http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10065922-2.html?tag=mncol;title
Interesting. Let's go through these one by one.
1- Refresh. The author of this article apparently really hates having to use the refresh button to see the latest information on a website. I can understand the frustration of waiting for news on something and constantly having to reload a site, but having it work automatically seems to be asking for trouble. For example, if the internet went down, you would no longer be able to even look at the page you were looking at before the crash. Also, if information changed on the page you were reading, you would be lost, looking at something else where your article should be. Here's my solution: have a refresh toggle, so if you're in the middle of an article, you can turn off the auto-refresh until you're done, and then turn it back on to see what you missed. See? Everybody's happy!
2- Save. Well, isn't auto-save a pretty common feature at this point? That doesn't mean that you need to take away the save button. Word processors have been doing this all the way back to ClarisWorks, if I remember correctly.
3- Log-ins. "Keeping track of passwords for all the sites we visit is becoming unmanageable. There are better solutions," the author says. What confuses me here is that right before he has said this, he pointed to no more than three of those better solutions. True, they may not all be mainstream just yet, but if they work, then why not use them?
4- One-size-fits-all site design. I agree with this one. There are more and more mobile devices - BlackBerry, iPhone, Treo, and many of the newer cell phones - that will happily load a website for you. The problem there is that the websites it loads aren't made for mobile devices, and as such will take a very long time to load and may not be very useful once they do, because they've been made for a full-size computer screen with capabilities that far exceed those available on a mobile device.
5- Blocker ads. Those pesky things that take over your screen when you're trying to do something else, like the 30-second ads that pop up every time you try to watch something on Hulu. I have no problem watching an ad before and during, say, an episode of Bob Newhart, but when I just want to watch a few SNL clips, and I sit through more commercial than show, then that's getting really old. But what is there you can do about it? As the author states, "You go away, or at least you hesitate before you come back. Sites need to make money, but punishing users for viewing content is not just old-fashioned, it's medieval. The message should fit the medium, and TV-style advertising for the Web is not the right model." Hm. In most circumstances, I'd agree with this for the most part ("medieval" may be putting it a bit strongly for me), but when it comes to Bob Newhart, there's just not that many places that you can watch that show online for free, and sometimes it's worth it to put up with a bit of annoyance to get where you want to be. I think that taking that time to get a cup of tea may be a better solution than abandoning what you were trying to do in the first place.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
"Thumbspeak"
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/10/20/081020crbo_books_menand
I realize that I usually write what sounds like my own decrying of the evils of technology, and I don't mean to be doing that, but sometimes an idea that's absolutely perfect is really not that great upon closer inspection (see the King of the Hill episode where they go to a lawnmower focus group for an example). In this case, however, it isn't the technology I'm debating about, but the author's views on it.
I read an article in The New Yorker about text messages. It's the review of a book called Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. The author makes some interesting points. For one, the rise of texting is taking over where email left off, having left phone calls and face-to-face interaction, and good old snail-mail letters, in the dust. He claims that information is spread fastest this way, and the speed at which information travels has been increased incrementally throughout the above list. While I agree that texting is quick, I disagree that it's the quickest way to find something out; in my opinion, nothing beats a phone call or face-to-face chat. In my personal experience, emails often lack vital details, and the loss of tone of voice prolongs any miscommunications because there's no way to tell if you're talkin about a wholly different thing than the person you're talking to. People also tend to leave out vital details in emails, because they assume you already know something. Text messages can be even worse. Because of this, it sometimes takes a day or so worth of emails, or an hour of texts, to accomplish what could be done with a 5-minute phone call (and that includes the niceties). I notice that the author completely skips over instant messaging, which I would use as my preferred medium of communication with friends if I were near a computer.
From a linuistic approach, I enjoyed this article because it shows that languages - specifically the shorthand therein - is becoming more blended as the popularity of texting grows. The author speaks about " 'code-mixing,' in which two languages—one of them invariably English—are conflated in a single expression. Germans write “mbsseg” to mean “mail back so schnell es geht” (“as fast as you can”). So texting has probably done some damage to the planet’s cultural ecology, to lingo-diversity. People are better able to communicate across national borders, but at some cost to variation."
