go to any particular language version. But what often happens is that they share a lot of similarities between them. So one site would make their main page and then the good parts of that will filter out into the other languages. You really end up with parts of the design that work well. An example of this is parts like the "featured article", which is showing on all six of the largest Wikipedia. You can see that they have all copied the same sort of table format with the different colors and different areas. There are also a lot of similarities, which are forced on them, in terms of the navigation. The logo is always in the same place the standard links are all there on the left. So certain parts the user can't change are given by the developers. But the rest of the page is completely up to the users to come along and edit.
There are a lot of external tools that people create. Because the software is free content, it is very easy for people to modify that and add on extensions. There are a few offline editions that people have been working on. One of them is WikiWriter. There is a screen shot of this here, which gives a more WYSIWYG approach to editing, for people who prefer that to editing directly on the site. This one actually splits off metadata, you can see the inter-language links and the categories are appearing in different columns. There are also various plugins for different text editors and a plugin for Firefox. If you use the Firefox browser, you can download this plugin and edit Wikipedia directly just from the right click button.
And users create markups and conversion tools, which convert HTML to wikitext as well. This Tombraider screen shot is actually an extension, which allows Wikipedia to be read on PDAs.
I’m just going to show you some screen shots of the last four years of Wikipedia, which shows a history of the site from being very content centric to becoming more user centric. And there is a tendency over the last four years to move to more dynamic information for like things that are in use and things that are updated daily rather than vary rarely.
More visual elements, more color have been added over the last four years. And there has also been a separation between editors and readers; before there was just the main page for everybody, now there's a main page for readers, and there is a separate community main page. This is August 2001, just eight months after we started, when we were still using the UseMod software. So it is very basic, just text, there were no images at this time at all. It is just basically a list of main topic areas we had at the time. Then, in November 2002, we move to what we called phase three. This is MediaWiki before it had a name. Again it is very text centric, but you have more navigational feature now. You got links to older versions and so on. Jumping to 2003, it hasn't changed all that much but we've moved into a table format now. We split off the articles along with the community aspect under the "writing articles" heading, and you've got links to the community and you have policy and help pages and that sort of thing, now on our main page. In February of 2004 we had a logo competition, so we got the new Wikipedia logo. And it is also the first time we had color on the main page. It still isn't very colorful but it is a little bit different than it was before. And then in 2005, this was the main page a couple of days ago. So it is still fairly similar. We have the same table but we have far more dynamic information, like the featured article is changed every day. Rather than just listing all the main categories, readers have to click the browse link and they can go to those categories, but the main page is used for things that are regularly updated. So the main page now is updated on a daily basis rather than more rarely.
Quickly to come to a conclusion, by empowering users like we've done on Wikipedia, they can fix their own design problems. Over the last four years, Wikipedia has opened up its design process so it is no longer just up to the developer of the site; through the use of style sheet and so on, it has become much more open. There are feedback mechanisms, the way the community feeds back to the developers, such as various pages on the wiki for people who have a problem, and a Bugzilla bug tracking system. People don't need the knowledge to fix the bugs themselves because through these feedback mechanisms, they can report them to other people who can fix them.
Even beyond wikis, this open feedback management can go a long way. Its not only can be applied to wikis, in terms of open design, other sites could take this up and give it to the user to help with the design aspects.
Geke van Dijk
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Caroline Nevejan: Our next speaker is Geke van Dijk, connected to the Open University in England, she has worked for a long time in digital culture in Amsterdam; started ACS-i and later sold it to Lost Boys; Geke van Dijk.
Geke van Dijk: Hello. I've chosen the title "A Decade of Web Use". When I was invited to do a contribution to the conference, I thought, maybe the most interesting or relevant thing I can do is speak about the decade of web use. My background as a person who has worked since the beginning of the 90s in the web industry was actually in user research. We were working in an independent research company who was focusing on usability research and later on other user research as well. And at the moment I am currently working in the UK doing PhD research but I will come back to all this later.
I think I have to stress at the start the focus I am going to be talking about. The perspective is mainly the commercial use of the web. But not so much what we tend to call e-commerce, which is very focused towards purchasing, but what I mean is web sites that are from companies or institutions, that might be governmental or non-governmental NGO's, which are meant to explain and give information about the organization. And people, as consumers, make use of that information. So it is not about the artist web site or people's personal homepages. This is the realm that I've been working in, the commercial use of the web. And I think that is where I can offer a contribution to the conference.
What I've done for this presentation is to look back for the past ten years, like some of the other speakers have done as well, just to realize what has passed in these ten years, which feel much longer actually. Not so much as to be concrete or nostalgic and talk only about history, but also to understand where we are now? Where we are coming from? And maybe look a little bit ahead, where are we going?
So what I started out to do, very simply of course, was to make a time line, where I focus on the discourses, the dominant discourses, in this decade. When you look at visions we share as intimate culture, about users of the web. But then when I was preparing the presentation I found out that it makes no sense at all to put it into a timeline. Because I do recognize these periods, and I hope a lot of you in the audience do as well, but the thing is; on a time line you suggest one thing is finished and then another one is there. We dismiss the dominant discourse of the period before that. Which is not at all true. I think these discourses are still very valid.
So I decided to try to do it differently and to use the metaphor of a pond. A pond where stones are thrown into it so it will stay in motion, every time you throw in another stone it adds to the dynamics of it. I think this explains better how we are mixing in our discussion about use, how we are mixing the echoes of discourses happening now and ones coming up from the past decade. I hope you will recognize a lot of them.
I will try to speed it up because I think the previous speakers went through the past ten years, and you will recognize especially from the session this morning, some of the characteristics per period.
The first stone that was thrown into the pond was around 1995 when the commercial web was born, and the focus of that time was very biased toward technology.
The second one... actually I have to stress that the years I put in are just to give an idea of when it was. Of course it is also something not meant to build in concretely. This is per person when you first encountered the discourse, but I am sure you recognize the discourses. So the second stone thrown into the pond was around 1998, where the focus was shifting more to usability and user friendliness of a web site, and this enters discussions about strategies for the development of sites and also the evaluation of sites.
The third stone was around 2001, when the focus shifted again more to the user experience. Usability remained an issue but it was moving towards the user experience, and terms like fun, desirability and pleasure entered the agenda.
And the fourth stone, more recently, is user value. So now days you more often hear that the criterion for a successful web site is whether they are really offering user value. Are they contributing to what people really want, and do they support the well being of people?
I will come back to all these periods in more detail later in this presentation.
I just want to stress again that the years are not that important, so it is more the idea of the periods and I hope you will recognize the metaphor of the pond and that it is not about dismissing earlier periods but recognizing new discourses coming into the discussion.
If we go back to the first period and look at the technology focused period the main question was 'what can technology do?' So the web sites that were developed at that time were feature driven. This period was about discovering what you could do with coding. Programmers who were doing the coding mostly did the design as well. Anyone who mastered the code was a web designer, and web design as a profession was not a really a discipline yet.
This meant that the evaluation of web sites was driven by a technological focus as well. The criterion for good design was whether the web site worked. The people, at that time using the web obviously did not object, because they were the early adopters. They were interested in the technology and not scared of technology and they were ready to accept inconvenience, as long as there were new areas to discover.
The opinion leaders of that time were the programmers. They were the wizards who were 'in the know'. Also on the client side you found that in briefings about web sites or evaluating prototypes the team from the client side was very much dominated by people from the IT department. Most initiatives for web sites originated from the IT departments.
When we look at user research at that time it was very minimal. Actually we were just discovering it. There were some projects, but usually the techniques and methods had to be custom-developed. There was not that much experience with user research at that time. If we look at the main vision of a user in this period, we sort of accepted that users should adapt to the technology. We didn't really realize at that time that it could be different, that the technology could be further improved rather than the user adapting to.
If we look at the next period from around 98 the usability concept and discourse entered our discussions. The main question at that point was 'can we make technology usable?' The starting point was still technology driven, what can the technology do, but there was an awareness that maybe not all users are technophiles, or even that for technophiles web sites can still be made more user-friendly. So you see, as you may all remember, that at that time web sites were much more visually attractive and more usable.
But also as other speakers have pointed out before, there was a sort of tension in that period. The feeling of some web designers was that some usability requirements were incompatible with making creative design, and some usability researchers thought web designers didn't want to hear what they had to say. However I think in general most people who were open for improvement and curious to find out how to make better work were really open to the discussion and interested in incorporating it into web design.
By that time design was becoming recognized as a profession, as a specialization. Development teams now usually had one or more designers working along side the programmers.
The evaluation of what made a site successful changed. It now shifted to the criteria of does it look good?
The audience that was online grew to the early majority. These were people that did have affinity with technology, who were curious for it, but who were not necessarily educated in this field. They were willing to do a bit of exploring, but not too much. They would drop out if sites were too difficult or too freaky.
The opinion leaders of that period, as you can predict were mostly designers. They usually headed the presentations of concepts to clients. And also on the client side, in the briefing team, there was much more awareness of the necessity of creating good design. And in that period contacts with the communication departments from clients were very important.
