Vanquishing Conservative Metaphors
Thomas Noller
I decided on the spur of the moment to fly to New York for a long weekend. A woman I work with tipped me off about an Easter Special offered by United Airlines, fly out Saturday, fly back Thursday and all for just $350.
Mid-way through my journey to the east coast -- leaving behind the turbulences and jet streams of the Rockies which usually remind me of my fear of flying and make me question the reliability of analog technology - I was at last able to enjoy a Gin and Tonic and "The talented Mr. Ripley" and to reflect at my leisure about the process in which I now found myself.
Of course, booking a ticket on-line has become a pretty standard procedure today and the fact that our natural need for comfort and convenience has been satisfied by the World Wide Web is also now widely acknowledged. But, the combination of the on and off-line aspects of my journey - the very easy and discretely organized on-line booking process, the smooth handling at the ticket counter and the equally easy and polite efficiency when getting on to the plane - had merged into a seamless travel experience. I had, in fact, for one brief and perhaps even insignificant moment that thing which everyone is talking about but which few are in a position to deliver - a Web-initiated customer experience.
Marshall McLuhan once claimed that all new media are conservative to begin with. The individual - when confronted with a complex, unfamiliar system - tends to use tried and trusted metaphors to get to grips with this new thing. There are legion examples of this: from the first pages printed by machine, that imitated handwriting, to early photography in which models were placed in front of painted, classical-romantic landscapes, to the electronic desktop which replicated all the dry charm of the familiar office landscape.
The Internet of 2000 AD would appear to support this thesis. The fact that it already is a mass medium obeys the logic of human inertia, in that it also has to function like any other (conventional) mass medium.
So, in spite of all the wonderfully designed websites and a growing number of bookmarks, I can't shake off the feeling that my experience of meaning, point and personal enrichment has become just as miserable as any this other screen -- the television -- promises to generate. In all of this, it is irrelevant whether this frustration is due to the onslaught of the corporate players or the Flash masturbations of the cutting edge, which increasingly masks lack of content and authenticity beneath ambitious animation.
Established graphics standards like the left-hand navigation bar as well as experimenting with and sounding out the very latest technologies have degenerated into generally accepted and expected goals in and of themselves.
However, unlike all "traditional" media, which were nothing more than a linear distribution mechanism by which one person's ideas and experiences could be communicated to many, the technological basis of the Internet enables the exchange of experiences and ideas between many individuals. As such, it is an inherently social vehicle, which, for the first time in the history of the media, equips individuals with the power to change their surroundings. To a certain extent, it is a mirror of life itself.
Designing a medium like this demands two things: first of all an understanding of the technological structure that makes it possible for individuals to communicate. Secondly, giving the "players" simple, understandable and comprehensible tools, that make it possible for them to take part in this social and creative exchange - because now it is no longer about connecting people with data, but connecting people with people.
In the future we will no longer differentiate between on-line and off-line. Interfaces will become increasingly fluid, the frontiers imperceptible. Our focus should then be less concerned with generating an Erlebnis* (the experience of "thrill") - which has been the objective of mass communication from the beginning - and more with designing the necessary environment in which an individual Erfahrung* (an experience that is embodied in ones history) can be broadened: to sum up, nothing more than the conditions in which real interaction can take place.
At the level of design, this means that the "rules of engagement" will have to change. Design will no longer simply have the task of drawing the user to the page through pretty, superficial graphics.
That was and still is the mechanism used by the old media. On the other hand, making it possible to have an active influence on the originating and exchange processes demands an environment which allows for different social configurations and individual preferences. To develop the argument further, would it not be interesting if our interfaces, instead of speaking the language of the sender, were able to speak the - vastly different - languages of the user? No matter how enormous this task might seem, it is worth remembering that the history of the media shows us that the moment of art for art's sake is also the critical point from which a new, independent language develops.
In the short term, many designers will pursue the panaceas promised by multi media, with wide screen and video on demand already on the horizon, but few will last the distance. I am certain, however, that the best people in the field will take on the real challenge in the long term and will develop interfaces which enable individual freedom and experiential learning.
Because all social process are by nature amorphous and multi-faceted this may mean that the designer will have to give away a certain level of control in favor of the user (I hear some moaning here already...). But what a negligible loss this would be if we finally ended up in a situation where we had the ways and means to design how we can live and interact with each other - instead of simply changing things on the surface.
I could also add at this point, how happy I would have been if at the end of my film Gwyneth Paltrow had found Matt Damon out as the fraudster he really was - but unfortunately this was another medium in which the director prescribed for me an ending which I did not like. Unfortunately, I did not have the means at my disposal to change the world. Well, not yet.....
*The German language has two genuinely different words for the english term experience, which have a quite different connotation in that Erlebnis is a rather superfical experience attached to a specific moment in time while Erfahrung is something of a broader and more fundamental range which becomes part of ones ethic and way of thinking.
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