Personally, I find the loss of variation a small price to pay for the communication skills that it garners. Wouldn't you rather be able to talk to people - especially those people with whom you were close enough friends to be sending messages - without having to worry too much about language barriers? This does raise a point, though: those people who you text with are good enough friends as a general rule that you don't need to worry about language barriers, since you already speak with them. It's a moot point.
I appreciate the author's interest in such a topical subject, but he does make some mistakes in just the two-page article (I'll have to read the book to see if it was the author of the book or the author of the article). For one, "wassup" did not originate in a Budweiser commercial. True, the commercial did make the lingo more widespread, but the backstory for that ad campaign is from a tradition that some friends (the ones who appear in the commercial) used to greet eachother with the phrase, and they videotaped themselves being silly and spread it around (a viral video on VHS). Unless Budweiser lied about its campaign - and, why would it? - the word was around before the commercial was. I have also never seen anyone use the Homer Simpson Emoticon in email, text, or IM form, spiffy as it may be. Perhaps 25 is just too old for me to reap all the benefits of texting.
I realize that I usually write what sounds like my own decrying of the evils of technology, and I don't mean to be doing that, but sometimes an idea that's absolutely perfect is really not that great upon closer inspection (see the King of the Hill episode where they go to a lawnmower focus group for an example). In this case, however, it isn't the technology I'm debating about, but the author's views on it.
I read an article in The New Yorker about text messages. It's the review of a book called Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. The author makes some interesting points. For one, the rise of texting is taking over where email left off, having left phone calls and face-to-face interaction, and good old snail-mail letters, in the dust. He claims that information is spread fastest this way, and the speed at which information travels has been increased incrementally throughout the above list. While I agree that texting is quick, I disagree that it's the quickest way to find something out; in my opinion, nothing beats a phone call or face-to-face chat. In my personal experience, emails often lack vital details, and the loss of tone of voice prolongs any miscommunications because there's no way to tell if you're talkin about a wholly different thing than the person you're talking to. People also tend to leave out vital details in emails, because they assume you already know something. Text messages can be even worse. Because of this, it sometimes takes a day or so worth of emails, or an hour of texts, to accomplish what could be done with a 5-minute phone call (and that includes the niceties). I notice that the author completely skips over instant messaging, which I would use as my preferred medium of communication with friends if I were near a computer.
From a linuistic approach, I enjoyed this article because it shows that languages - specifically the shorthand therein - is becoming more blended as the popularity of texting grows. The author speaks about " 'code-mixing,' in which two languages—one of them invariably English—are conflated in a single expression. Germans write “mbsseg” to mean “mail back so schnell es geht” (“as fast as you can”). So texting has probably done some damage to the planet’s cultural ecology, to lingo-diversity. People are better able to communicate across national borders, but at some cost to variation."
Personally, I find the loss of variation a small price to pay for the communication skills that it garners. Wouldn't you rather be able to talk to people - especially those people with whom you were close enough friends to be sending messages - without having to worry too much about language barriers? This does raise a point, though: those people who you text with are good enough friends as a general rule that you don't need to worry about language barriers, since you already speak with them. It's a moot point.
I appreciate the author's interest in such a topical subject, but he does make some mistakes in just the two-page article (I'll have to read the book to see if it was the author of the book or the author of the article). For one, "wassup" did not originate in a Budweiser commercial. True, the commercial did make the lingo more widespread, but the backstory for that ad campaign is from a tradition that some friends (the ones who appear in the commercial) used to greet eachother with the phrase, and they videotaped themselves being silly and spread it around (a viral video on VHS). Unless Budweiser lied about its campaign - and, why would it? - the word was around before the commercial was. I have also never seen anyone use the Homer Simpson Emoticon in email, text, or IM form, spiffy as it may be. Perhaps 25 is just too old for me to reap all the benefits of texting.
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