User research was starting to pick up. This was of course helped by usability advocates like Jakob Nielsen, who did a lot of PR and brought in a lot of knowledge. The need for pre-launch usability tests, were becoming ingrained into the process. Clients started to pro-actively demand this from agencies to be part of the deliverables. Many sites were successfully adjusted before the launch as a result of usability tests done with user groups.
At that time the vision of the user was an early user, people with an awareness of technology but without a technology background. But it sort of went a bit over the top; if you see a lot of reports at that time we thought, well these are new people to the web, so we have to carefully guide them. The assumption at that time was that the learnability of the site wasn't very important. People were prepared to invest a bit in learning a site but it shouldn't be too difficult. It shouldn't take too much time.
If we look at the next period, the focus was shifting to a new perspective or discourse of that time, and that was not so much on technology anymore that was shifting; it was more focused on the user's experience. That was one of the key concepts at that time. The ultimate goal of a web site was creating a positive user experience. So a site had to offer fun and had to be a pleasurable adventure. This meant that the discussions about new web sites were dominated by the necessity to offer an element of fun.
This was very noticeable on the client side as well. There the marketeers suddenly entered the briefing teams. And they stressed the point very clearly that it should be fun. This is despite the fact that the site was not an entertainment site but perhaps a telecom site or a banking site.
In this period web design had matured into several specializations. Suddenly we were talking about visual design, interaction design, functional design, information design, audio design, etc.
Development teams generally included several types of designers focused on the different aspects of the site design.
The evaluation of a successful site in this period began to center around statistics that were brought in by the marketeers. We were looking at statistics that revealed the popularity of sites. So if a site was generating a solid 'hit rate', it was more about hit rates, than actually purchasing statistics that determined if it was a successful site.
In this period the late majority was entering the Internet. That included people that were not attracted per se to the technology but were attracted to the Internet because of its content and what it would offer them.
As I said, opinion leaders at that time were the marketeers. Their discourse was very dominant in the evaluations of whether a site was good or not, and they were the ones who collected the statistics about target groups and success rates of sites.
User research at that time, just as design, is a parallel development, as web design was becoming a profession, user research had also matured into several specializations. So we were not just talking about usability research, the testing of actual sites, but as well the user experience, which is more preliminary research; research about the culture and style of target groups; online panels were developed at that time for online surveys; click stream analysis; eye tracking diaries, etc.
The overall vision of the web user in this period was that people are not so much looking for the technology, but instead looking for fun and easy deals. It had more to do with the marketing idea about the popularity of the web site in order to attract users.
Now if I move on to a more recent period which is still very much in development, whereas the other three periods are seen more clearly, I think this is something developing at the moment. I should say the focus at this moment is more looking for a balance between what the technology can do and what can it offer to the users, and both of them are very relevant. I think the history of the decade has learned what to ask. The formats for web sites are more strategically chosen. It is less about what you should always use in a site and what makes all the sites good. It is more about what is this site meant for so which guide lines should be followed. So much so that you cannot generally talk about a good web site anymore. You have to look at formats of what the web site is meant for and then you can make your strategy and do evaluations.
If we look at design, it is a very natural part of any development team. Nobody can imagine that a site is built without one or probably more designers in the team. The criteria for what makes a site effective or successful has moved towards a specific evaluation, as I said before. Not only what a site is meant for, but also whether it is valuable for its users, and when does it deliver what they are looking for.
We could say that now the general audience is online. We can no longer distinguish between early adopters and late adopters. Today that does not make any sense. Most people have some basic experience with Internet. The only difference now is whether you have experience with a specific format that you're focusing on. So if you do any user testing, it is not about having Internet experience anymore because we just have to assume that everybody has Internet experience, everybody, let me put it roughly, most people. But what we are looking for is, with this who has experience particularly with this format and who has not.
Who the contemporary opinion leaders are it is very difficult to say, I would guess, I would call it power consumers. People that generally know how and where to find what they want, and who are pilots or agents for their friends, family, and colleagues. The people who are saying hey you have to seen this, you have to see that, or that's no use. I think we have come to that period with the Internet as well. So it is much more complex and dynamic, and the consumers who need a certain service find out by themselves if it is valuable and then tell others whether they should use it or not.
User researchers just as web designers are now generally accepted. We don't have to defend it anymore. In most cases there is exploratory research before the concept development starts, testing and post-launch evaluations to adjust project plans before the launch date of a site.
The contemporary vision of web users should be that the web is so integrated into everyday life that we as users and consumers, we hardly think of it twice. We just use it. When we need some information we use the Internet just as you use other sources of information. You ask your friends, you look on the street, whether its shops or billboards pasted on the wall; you find your information, you discuss it with others and you use the web like that as well. So the web is not as much a goal but a means to use. It is not so special anymore. It is not a particular activity.
To sum up, my personal experiences, and I hope you recognize them, is that if you look at the past decades and form periods with dominant discourses, I would say they are all still very relevant. I think even, that it has enriched the discussion about the use and evaluation of sites by these different discourses entering the discussion.
I see at a conference like this that sometimes for the sake of getting something clear we have to focus and tune to one of the perspectives. So we can have a debate from the technology perspective or from the usability, or when Helen before was taking accessibility as a specific topic then you zoom in on one of the voices. But I think the metaphor could also have been instruments in an orchestra. Sometimes it is really good to listen to one instrument but all of the instruments together make up a good piece of music, and I think that could have been the same metaphor. It makes the music richer. I think we cannot dismiss the perspective as being out of date, just because it started earlier. We shouldn't make that mistake. I think sometimes I hear it in some presentations but I think it is usually to have a good laugh, it is always nice to point out stereotypes and say, 'that was a nice time, that was a geeky period', but if you are really looking at the complexity and the dynamics of the reality that is going on we should consider all of these perspectives. That is what I really appreciated about the session this morning, each of the speakers were focusing in on one of these periods. The last speaker, Danny O'Brien, started also talking about the geeky period, focusing on the technology period. Then Rosalind was talking about the cool period of the designers. I think she spoke mostly about the late 90s, she stated that as well, because she said the report was from 1999.
But I think also the social history and identity has moved on as well. And the first speaker this morning, Michael, he spoke more about the period which I characterized as the marketing period, the user-experience period. Which was much more about venture capital entering the market and who would be the first one who has a dominant part of the market, and who would be the first one to claim a certain target group.
I think what didn't come into the debate, maybe later in the day, was the fourth period, which we are in at this moment. Where I think we have even moved on from these three which were so nicely characterized this morning, and we are looking for a more balanced, a more subtle discussion where all these voices are still there, but there are more instruments in the orchestra.
I'll wrap it up. I think I made the argument of effective formats, that it is very... it is impossible to talk about golden rules or guide lines in general for web sites. There are so many specific formats. There is so much variation for which format is effective for which situation. So you really have to look per site and per strategy and whom it is for. That is what I mean by looking at the user value.
My last point I want to make is bringing it back to my main topic, which is the vision of the web user. Our visions of who the web users are have changed a lot, literally, because there were differences, early adopters, late adopters, and late majority. There were literally different audiences, but now it is a general audience that is online. So sometimes it is difficult finding the right terminology, because 'users' is a word I use everyday, it is not a word to dismiss, but it also has the connotation of coming from the technology, using this technology.
Whereas customers, the term used by the marketeers has the connotation of buying; I have this service do you want to buy it. Consumers I like to use because it is much more broad, it is much more about you have a lot of things to do in your life and part of that might be using what is on offer. I think this is a discussion that will go on a long time.
In general we can say the web is integrated into our daily lives and our daily lives are very elusive, chaotic, messy, so we use anything we can to arrive at our goals, and the Web is one element within that. We can say the users of the web are very sophisticated and very active people who know where to find their information. If they don't like the site they won't use it, they will find another site. Telling others about that as well. But we are also as consumers very unpredictable and erratic. That doesn't mean that if your site is really good, if it looks good, if it works, it doesn't mean per se that people... even if people appreciate it, they've used it last week to book a ticket, it doesn't mean per se that next Saturday, if they want to book a ticket they will do it again online. That is what the statistics just scream out to us. People use the Internet a lot, mainly to do research, not so much to buy, because we like to go to shops. And if it is eleven o'clock in the evening then of course you do it online, but if you have time and it's the weekend and you want to go out you just decide differently. That doesn't depend on the design as much; it doesn't depend on the technology as much. It can depend on the mood. Or that somebody yesterday told you a scary story about worms, viruses or online security issues. I think if we look at visions of web users we should except that it is a messy, very complex, very dynamic and very interesting. This is the topic I am researching at the moment, for my PhD research. As producers we shouldn't over focus on making anyone use a web site, regardless if it is perfect technology or perfect design. People will move in an out and they will know how to do that, and if they don't feel like it they won't.
That's it basically. If anyone wants to give a reaction you can email me, I'll put the slides online as well.
Rosalind Gill
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Geert Lovink: Rosalind Gill teaches at the London School of Economics, there she is also heading the Master Program of Gender and Media, and she wrote an influential paper called Working Practices in New Media and it is one of the few based on empirical work that looks into work and practices with a strong gender aspect. Rosalind.
