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Hey! Do Something!

A friend of mine has a marquee screen saver that reads "Hey! Do something!" Since I saw it, that message, short and succinct, has been my mantra, only it has mutated slightly while rumbling around my head to say "Hey! Do something useful!" The thought behind my writing these articles is to do something that I think would be very useful to me, that is, getting other people past the piddling with their new Web toys stage and realizing the true potential of the Web as a way to communicate, not display themselves as exhibitionists, not talk past each other or storming each other's gates with flame throwers blasting, but communicating. It would make my life so much easier if all the people with good ideas, when they're putting together their Web sites, would just grasp what the Web is about.

In the Lotus Domino commercials, Dennis Leary rants that it's about commerce. That's becoming more and more the obvious answer to the question, "What is the Web about?" But it's wrong. It's scenery. Likewise, it's not about millions of tacky home-pages or sex-sex-sex-sex-sex in letters only the search engines can read. Its basic nature may include all of these things, but it goes beyond this, the nature of the Web is inclusive communication and wide access to shared resources. The Web is a synthetic medium, Hyper-Media, published to a global network audience.

Let's play a little game of "imagine that" for a moment. Imagine that you, for whatever reason, want to put a talking greeting inside a magazine ad, or mount a television set on a billboard, or package a companion game with a novel (or vice versa). To do any of these things in the real world would take serious capital, and the odds on total material failure (at least in the first two cases) are prohibitively high. In short, it'd probably be the last project you proposed to your bosses before they paid for you to get counseling. The Web, on the other hand, can handle any of these things quite easily. That's what I mean by a synthetic medium. Nearly any art form or medium of communication is a fertile field for a skilled Web designer. The delivery might be relatively slow and cumbersome, but, more than just possible, true multimedia is actually becoming the standard.

Now, imagine that you want your message, your story, your billboard with the TV set mounted on it, to be available to the blind, or how about to someone halfway around the world that speaks a different language. The Web has the first situation taken care of; screen readers are available for the visually impaired. The second is a bit more difficult, but things are moving closer to a truer universality. A user in China or Saudi Arabia can get your Web pages converted into their character sets. If you have a specialist in Chinese or Arabic to translate your message to those languages, your potential audience just grew immensely. That's part of what I mean by inclusive communication.

Okay, now imagine that you're a typical 9 to 5 Joe/Jane with family scattered everywhere. Your 5 year-old just starred in a school play, and you've got the most adorable picture of a 3 foot tall crayon that anyone could imagine. You could make a few dozen prints of it, send those out to the mercy of the post office to get to their destination in a minimum of a few days. You could, but why would you want to when you could scan the photo, supply an appropriate caption, and post it not only for relatives but the occasional bored surfer to view? This is the other part of inclusive communication, putting the power to publish globally in the hands of ordinary individuals, doing it more efficiently and more quickly than any other medium.

I'm a true believer in the power of this form of communication, but the limitations can't be ignored by even the most starry-eyed advocate of the Web. It's come a long way, but I'm often forced to ask myself in what direction and to what end. The charming novelty of instant communication is wearing thin. The Web is now just as much a Tower of Babel as it is an Information Super-Highway. The advances in technologies related to the Web and its engaging, interactive potential has brought a flood of new users, wasted bandwidth, appalling scams and infomercials, repulsive amounts of media hype, and a cynicism that leads many to wonder whether the popularized version of the Web will over-tax and over-expose the Net to a weak approximation of public access cable TV.

That's a very real danger, and those are valid concerns. Considering how the Web has become synonymous with the Internet in just a few short years, the demise of meaningful online communication seems a real possibility. New technologies like push channels have offered partial solutions to the meaningless content aspect. Legislative initiatives and content labeling and ratings systems have tried to address concerns about inappropriate and objectionable content. Cable, satellite, and telephone infrastructures are working with an eye toward the future bottom line to assure that the whole communications system won't collapse under the projected burden of a growing number of connections. Even so, the alarmists are stating that this is not only too little too late but also misses the real threat: stupid greed. Once, the Internet was a refuge from crass commercialism. The days of rugged techno-pioneer spirit and frontier justice are gone if they ever really existed. Now, Web addresses clutter every type of product imaginable. In fact, the addresses themselves are now commodities to be bought, sold, and sued over.

This state of affairs can end in one of two ways, the Web can become a lowest-common-denominator arena for mindless mass marketing, or commerce can learn a few lessons about what makes the current set of users want to be a part of this experience and try to enhance rather than invade "cyber-space". To do this, however, commerce needs people who really love this medium to show them how it could be done. We need to show them what is in it for them. Essentially, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson: The going is getting weird, so the weird better start turning pro.