Rosalind Gill: Thank you very much Geert, and thanks everyone for inviting me. I think it is really going to compliment what Michael said very well. Because what I've been interested in is: looking back at web design was not just the excitement about what the web could do, in terms of creativity, in terms of new technologies, in terms of new designs, but there was also such a powerful moment of the excitement about new ways of working around web design; new kinds of anti-corporate, informal, flexible, autonomous, non-hierarchical ways of working. There was a really powerful sense of utopian imagining around what kind of work would be possible. So that was the interest that I had when I started out on this research, basically to test some of those ideas. To test some of those utopian imaginings against what was actually happening and what people's experience of working in web design actually were.
First of all I need to make the sociology plea and apologize for doing such a naff PowerPoint presentation. It is very very embarrassing to be in a room full of very creative artistic people and here I'm using the most boring off the plate template in PowerPoint, but sorry I am a sociologist. Forgive me.
Basically the research that there was around new media, at the time we did this was, there's been quite a lot of sociological research and research by anthropologist and geographers but it seemed to focus on quite a few themes that didn't actually have to do with the workers own experience. One of the key themes was the theme around the New Economy. A lot of the research focused on the New Economy and economic boom and bust patterns, trying to specify in what way the New Economy or the Knowledge Economy worked as a different form of economic organization.
A second theme of sociological research was around the death of distance. This was a really really powerful research theme. Basically it focused on the possibilities engendered by virtual products. The idea that workers could be based anywhere, and businesses were really interested in that because they thought that saved them loads of money in distribution costs.
The idea of the Weightless Economy, it is very interesting because the Weightless Economy is a very, in sociological terms, a very common term. But whenever I mentioned it to new media people they would think that "weightless" was spelt "wait", "wait less", rather than "weightless", and they associated with that faster broadband connections and so on. But it is actually more about the weightlessness of what is produced.
The flip side of that interest in weightlessness is a current preoccupation around the return of sociality. There is a really strong interest, at the moment, in clustering, why people doing similar activities, who are involved in similar kinds of work, why they cluster together. Even though these works are by definition virtual. We could in fact be working anywhere, we can communicate by email; why is it that people doing similar types of things want to all live and work in the same parts of the city. Right now there are a huge number of research projects examining those questions.
I'm basically focusing a lot on the value of face-to-face interaction as means of sharing information, such as getting information about what jobs are available, evaluating new programs, new types of software and so on.
There is also a lot of research around new types of firms in the new media field. In particular the declining significance of the traditional firm, and this new interest in networks, where firms pull together diverse people from different fields and bring them together as project networks rather than old established units of the firm.
And finally I'd say in terms of what the dominant sociological research is looking at; there is a huge amount of research on consumption and the uses of new media products. There is a lot of work on the unequal distribution of access to these kinds of products and these kinds of skills. There is a strong focus on the digital divide, focus on things like the way the web is transforming peoples consumption, healthcare and people's health practices, political transformation; how that is being impacted by the web.
All of this stuff I think is really interesting, really important, but what's left out of it is; there is little focus on who the people are that work in these fields, what they are doing, what their aspirations are, how are they organizing, are they actually doing things differently, what kind of challenges do they face, all these kinds of questions.
This really echoes what Michael was saying. Into this space generated by a lack of research comes all of these really potent myths usually based on studies of just one city and it is often either London where I'm from, or New York, and dominated by quite North American assumptions. So there is the image of the Techno Bohemians from New York at the end of the late 90s, artistic, cool, alternative, kind of DIY punk sensibility, Generation X'ers with a strong anti-corporate ethic. It is really interesting when you read a lot of the writing about this that quite a lot of the popular writing about this group of workers focuses more on how many body piercings they have and how many tattoos they have and what their hairstyle is like, rather than the nature of the work, or what they are doing.
The British flip side of that is the "Independent", that was the term coined by Charlie Leadbeter and Kate Oakley and it was a term that had been used to talk about young people who were setting up creative or cultural industries, micro businesses, in Britain in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. T hey share a lot of the values as the Techno Bohemians, they are anti-establishment, they're highly individualistic, they value autonomy and fulfillment in their work.
According to Leadbeter and Oakley, the emergence of this group had several quite distinctive social and demographic determinants. They were the first generation who grew up with computers and consequently felt enabled by that technology. They entered the work force in the 1980s during a moment of economic recession and industrial downsizing. And also, this is quite crucial, during a moment when there was a diminishing availability of the public purse for arts subsidies. So they were kind of pushed by these social determinants towards self-employment. They generally reached adulthood or adolescence during the time of Margaret Thatcher's Prime Ministership, and they are said to derive some of their values from this kind of political formation of Thatcherism. In a kind of contradictory way because none of them would identify themselves as Tories, they wouldn't identify themselves as conservatives, and yet they have some of those Neo-Liberal, like Michael was saying, anti-establishment, anti-tradition, very individualistic qualities. And this again pre-disposed them to entrepreneurial self-employment.
In addition to this academic writing about the new media myth there has really been a very powerful and potent media in popular culture about the new media myth, a myth around it being exciting cutting edge work. That it involves artistic young cool people. That it is very creative and it is autonomous and that working relationships are relaxed and non-hierarchical. That there is this anti-corporate feel, and that there is this really egalitarian focus and a focus on diversity. The myth around what a new media start up firm looks like, is that it doesn't matter if you are gay or straight, it doesn't matter if you are male or female, it doesn't matter if you are black or white, because everyone connects to this "post-Benetton" ideal of egalitarianism, I think you could call it. You know the Benetton adverts; it's that kind of image. A sort of classic image of it in Britain was seen in a drama that started in late 2000 called Attachments, which was the BBC's first attempt to do a dotcom drama. I'll just read a bit from the press release of the drama. The BBC promised us:
"An abundance of sex, nudity and lust..." and it highlighted the following things, "lattés and trendy warehouse premises, temperamental designers, people shouting things like, 'can't you do a tracer route on the IP address', web cams in the toilet, swearing abuse and practical jokes, brooding techies with body odor and investors who seemed to be friends but turn out to be enemies."
A... just the opening two scenes kind of set the tone for the whole of this drama. The opening scene shows the coder hard at work on his HTML or his JAVA or whatever, then the camera pulls back and we see that he is actually completely naked. Then he gets up to make a call on his mobile, which obviously he has to do on a skateboard, and he skateboards across the room, naked, and calls his colleague on the phone. His colleague answers the phone midway through having sex, and there you have all of the ingredients of this show.
It was against the backdrop of these myths that we set out to do, really some basic empirical research about what it is like to actually work in new media. This research is five years old and that makes it basically half a lifetime away, in terms of the lifetime of the web and what we are addressing now. One of the things I'd really value is your feedback on how out of date this research is. How much has changed, what is different now. The situation I think is perhaps very different and it is partly a result of the Dotcom Crash. Though I think this is more of a North American story than it is a European story, especially because of the huge amounts of venture capital that were involved in the US. But it is also very different because things have just shaken down. Things have stabilized and there is much more differentiation now, say for computer game designers, which are now a separate group largely, rather than included under this heading.
There has been this stabilization and differentiation, but I am keen to explore what has changed. We have started a new study at the beginning of this week with Andy Pratts, from London and Folkes Beltan from Berlin. We are looking at six cities but don't have any data yet, we started it two weeks ago. What I've done in this talk; I am talking mainly about research I did with some colleagues, but also supplementing it where I can with more up to date information from other colleagues.
These were my research partners and I just want to acknowledge them. The study was carried out with these partners and it was cross European. We focused on six different countries. We did interviews, a combination of interviews and electronic surveys. This is just a slide mentioning some of the additional research I am drawing on.
The countries in the study were Austria, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.
The responses that we got from the study were very uneven. So we got a lot of responses from the people in the Netherlands and a lot of people from the UK, some from Spain, hardly any from Ireland and a few from Finland. So it is very unevenly distributed.
Our findings. Starting off with the most banal, most people were aged between 20 and 40; most of them actually were between 25 and 35. They've been working in new media an average of two to six years. The people that we spoke to, 112 of them, the sample we have is overwhelmingly white. I think this is an important point. I am not totally clear whether the whiteness of our respondents is at all related to the fact that this industry is very white dominated or whether there something in the way we did our research, and particularly the use of snow balling, that meant we didn't actually get to close to the black, Asian and other people involved. I suspect that it is a very white dominated field, and I can say that looking out at this audience. But also based on the evidence of art school admissions. In the UK there is a real concern at the moment because entry to art school is so white and so middle class, and it shouldn't be. I think there are really important issues around racialization, particularly when we look at the findings juxtaposed with the myth: the myth of racial egalitarianism.
In terms of education we found that, you guys, are probably the most highly educated workers in Europe, that 93% had a degree, half of those with a degree had a post-graduate qualification, but more than that they have also done loads of supplementary training and learning from all kinds of packages, training languages, techniques and so on.
There was a really powerful finding around how critical people were about their formal education, so although they were kind of up there with doctors and lawyers, in terms of how much formal education they'd had, they were extremely critical of that formal education. They were critical of their teachers having very low levels of IT literacy; they felt that their teachers had a very impoverished view of the potential of new technologies and applications. And that there was much too much a rigid split between art lessons on the one hand, IT lessons on the other, and no connection between them.
They were also very critical of the way that ICT was treated as kind of play, instead of real work, in schools in particular. So a bit like, "oh now kids we are going to do something really fun". Instead of, this is just as important and serious as the rest of your work.
A lot of them having been very critical of their formal education had then learned loads of packages and applications, by themselves or in adult education settings, or media centers, or from their peers. There was an incredible amount of peer teaching and learning going on. Someone mentioned it yesterday in terms of just standing around terminals. People gathering around saying, "look at that, how did you do that? Look at the particular look and feel of that", all of those sorts of things.
Findings in terms of the work itself, we found that the informal networks that people had were extremely important. They were a source of support, of learning, and of information about jobs. Lots of people at that time created their own jobs. And that could be something as basic as somebody going to their local independent record store and saying do you want me to design a web site for you. Lots of people created their own work, or produced CD-ROMS that they took around and showed people. They were trying to engage with people about thinking about doing different things and extending people's vision of what was possible.
A key source of finding work was a culture that was organized around bars and cafés. The recent research pool has born that out as well. There is some research on Brighton and Hove from 2003, which is a very big new media hub in the south of England. It found that although there are loads of internet recruitment agencies and also lots of state subsidized agencies to support new media workers with bulletin boards of vacancies and jobs etc. people didn't tend to use them. They used word of mouth and face-to-face as their source of finding work.
Importantly it was not just a source of finding work, but it was also a source of trading evaluations of who was good, who was doing crappy stuff, who was good to work with, who kept a deadline, who didn't. All of that kind of tacit information was passed on informally in face-to-face settings around bars.
We found that people were often working on lots of different projects simultaneously. The average was around eight per year and they sometimes made distinctions between the things they had to do to pay the rent, which might be very boring and mundane things that they had to do just to pay the rent, and then their artistic or creative projects, which they saw as actually defining who they were and what they wanted to do; where they were pushing the boundaries.
Findings in terms of money: we were really shocked by this, when we found this out, bare in mind it is five years ago; very low earnings for new media work. Men were earning an average of 16,000 euros a year and women were earning an average of 10,000 euros. These low incomes meant that they had to supplement their new media work with other types of work. By far the most common other type of work they supplemented with was teaching. There is a lot of adult education teaching going on, some of them were doing part time teaching at a university, and what was very significant was, they are bit like actors in a sense. They might be waiting tables in a restaurant eleven and half months per year and get a part in a show for two weeks of the year, but they still self-defined themselves as actors. And so it was with the new media workers we spoke too. Their identity, their sense of who they were, what they were doing came from their new media work, even if that was, in terms of their financial earnings and in terms of time, much less significant. That is really important.
The attractions and frustrations, the youth dynamisms, the creativity, the fact that it was never boring, people said that a lot. It is never boring. It is always challenging you; you are always being forced to think through new things, a sense of possibilities. They also really valued working in flat organizations where there wasn't specialized differentiation, where everybody had to do a bit of everything. That was how it was for most of the people at that time. They valued the autonomy, they valued the freedom to shape their working day. They could get up at three in the afternoon if they wanted and work then, and work through the whole night. But there was nobody saying you need to be here between these hours.
Again, the myth of new media was heavily referenced by the people we spoke too, saying it is a fun place to work and a really valuable part of it was the blurring of work and non-work, so you didn't think, this is my work and then this is the rest of my life. There was a blurring between work and life.
Leadbeter and Oakley in their study offer a very upbeat assessment of this kind of work. It really stresses the pleasures of working in a creative micro business. But what we felt and what often gets left out of these very celebratory accounts is a sense of any of the costs, or risks, or the insecurity, or the precariousness of this kind of work. So what we tried to do is hold on to both sides, hold on to the fact that people told us about the exhilaration, the excitement, the pleasure; how good it was to be doing something you really enjoyed and was challenging, yet also hold onto some of the problematic features that there were for people working in new media.
We grouped these together under the headline, "The Individualization of Risk". This phrase is one that comes from a German sociologist Ulrich Beck. Unlike employees in traditional organizations the majority of our respondents were freelancers and they were working in extremely competitive environments, where your portfolio of work and your last job and your reputation were fundamentals, like the phrase, "you're only as good as your last job" was very powerful. The workers we spoke too dealt with a lot of anxieties and risks around finding work, managing their time, managing their new media work with the other stuff they had to do in order to make some money to pay the rent. Managing the gaps between contracts updating their skills in a field where innovations are just crazily fast. Staying abreast of new developments was a constant challenge. You couldn't get sick because you might miss out on a whole new set of things.
So, for example, Susan Christopherson has done some research around the new media district in New York, and her respondents said they were basically spending 20 hours every week staying abreast of changes, training themselves in new skills, updating their skills, and looking for their next contract. 20 hours a week you know is more than half of the standard working week and that is before they've even done any work. You see what I mean? They haven't even started their actual work. That's just to keep ticking over. So a long hours culture, very demanding. There wasn't a culture of complaining about that. People did that and understood that is part of working in this field, yet you could see that over a long period that might become unsustainable to work at that kind of pitch and once you've left a particular age bracket.
Turning finally to the specific issues around gender. We found that when we asked women and men about what you could call their "techno biographies", that whole set of experiences they had with different technologies growing up, that they had totally different techno biographies. And this started either at school or before going to school. At school the women routinely reported having much less access to the PC, and that the PC's would be dominated by groups of boys hanging around them. There was lots and lots of talk about that.
It ended up with the fact that women just got fewer of the contracts. So I said to you earlier that there was an average of eight contracts per year, eight different projects per year, when you broke that down by gender, men were doing an average of nine and women were doing and average of six. Women were doing fewer contracts. As a consequence to that they earned substantially less for their new media work. Where men were earning 16,000 euros on average, women were earning 10,000 euros. What this meant was that, de facto, women became part time in what they were doing. They got pushed into a situation where, because they were getting fewer new media contracts they were having to do more teaching, the university lecturing and so on, in order to supplement their income. And so it polarized many of them. If you looked at their career trajectories side-by-side they started to look very different and they became more different.
One of the other significant things about this was that one of the universal desires of everyone we spoke to was that they wanted to work in the cultural hub or the technology hub of a city. That was their most desirable place of working. So everybody's aspiration was to have some sort of rented studio space in the cultural hub of the city. What happened in terms of gender was, because woman were earning less from their new media work they couldn't justify the rent on the studio space in the way that men could. More women end up working from home. And then it became a sort of self fulfilling prophecy, that they were working from home, they weren't in the cultural hub of the city where a lot of the men had rented studio spaces, so they weren't in the café and the bar culture, so they didn't have a place to bring clients to and say this is my work space. And so this whole cycle continued.
We had from women and men; we had people telling us very fun solutions, and very creative solutions, that they made for this problem. Nevertheless, it was a problem. One woman adopted a café, which she always used to bring clients to. It was like her café and that's where they kind of reserved a table for her and she could always bring her clients and know it would be reasonably quiet.
Diane Parrins who's done some work around Brighton, told me a very fun story about how two men, who were working out of a bedroom, how they managed that problem about talking to clients in a space that wasn't a converted bedroom. What they would do is hire a black Mercedes in order to generate the impression that they had tons of work and tons of business. They would always get out their PDA and say, "I can't fit you in, I just can't fit you in at all" and then they'd say, "look the only time I can do it is midnight, is midnight by Brighton Pier going to be okay?" Apparently people would say yes and they would actually have the meeting in this hire black Mercedes.
There was another similar story, again around generating an aura of solidity and busyness and creativity around the company, was again from Brighton, which was two guys hiring a yacht just off the coast of Brighton, and then they would pay young people to wear t-shirts with the company name on it and to walk up and down the beach wearing these t-shirts, which was basically just these two guys; the company; wearing these t-shirts to generate an impression of how big and successful the company was while they had this hourly rented yacht trip out at sea.
There were incredibly creative solutions but nevertheless the serious issue is around what happened when woman got forced back into working in the home.
So far I've talked about some very traditional mundane, not at all surprising difference between the number of contracts that men and women got, the rates of pay they got, the access to work places they had. But in addition to those traditional markers of inequality there were a couple of things that seemed to be new, seemed to be distinctive to the new media field, one of them centered around informality. As I said before the informality in new media work is something that really attracted people to that work. But this could also pose problems for women. There were various women who reported problems in terms of working with men in male dominated teams, where there could sometimes be inappropriately sexualized interaction, sometimes bordering on harassment. More commonly there were complaints about ladish culture. This was also found by Victoria Pitts in her 2003 study, and by Diane Parrins in her study in 2004. Her respondents talked about the "bloke-ism" of working in new media.
Women also tended feel that they missed out in getting contracts because they were less likely to be involved in the drinking culture. They also felt implicitly that judgments that were passed on around who is good, who's creative, who's doing exciting stuff, who's hot at the moment, those kinds of informal judgments tended to discriminate against them. Not that it was deliberate but tended to privilege men, in what one of them called the new boys network.
Another issue was flexibility, as I said, flexibility is another of those things that is seen as highly desirable. But there is a very flexible discourse of flexibility in new media. It didn't necessarily turn out to be the kind of flexibilities that they wanted. Flexibility ended up not being determined by their own needs, it wasn't that they were truly autonomous and able to work flexibly, but it was flexibility determined by the needs of the project. So you could be quite flexible when a deadline wasn't due, but as soon as one was due flexibility went out of the window. In fact it turned out to be something that Andy Pratts called the bulimic career pattern. Which draws on that notion of eating disorders where you have really intense periods of binging on work where you are working all of the time and then periods where you are basically starving for work.
Another issues about women working from home, I'd like to add just one point here. Historically the home has had a very different meaning for women then its had for men and that is another reason that made it particularly difficult for women to be returned to the home. It made our female respondents feel that being in the home made them seem less serious then it did for men.
The final issue here is about children. We didn't specifically ask about children. Very few people had children, partly because of the age range of the people. But Susan Christopherson in her study of New York found that very few of the new media workers she studied had children. And Annette Henninger and Karin Gottschall in Germany also found that women were much less likely to have children. Now you could just say, maybe new media workers don't want to have children. But what emerged was that men could have children, so male new media workers often did have children but the female new media workers didn't. This seems to be another hidden cost that women where facing. As a side note to that, I've done some work for the BBC and they've been working towards getting targets for the number of senior executives, executive producers, and producers and they reached those targets for women. But anecdotally what they reported now is that the new in-equality that they found is not between men and women but between men with children and women who can't seem to have children to make it in the same positions within the BBC. I really think the issue around children and being able to have children combine that with work is an important one.
My very last point now, is around something we called the post-feminist problem. One of the issues was that there was a real reluctance amongst our sample, both male and female, to admit to the new media scene being anything other than completely egalitarianism. There was a kind of willful gender blindness and racial blindness so that people would not notice that it was completely white, and not notice patterns of male domination, and this went for age as well. There was such a dominance of individualistic and meritocratic discourses so everybody seemed very wedded to the idea that if you work hard enough you can make it. That it is up to you to be good enough so that you get the next contract. What seemed to have disappeared was any kind of language for talking about a structural inequality. There was a kind of schizophrenic quality to some of the conversations we had. Where on the one hand people would know that it wasn't really meritocratic, it wasn't really based on how good you were and there were all kinds of other things going on in the allocation of contracts; who do you know, who is you friend, who did you work with before, or were you in the bar on that particular night when that was being talked about. All of those things were in fact really important things, but once people talked about it they came back to this idealized notion of it being a meritocracy, and it is all on the basis of how good you are.
To conclude I think there are a lot of issues in terms of new media workers lives, but particularly I focused on the differences between the kinds of career biographies that women and men were able to have, and I think there is quite a long way to go before we can say in anyway we are living up to the core creative, egalitarian image. Thanks
Michael Indergaard
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Geert Lovink: Lets just start with Michael Indergaard, from New York. He is the Associate Professor at St. Johns University in sociology and anthropology, and we asked him to speak here because he published the history of the New York, New Economy, the so-called "Silicon Alley". The book is called Silicon Alley, The Rise and fall of a New Media District and in this book he is addressing different issues concerning the New Economy. Apart from Silicon Alley he has another forthcoming book on corporate government and financial crimes. Please Michael Indergaard.
Michael Indergaard: As a sociologist I'm sort of from a different tribe than you, and I was pondering just exactly what tribe do I belong too? I was looking at my very interesting badge which of course is now all over the room; I wasn't sure if I was representing George W. Bush or perhaps the Pope and both of these aren't very good choices, so lets just say I'm the sociologist.
I think perhaps these little badges were a device to raise the issue of how does legacy and lineage effect identity. And it turns out that trying to specify the essential character or nature of something, in other words its identity, is a rather difficult thing to do.
My book on Silicon Alley is one of those messy kinds of works that tries to look at many different things and see how they all came together in one clump, namely, how many diverse kinds of actors and social cultural resources, in the city, were organized into this ensemble, under a particular identity.
Here is my thesis: the character of web workers, their work, and even their ideals ends up being shaped ultimately by what it is they are a part of; by what they are connected too. Which means the larger social economic systems. Based on that, I think a lot of the issues that arose in the 1990's in places like Silicon Alley are still facing people in this field, even as the field changes quite a bit. Part of these issues are this: what will sustain their work, your work, in a material or economic sense? In terms of, who will sign your paycheck or what will pay the bills of the enterprise you work for, whether it's for profit or not for profit. How will you gain the resources that you need to sustain what you are doing? One of the key ones I will be focusing on is how do you gain a place in the built environment, in the expensive urban real estate. The other issue, I think, is in the networks that web workers belong too. Where is the power, where is the control and how much do you have, how much did you have in the early 90s and how much can you look forward to have in the future? I will probably ask these questions without giving that many answers.
I'm guessing that there are lots of idealistic, young, web designers here. I would like to start out with the ideals and idealistic new media types once found in New York circa 1995, and these ideals you can organize around a set of expectations as well as hopes. For example, that the Internet would allow for the rise of an alternative media, and that, new media producers and users could escape corporate controls. That corporations would have lost their advantages in terms of both production and distribution, and not only that, the new media producers could produce content and expressions that were more creative and more authentic; escaping the whole mass market, mass consumption circle. Finally the New York media claimed that they had a special comparative advantage; that they were creative. That they could excel at making creative content, then in trying to make a more sophisticated version of that, they dubbed this "Creative Commercial Applications". What they had in mind was; this is our advantage versus the tech heavy West Coast. We have the media; we are the media center of the world.
So I'm going to introduce a young idealistic web designer and I'm just going to kind of loosely follow him. This is one guy I mention in my book. This is a zine he helped found, the guy is Kyle Shannon, he was an unemployed actor who was doing desktop publishing to pay the rent. Around 1995 he formed this web zine called Urban Desires, of which this was one of the covers. The notion was that there is much in the city that is desirable. He first started with a kind of erotic notion and then he went to a more general idea talking about the dark side of our desires and wants. He also formed an association so that he would have like-minded techno bohemians to exchange ideas with and that was called the World Wide Web Artist Consortium. To show the importance of those kinds of networks for supporting these new creative sub-cultures, as well as, their life and work style; one of the people he started to get help from in this association was a fellow named Chan Suh. Within a couple of months they formed a company, a new media startup that they called Agency.com. Basically they did advertising based web design and other services and that probably was the kind of work that Silicon Alley became known for.
Ironically these new media progressives, who were so adept at creating these vivid imagery lost control. They lost control over the images, as well as the identity of the New York new media itself. And that is the story of Silicon Alley. Silicon Alley is a commercial identity.
Originally Silicon Alley was in this corridor along Broadway starting at the Flatiron district and going through Soho and Greenwich Village, the traditional bohemian area of lower Manhattan. But as you can see I have a separate little quadrant towards the bottom of lower Manhattan and this is actually the downtown financial district and this became a second center for them. And that is a somewhat novel twist for the bohemian experience in New York, to end up on Wall Street, in more ways than one.
Where did this commercial identity come from? It was produced largely by real estate interest, as well as, by the financiers, and especially the venture capitalists. With the important collaboration of the media, both the burgeoning new financial media, that we heard and saw so often, as well as Silicon Alley's own specialized local industry newsletters and online magazines, probably the best known is the Silicon Alley Reporter, which is actually a real paper magazine.
Also contributing was a segment of the new media pioneers themselves. A segment. Those who aspired to be national contenders, if not international, or more specifically those who sought to become new media moguls. To be first movers who can dominate their market segment and be the new Bill Gates.
Now, a quick brief to layout the larger forces that set the scene here. I can only give you a slice of what is in the book of course, but I think it is useful to reflect on the era, these larger forces, and I'll just do that briefly. One is Neo-Liberal policy in the US. One segment of that and probably the one that is most obvious is this promiscuous deregulation of finance and telecommunications sector, which really together fueled the boom; set it off, as well as the general deregulation of corporate governance. So you can make funny numbers, to make funny money. Not only did Neo-Liberalism entail this deregulation but also it also actively promoted it. That is an important thing to realize about the Neo-Liberal state, it is active. It just doesn't retreat. In this case their active promotion, this of course was a Democratic President, the Clinton administration, actively promoting finance driven tech development.
A second major force going on was what I call the New Economy and Cultural Mobilization, in which you have these networks of intellectuals and business professors and consultants who are making the brickolage of new sensibilities in the "new rules" for the New Economy. And the one I just want to point to here that really is important in a concrete sense in Silicon Alley is the idea that you need to turn your stock into a currency. That is your weapon for getting big fast, so you can be that first mover.
Back to the local players and the making of Silicon Alley. Since the Federal Government has no direct intervention at the local level you have sort of an institutional vacuum and the two interest that filled this, were as I mentioned before, the venture capitalist and the real estate developers.
Lets take a look at the venture capitalist first. Of course it is well known what their role is supposed to be in these high-risk innovative economies. They are supposed to reduce the risk, because they are smart money on account of their networks and insider connections. But what we found out during the 1990s is that their insider connections meant that they were able to learn how to beat the market regardless of the quality of the firms they had, because they knew the financial system. They know how to shepherd them through. The pioneers in New York are Wall Street veterans who see an opportunity to challenge Silicon Valley, to challenge its flow over venture capital, and they're thinking it sure would be nice to start directing that flow back to New York, because a lot of that money originates in New York. It just was not being targeted to New York; it was not being applied to New York.
One of them coins the name Silicon Alley in a rather obvious bid to set up this rivalry claiming we have the media, you've got the computers, the computers can replace the media but maybe we can compliment each other, and we'll both be Centers.
One thing I found very interesting is the degree to which the venture capitalist did not just exploit networks they were actively creating them. They in fact helped organize Silicon Alley through connecting the diverse kinds of occupations from the new media people with corporate executives with business professionals, like accountants, as well as, of course the financiers on Wall Street. They formalized that network when they created the New York New Media Association, which I was surprised to find out was a model for a new media association in Amsterdam, but I don't know if it was as oriented to venture capital. At its high point the New York New Media Association probably had about 8500 members, from a very wide spectrum of professionals; artist to bankers to lawyers to accountants, executives to the venture capitalists and at least one sociologist, which just tagged along of course to get some inside dope! Or I guess I should say some information, being here in Amsterdam.
Let see I... Oh the real estate connection! Well this is the reason why the new media got the foothold in Manhattan in the first place. There was a very bad recession in the early 1990s the city lost something like 300,000 jobs, 10% unemployment. Starving artists experimenting with the digital technology are able to find spaces in lower Manhattan, especially in old industrial lofts, along that Broadway corridor. But the worst area was down town in the financial district. Wall Street had a vacancy rate in 1995 of about 20%. At one point the World Trade Center was 30% vacant. That's 11 million square feet.
This is how they end up in the financial district. One of the real estate powers down there has an abandoned, an empty 30 story building that he opens up to the new media. And he spends 40 million dollars putting in the wiring, state of the art infrastructure; invites them in, calls it the New York Information Technology Center and also launches a PR blitz and gets a lot of coverage, and that helps put the identity on the map for the general population. That was quite successful, and the public/private real estate promotion group that this guy influenced down there, decided to do a larger program, which they called "Plug 'n' Go", in which they ended up wiring a total of 13 different office buildings. We're talking office buildings now, not lofts. At the high point they had about 260 new media firms in those buildings. Here you can see in the promotion for this, you can see the commandeering of the new media imagery it is pretty blatant here, entrepreneurship as extreme sport.
I don't know if this map turns out so well, but this map just gives you a sense of the extent of these "Plug 'n' Go" buildings. I think there are only 8 or 9 of them shown here. There are about 4 or 5 more than this. And you can see where it is vis-ˆ-vis the World Trade Center and where it says New York Information Technology Center; well that's part of Wall Street.
This changes the geography of Silicon Alley at the same time that it reinforces the identity. Greatly reinforces identity. It is reinforcing and spreading this territory. And when the tech stocks later heat up many real estate interests all over Manhattan start using the presence of new media firms to change the imagery.
By late 1998 you have extensive financial networks in place to take new media starts ups to IPO's, to their stock listed on the stock market. One thing I tried to emphasize in my book was to answer the question, what were they thinking? Were they con artists? Crooks? Were they deluded, and I think the majority of the new media entrepreneurs themselves were none of these. They were not necessarily trying to make a win fall of riches for themselves. They had a very specific set of ideas they were following and this once again couples with this New Economy doctrine: you've got to make your stock into a currency, you have to grow really big really fast and then you can dictate the terms of that market niche, when your the biggest fish in that pond. And that was their bid. Now in regards to the financiers I'm afraid it is a different story and that's the other doctrine: pump and dump.
Well you get a string of huge IPO's for Silicon Alley firms starting in the fall of 1998 running throughout 1999. In fact they had some record breaking IPO's in the fall of 1998. They were actually the highest one-day rise in price of the stock compared to Silicon Valley firms. I think it influenced the whole tenor for the whole market and made it much worse. By late 1999 you had 28 firms in Silicon Alley ending up with a value of nearly 30 billion dollars, on paper. These are places where five years before it was two guys and a crappy machine in one room.
Of course this provided new imagery for commentary and for reinforcing the hype. This is from the Silicon Alley Reporter, they were doing a top executives issue every year and for the beginning of 2000 they entered this nice little cover here; it's a rip off of the Sergeant Peppers Band cover, and what of course is the message here? I guess in the United States I would use the term "a double play", meaning not only do they have a victory in the capital circuit, they are claiming a victory as cultural authorities. In fact pop culture icons, saying we're the new wave. What's interesting in here is the guys that are front and center, taking the place of the Fab Four, (I put in these little signs because I saw this as the value of how one got to this cultural position, noting here the value of their own personal stock in the company they helped fund), the guy over here with the dog is from Razorfish, I'm sure you've heard of Jeff Dachis, his amount says 190 million; what he was worth at that time. Candice Carpenter, iVillage... Okay the Double Click guy is something like 750 million. Oh! There are a couple of characters here; you see the Blues Brothers, the sunglasses; Kyle Shannon and Chan Suh. Their company by about this time has about 2000 employees with a dozen offices across the world.
After this IPO run, you have an immense flood of venture capital come into New York. To give you some perspective in 1995 the total amount of venture capital in the United States was something like 4.2 billion dollars, and that would mostly be Silicon Valley. In 2000 New York Internet alone is making that much, which is mind boggling since Silicon Valley had been there for 40 years. The total in the United States in 2000 is about 102 billion. So you know now the flood of capital behind the startup explosion.
This has an effect in terms of having an incredible multiplication of startups in Manhattan and they are starting to eat up all of the space. They're going everywhere. In fact they are ending up even in mid-town, which is really the biggest business district. Not only did the real estate prices soar, a space crunch started and many small businesses begin to be displaced, businesses that were profitable, and employed many ordinary New Yorkers. This then began to back fire onto the new media itself. It started to become difficult for them to get space. In January of 2000 a new growth coalition formed to specifically address the new media space crunch, and it was formed by a New York Senator, Charles Schumer, and co-chaired by Robert Rubin, the former secretary of treasury under Clinton. It had a great many high-level multi-national corporations on it and it had representatives of 4 Silicon Alley firms including Agency.com.
Despite the fact that the crash came in 2000 before this group issued its report, it still went ahead and said we need massive commercial re-development in Manhattan to create more space, and they pointed to the west side of Manhattan, west of Times Square. But now the purpose was to provide space for corporations, so the whole new media thing had been used, abused and then refused, and tossed to the side and this whole thing ended up to be good old corporate deal. In fact the corporate economy kept expanding, even as new media was sinking after the stock market crash. You also had this terrible commercial and residential gentrification all over Manhattan, which was continuing to push out businesses. The places where that new media types used to live, they became full of yuppies.
The World Trade Center attacks of course changed everything and finally ended the corporate expansion and put New York into a deep recession. It ended any hopes that Silicon Alley was going to rebound and pull through this. Many of these national contenders go bankrupt, others shrink drastically, Agency.com had an interesting fate; they go private. They get purchased by a private interest so they are no longer listed on the stock market and they shrink to 80 employees.
Many of the characteristic Silicon Alley institutions fold. Silicon Alley Reporter and all of the local new media publications like that, the New York New Media Association, folded. The identity pretty much died in a sociological sense. You can say Silicon Alley died as a sociological entity, in terms of that name, that identity, and that particular ensemble with those connections to the media and to the financial district.
At the end of the book I raised the question, I said, there are lots of surviving elements of the new media in the area. There are thousands of computer firms and there are a number of institutional programs that have been started, but how could they be combined in some sort of new ensemble? I think we are starting to get one answer to that on the real estate side. A major trend seems to be this effort of large-scale real estate development projects to build around new media infrastructure and activities. And there is a conference at MIT, right now, called "New Century Cities", which is a joint project of the Media Lab, the real estate department, and the Urban Planning department. That tells you something. They are suggesting that in many places in the world you now have these new projects that are located at the intersections of technology, urban design, and real estate development. So basically the IT and the media technologies are being woven into the design of cities. So it looks like the web design problematic is morphing, becoming more interesting for an urban sociologist, no doubt, but you have to wonder what does this portend for the people who want to work in this field?
There is a specific project that I am working with that is kind of an example of this thing, a project by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. And it kind of embodies the contradictions we saw in Silicon Alley in the 1990s, in that the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's agenda is very progressive, yet their biggest backer is that down town real estate interest, because the real estate crisis in down town is accelerating, and when the new World Trade Center is built it is just going to add more surplus capacity. So they figure they have to have and angle. They are going to have to have some sort of major identity for that place, and they are thinking its going to be a 24/7 community, a good place to work, live and play. What the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council is coming up with is, if you have new media used very interactively in the built environment you can gain those qualities. And in terms of the specific goals here you see a lot of progressive elements. They want to bring together many of the different constituencies involved to discuss and plan this, including the new media practitioners and their institutions. Also they are very interested in issues of diversity and sustainability and granting access to this areas activities for groups of people who might usually be excluded. They've been doing a battery of activities where they've been bringing in interactive artists who do things out in the streets, in interactive art installations, and often times depend upon what the audience is doing. Such as, they project onto a building and then people who walk in front of the projector end up with their images on the building and they can manipulate the images and do little plays and skits and things. This gives you an idea; this is a pitch on one of their posters. The pitch they are trying to make to the general public is; you now live in this new media world, be aware of it, seize it, use it. Very progressive. Yet, a sober reminder of the ability of the elites, when they are in these networks, to swing them to their own designs is now what is finally happening out of that big west side project that started with the mobilization to create new space for the new media. As it is becoming the new engine of New York the city has now morphed into this. An attempt, a highly controversial attempt, to have about a 5 billion dollar development, will have a 600 million dollar public subsidy by the state and city, very corporate oriented office development, maybe up to 28 million square feet and a professional football stadium.
So I think that kind of sketches out a lot of the challenges, questions and issues and thank you.
To read a clarified and extended version of this presentation please see 16 ways of thinking about web design
John Chris Jones
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John Chris Jones: Thank you very much. As you've just heard I've been waiting a long time to be able to give you this talk, probably thirty from fifty years. Because in the 1950s, I was concerned as an ergonomic industrial designer with the interface of one of the early mainframes, the AEI 1010, and I've been connected at a distance with computer people ever since then. At that time when they used to consider auto coves for the cities and re-mended it in machine language, which was one's and zeros. And off course the amount of software has increased ... but for all these years it still wasn't flexible enough to act in a more human way for things I wanted to do with it.
It only worked in a more human way. Only recently in 1995 due to the persuasion of one of my good friends was I induced or forced, I should say, into becoming a natural computer person. And that was Jonathan Moberly who obliged me to buy the necessary equipment and to learn the skills about do it yourself with aid from him. Previous to that Erik von Rauschell persuaded me and eventually talked me into it. And what you see here is a bit of a website I was assisted by Kass Schmidt is Kass here now? Could you put your hand up? Of the BBC who helped me to make this, rather than on my own, and Rob Blake who some of you know. Without these people I could do nothing. And I think I made something of these things because its a collaborative medium is it not? And it is the first in the world that is so collaborative. I think the spontaneous example of the open source movement is kind of comparable for the good that can come out of this network situation. The general word for Internet ... I think the generic word should be computer net, namely a telephone network with a computer at each node as well as people at the nodes. That is what makes the difference whether you call it Internet or not. And it allows for things to go off on different routes and seems to be centerless. I wrote something called the phone in collaboration with Jonathan Moberly, which became quite a well-known piece of software.
Now I'm going to talk about my own experiences as really an amateur in this. I've been a professional amateur all my life; I would say going deliberately at the receiving end and seeing what it looks like to be fired at by the producers of technology. Mostly it hurts in my opinion though we're induced to believe that it doesn't hurt. And we get induced to mechanize ourselves to such a point that maybe we can't de-mechanize ourselves, by that meaning to pre-computer technology. The computer as I realized in the 1950s is flexible, movable, changeable, not concerned with fixed centers of authoritarian modes of behavior. And that is the promise. So first technology really does is allow people to send matter off, possibly a website too and the radio microphone.
We will read in a few minutes from my digital diary. If this is live, I am not sure if it is live, we'll find out in a moment. Then I'm going to look at the latest day if we can get to it, which was the 19th of January. We'll read what is there. Let see if we can get to it. I've never used one of these lines with two things in it I've always been a Mac person. Now is this working?
Thinking out of doors, is something, which I did on the 19th, and I've been taking another computer... where's my hand held? Here's the hand held. I found ... I was getting really far with the desktop computer and then I got an impulse one day ... I am going to visit the cave drawings in France, the underground cave drawings by stone age people and on the way I bought this. Which is a hand held made by ... it's called a Visor it's really strictly the same as the Palm. It uses the Palm software, and I write on this out of doors, and not in office spaces, not in houses, not with roofs, and floors, and wall around us. And following the advice of Thoreau, David Thoreau the American philosopher poet, or biologist poet, you could say that, who lived several years in a hut in the woods. And he says what you write out of doors in totally different, I agree with him. Also Rabindranath Tigore the Indian philosopher he says what I see in western philosophy I see the reflection of the city wall which is outside the philosopher and insulates him from nature and produces a dualism, the dualism of Plato for instance which has sobered us so deeply, and so highly ingrained and that I think is what we're up against. The dualism, very relevant to the last talk. I think from Hayo whether we accept all of it, don't accept splits between people into classes of professional and amateur and so on. I refuse to use splits. I find ... I tried in organization to do this but eventually I had to resign, in the mid 80s, because I had a profound argument with the Open University where I used to work, but I could see that within such and organization as that it was impossible to proceed in the way I wish to and since then I earned much less money and freedom from having a boss, freedom of having an editor I had to work for and so on; And freedom from being on a committee. I don't think I've been on a committee since then, since about 1985.
This is an expensive decision and this is one of the results. I have a clock here ... what time are we supposed to finish?
Femke Snelting: Fifteen minutes.
Jones: Fifteen minutes to go, so that's quarter past three. I hope I can keep my mind on that.
Now, I'm sitting in such a funny posture that I can't do that. I'm trying to get to where I can ... I wonder if you can do that for me, and I'll take the microphone a little bit nearer, so I can see the projection properly.
I'm just going to read this and we're going to enjoy the experience I hope, now of what I call collective reading. Which was absolutely impossible till digitized print. And I think the digitizing is a liberating move. We're going to read very slowly. I normally do this every other Friday on a radio station in London called the Late, Late, Breakfast Show. It went off at two o'clock (...?) The Late, Late, Breakfast Show is arranged by Jonathan Momely and his wife and I'm there every other week and I read the latest bits from my digital diary. So I'm going to read now as if I were on the broadcast.
Funny thing reading from a microphone, from print, in broadcasting and now into collective reading, I think you might find you enjoy the experience of reading rather more when your sharing it with everyone else, than you ever dreamed possible before. If you read the writing of Marcel Proust, he has some beautiful essays on readings which lead to his first book, and he says its a tremendous joy being in touch with the secret recesses of the mind of the writer reverberating into the recesses of the mind of the reader.
Okay "Online 20th January 2005. Modified", also 20th of January 2005. I do this each time. Note the modification. There will be more in this one I think because there are some mistakes in it. "19th January 2-0-0-5, Thinking out of doors. 16-0-3, Walking a different path today I find myself perceiving things differently. Ground, Trees, ponds, houses", I do these walks on (?) in London for those of you who know it. It's the city forest completely surrounded by a city and really quite wild. "... Ponds, houses, valleys, the whole of technology, and the ... the six billion of us alive and the billions who have already lived and disappeared without (it seems to me) having dealt adequately with their technologies or with themselves as workers, instruments, victims even of the circumstances that they and we create." By the way, when I am writing this, I'm never more than three words ahead of what's going to come. "...Causing accidents of human life. And work and its apparently senseless products all over The planet..." ha I must change that later on a late modification for this evening "...and beyond it. I'm still in the woods. But in my thoughts I'm revisiting the prevailing unhappiness or nonsense ... the rumble of an invisible jet plane above gray cloudy sky seen through bare branches. The sounds and scenes are alive, but what of the hundreds sitting up there in a metal tube." As I was sitting yesterday. "Why are they there and where are they going? Questions one need not ask when walking in the woods but necessary I think when re-arranging life and nature to make fly an all systematical prostheses..." I've recently come to the conclusion that all design, all products are prostheses, for those of us, all of us in fact who cannot fly, we cannot go at fast speeds, we cannot go at a hundred miles an hour and so on. Where have I got to? Ah, it's gone to the top, you moved it up! "And not when walking in the woods but necessary I think when re-arranging life and nature to make flight and all sorts of magical prostheses possible for many of us..." Bracket, this is a modification I put in yesterday, "I'm flying to Amsterdam tomorrow where I may read this at a conference on web design." I think that is a good moment. "But I intended to write were more modern questions, more in mind and psyche." Notice I didn't say brain there. "And the nervous system that are now physical techniques and process and machine made works and its consequences. Why work, why software, why all of this mechanical seriousness in our ways of replacing human effort by automatic process? All forms of modern magic endured without smiles without fully realizing that our technology is out growing its mechanical past and changing its nature. That is the question. What is the answer and what has happened to our spirits? We are human animals at work when we could be at play or at something better than most of what we do for money. But it is getting to dark to see what I'm writing and I have to be in a waiting room..." Doctors waiting room that was. "A few miles away in about fifteen minutes." To get some stitches removed, you can see if you look closely on my head there is still a sign of them there. Um... stitches removed where am I? Ah, spirits. Lost it again. Ah, "the clock, the train, the planned structure we inhabit. Walking fast toward (?) hill..." We going to move up?
Femke Snelting: Yeah we're going to move up.
Jones: "I see the red light, at the top of a tall building..." Okay, "visible beyond the hill top, and when I get to the top I see a surrounding city lit up in the dusk... and the mist... and I am speechless." I could have found a better word but I didn't. "My questions..." forgetting "forgotten in the face of all this, the beauty of the city..." and I can't help remembering Wordsworth's poem there, "... scenes so touching in its majesty, city now just like a garment ware beauty of the morning silent pair. Ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples (?) open to the fields and to the sky..." I can't remember the rest. Now where are we, "the beauty of the city in the evening as it is, the towers, the lights, the unknowable whole of it, seen from above, from this distance, and half imagined in our thoughts... there is more here than we know." Now take us up, up, up, oops wait, a litt... no, no, the other way.
Matthew Fuller: Down.
Jones: Down, down, down, down, yeah "These pages are designed to be read with the window set to 2/3rds of the screen width." I make the text something like twenty four point on most peoples computer and I put that instruction at the bottom rather mildly ... because these long, long lines are terrible on the eye. The printing industry in the past always said no more than 72 letters in a line. (...?) shorter paragraphs in order so that you can read long texts on screen without having to do a print out. I don't really like these methods of media print out, it's going back to our fathers for God's sake. Now we'll see what's new, or we saw what's new. The homepage you had a look at that. The digital diary archive... the Daffodil, which is a newsletter. Anyone can join; you receive the newsletter monthly if you just send me the word "subscribe". And I won't use your information and I won't force it on you, but there you are you can have it if you wish. I send it to about 200 people at the moment, and they seem to like.
Now this copyright, I'm keen on copyrighting and I'm keen on freedom as with the open source and so on. And copyright, copyleft (...?) A sentence that took me a long time to compose, "You may transmit this text to anyone for any commercial purpose if you include this copyright line and this notice and if you respect the copyright of quotations." I think that in a nutshell, other people have come to similar sentences. It's a reflexive legal way of guarding the rights of people and yet open at the same time. If you wish to reproduce any of this commercially please send me a copyright protection, "Permission request to jcj at, to avoid... 'at' instead of the symbol to avoid encouraging spam. I was getting about 50 spam a day now I'm down to about four or five thanks to the Macintosh filter, not the Macintosh filter the Demon filter that I use, and this sentence which I think means you can attribute to that.
Lets go now to what's new. Lets see if there is anything. I'll have a look at my notes now and the clock, which we have only a few minutes left. I have about six things I wanted to say. I'm going to have to choose one of them. Because I've really allowed myself to take a long time over that but I think it's worth it. I was going to show a very elaborate bit of multimedia but the equipment isn't quite right so... as usual as very often happens this is plan B, if not plan C. Plan A was going to be really a lot of fun but we've missed it.
Now... I'm only half way down the first page and there are two pages. Creative democracy. What I was asked to speak on was not what I've said so far. I was really asked to speak on creative democracy. I am going to now have to navigate to get to... wait a minute... no, I think we'll do that one by reading through a book. This was the one I was going to do in a multimedia form. But we now have to do it through the book. On page 18 in this. This is a book which is like a bible, it looks like a bible, it isn't really a bible, only you can believe it if you wish, it's called "The Internet and Everyone", and we'll turn to page 18 to some words that took me quite awhile to work out. Where's 18, oops, 15 ... 17, yeah here we are. Two quotations from this book. This is what I wrote about... Matthew asked me to speak about it; I think it must have caught his interest. He's one of the few people that has picked this book up and read it seriously I believe.
"What I promised in the synopsis of this book was to map out in some detail the creative democracy." This is the word "creative democracy". "The despecialization of industrial living to the point where professional jobs are deconstructed into families of intelligent software enabling anyone and everyone to take over the continuous reforming of culture, in every act and every thought. There are fictional hints at this vision in several places in the book. But to nowhere near the extent that the synopsis predicted. Something keeps stopping me," this is an important point, "writing in that prescriptive way the way of the utopias." All the utopias from Plato's republic onwards, have, with one or two exception, a group of well thinking guardians or philosophers who are telling the other people what to do for their own good. Lenin, in the case of the most famous utopia, Soviet Russia for instance, followed up unfortunately by Stalin. Only William Morris and one or two others in the history of utopias wrote a utopia without government, in which self-government was the form. It is very very disappointing to me to find that science fiction which is a kind of utopia nearly always reverts to this hierarchical mode and has no conception at all of a changed social relationship, a changed nature of how we are together. That's the real point I'm reading about here. "Something keeps stopping me writing in that prescriptive way of the utopias. Some deeper reluctance kept me back from any kind of faits accomplis in which other minds are not free to be clever or more stupid than any of us might predict."
And just to finish I think we'll read one more page. Page 29 to 30, this is only a little bit. Ah it's difficult with all of these other things but never mind. I think we might have needed about six hours for the other version. This is from something called the "Unnamed Something Else" because I didn't want to name its, because when you name it, in a way you destroy it when your talking about the "whole". I think the whole is in fact unnamable and most names for the whole are diminishments of what we are capable of if we don't name "it". This is William Wordsworth here interspersed with computer thoughts. The William Wordsworth thoughts come first, 'Once again do I behold the steep but lofty cliffs on which a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky." Now comes the computer bit. "The central point to this view of things is that specialization is no longer the right form for living in industrial..." Turning to the other page. "Industrial culture. I believe that the logic of the change from mechanical to post mechanical..." You can put the cameral right on the print here. This is the ghost; he's going to give a version of what the multimedia version would have been like only it will be on tape. You can focus on the writing. "I believe that the logic of the change from mechanical to post mechanical, via electronic media and computing, implies that people cease to organize themselves in specialized roles, as experts highly skilled in narrowband jobs. With the aid of the computerized internet everyone should be able to take back (from what remains of the specialized professions) the creativeness and initiative that was long ago lost to them." The designer is a greedy man said someone called Josephine at a conference I remember about design. He steals all the interesting parts of life and leaves all the rest for all of the others. "The manual skills..." Wait a minute now... ah, I can't help doing these departures from the text. "As I see it the presence of accessible computing power embedded in everything will turn the technical know-how of experts into accessible software and their manual skills and intuitions into the normal abilities of everyone else. Thus users could become designers and designer could become facilitators (the designers of contexts and software in which these changes can happen)." That I think is the answer, my answer to the question hanging over this conference. Web design if it's professional should be a meta-profession whatever that means. That might be too much of an un-naming of the unknown. Anyway I brief look at the time and ah that was only about 25% of what I was going to say.
Thank you.
Olia Lialina
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This is an adapted version of Olia Lialina's text A Vernacular Web, for the entire content follow the link below.
The Indigenous and The Barbarians
When I started to work on the World Wide Web I made a few nice things that were special, different and fresh. They were very different from what was on the web in the mid 90s.
I'll start with a statement like this, not to show off my contribution, but in order to stress that -- although I consider myself to be an early adopter -- I came late enough to enjoy and prosper from the "benefits of civilization". There was a pre-existing environment; a structural, visual and acoustic culture you could play around with, a culture you could break. There was a world of options and one of the options was to be different.
So what was this culture? What do we mean by the web of the mid 90s and when did it end?
To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer. One could say it was the web of the indigenous...or the barbarians. In any case, it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dotcom ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.
I wrote that change was coming "soon" instead of putting an end date at 1998, for example, because there was no sickness, death or burial. The amateur web didn't die and it has not disappeared but it is hidden. Search engine rating mechanisms rank the old amateur pages so low they're almost invisible and institutions don't collect or promote them with the same passion as they pursue net art or web design.
Also new amateur pages don’t appear at such amounts as ten years ago because the WWW of today is a developed and highly regulated space. You wouldn’t get on the web just to tell the world, “Welcome to my home page.” The web has diversified, the conditions have changed and there’s no need for this sort of old fashioned behavior. Your CV is posted on the company website or on a job search portal. Your diary will be organized on a blog and your vacation photos are published on iphoto. There’s a community for every hobby and question.
This is why I refer to the amateur web as a thing of the past; aesthetically a very powerful past. Even people who weren’t online in the last century, people who look no further than the first 10 search engine results can see the signs and symbols of the early web thanks to the numerous parodies and collections organized by usability experts who use the early elements and styles as negative examples.
Just as clothing styles come back into fashion so do web designs. On a visual level things reappear. Last year I noticed that progressive web designers returned to an eclectic style reincorporating wallpapers and 3D lettering in their work. In the near future frames and construction signs will show up as retro and the beautiful old elements will be stripped of their meaning and contexts.
In the past few years I’ve also been making work that foregrounds this disappearing aesthetic of the past. With these works I want to apologize for my arrogance in the early years and to preserve the beauty of the vernacular web by integrating them within contemporary art pieces. But this is only half of the job.
Creating collections and archives of all the midi files and animated gifs will preserve them for the future but it is no less important to ask questions. What did these visual, acoustic and navigation elements stand for? For which cultures and media did these serve as a bridge to the web? What ambitions were they serving? What problems did they solve and what problems did they create? Let me talk about the difficult destiny of some of these elements.
Under Construction
The "Under Construction Sign" is a very strong symbol of the early web. It reminds us of the great times shortly after the scientists and engineers finished their work on the Information Highway. Ordinary people came with their tools and used the chance to build their own roads and junctions. Work was everywhere and everywhere there was something that wasn't ready, links were leading to nowhere or to pages that didn't quite exist and there were signs on the pages that warned of broken connections and the lack of navigation.
Step by step people were developing pages into a functioning web and it became less necessary to warn us, especially using road signs, about missing information. But they didn't disappear. Instead, "Under Construction" images changed their meaning from a warning to a promise that this page will grow. The symbol became a hybrid of excuse and invitation. It could appear on an empty or properly functional site as a sign that the project was growing and being updated. Often you could see the newer sign, "Always Under Construction."
"Always Under Construction" didn't mean the site would never work but actually the opposite. It informed users that there was somebody who was always taking care of the site so it would be interesting to return again and again.
This was a very important message because it was crucial to really insist on the idea of constant development and change but the sign was wrong. The association with broken roads and obstacles on the way didn't illustrate the idea of ongoing development. Around 1997 the si