wake up clicks

I’ve been thinking about websites recently—how they’ve changed over the years and what their future might be. Websites, of course, come in all shapes and sizes. There are personal websites, group websites, commercial websites, and government websites. There are archive sites and information sites and media sharing sites and blogs and forums and portals and search engines and social networks. You can find news, jokes, porn, warez, games, dates, reviews, gossip, flame wars, advice (good and bad), free stuff, and pricey stuff on websites. We all have favorite websites that we visit all the time. I thought it might be interesting to ask some of my Friends on Facebook how they started their days on the net and then compare notes. Here are a few replies:
Aspiring literary fashionista Susanna Babione <oasinstoryof.blogspot.com>: “Check e-mail on phone and read anything personal. Once in front of a PC: read Doonesbury, Frazz, and 9 Chickweed Lane <gocomics.com>; check shirt.woot.com <shirt.woot.com/Blog>; sometimes sometimes check Neil Gaiman’s blog <journal.neilgaiman.com>. Then it is work stuff for the rest of the day. If it is a weekend, then writing e-mails (usually done in evening on weekdays, if done at all) and Facebook.”
Matthew Wayne Selznick <mattselznick.com>, a creator working with words, music, pictures, and people: “1) Check email (on my phone), 2) Read RSS feeds over coffee (also on my phone) 3) Check personal and client Facebook pages for comments to attend to 4) Ditto Google+ 5) Ditto my personal web pages 6) Note Google alerts of mentions of me and/or my work on blogs and other sites; comment on/thank same if appropriate.”
New Asimov’s writer Will Ludwigsen <will-ludwigsen.com>: “1. Check email, 2. Check Facebook, 3. Check Google Reader, my RSS feeds, 4. Browse Reddit reddit.com”
Writer, editor, and teacher Lisa Romeo <lisaromeo.blogspot.com>: “Before breakfast or coffee, while waiting for my kid to get up and dressed: check email (4 accounts); respond to student and/or client email questions (the easy ones); glance at Google alerts; delete a bunch of emails and wonder why I haven’t just taken myself off those lists already; quick check in at Facebook to see if any direct private messages need responses; ditto Twitter; send out the daily writing prompt (to folks signed up at my blog/and students); check kids’ school calendars/websites so I won’t be surprised later; glance at New York Times <nytimes.com website>. Repeat.”
I got many more replies but these are typical. A couple of things struck me about this admittedly unscientific sample. The first is that everybody checks their email. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, except that the net is full of chatter about what is about to replace email. Texting? Tweets? For instance, a 2010 Pew survey, Teens, Cell Phones, and Texting <http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1572/teens-cell-phones-text-messages>, reports that 75 percent of 12-17 year olds now own cell phones. For these, texting is the most popular way to contact their friends, followed by talking on the phone, connecting on a social media site, and meeting face-to-face. Email is at the bottom of the list: just 11 percent of teens use it for daily contact, while 54 percent are busy texting.
Apparently I need more teen Friends.
Another thing that caught my attention was how many folks were accessing the net from their phones or tablets. I have yet to join the iPad generation, but my iPhone’s small screen and uneven connection speed do not match up all that well with my established habits of accessing the net. These devices are based on apps, and while apps have not yet replaced websites, they are certainly in competition with them for attention and dollars and features. Of course, this may be just a temporary phenomenon; as the technology progresses, the distinctions between apps and websites and browsers are bound to disappear. The internet is all about information, isn’t it? Platforms are just packaging.
Or are they?

block that metaphor

The problem with making generalizations about the internet is that it is so vast and complicated that it verges on the indescribable. Which hasn’t stopped the proliferation of metaphors to attempt to describe it.
In the first five years of the 1990s, the number of computers connected to the internet jumped from 313,000 to 10,000,000. This was the era when Vice President Al Gore popularized his earlier coinage information superhighway <clinton1.nara.gov/White_House/EOP/OVP/html/nii1.html>. Since nobody knew exactly what the internet was “for,” information superhighway was not a bad choice for Net Metaphor 1.0. But neither was it particularly apt. There have been many metaphors proposed since. For example, according to Kevin Kelly <kk.org> (no relation), the net is a ubiquitous copy machine <kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php>. “In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. . . . The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies.” Or it is a nervous system <forbes.com/2009/03/09/internet-innovations-hive-technology-breakthroughs-innovations.html> that is inexorably binding us into a kind of hive mind? “As ever more people get connected, we see an acceleration in the way the Internet is used to coordinate action and render services from human input. We are witnessing the rise of a social nervous system.” Or perhaps it is a vast electronic frontier eff.org that we can explore and even homestead, as Howard Reingold suggests in The Virtual Community <rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html>. Similarly it is a kind of cyberspace <http://users.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html>, through which we imagine that we move and stop from time to time to “visit” sites. “Cyberspace is psychological space. Its social climate partly is shaped by its demographics. As a world structured by machines rather than the physical environment, it also is a space with some rather unique psychological features—such as reduced or altered sensory experience, the opportunity for identity flexibility and anonymity, the equalization of social status, the transcending of spatial boundaries, the stretching and condensation of time, the ability to access numerous relationships, the capacity to record permanent records of one’s experiences, and the ‘disinhibition effect’ . . . to name a few.” Or stretching the movement metaphor, perhaps we surf through cyberspace. (Here’s some net trivia: who coined this odd but appealing slang? Answer: librarian Jean Armour Polly netmom.com, aka the “netmom,” is generally credited with the first usage in an article “Surfing the INTERNET,” published in 1992.) Speaking of libraries, the net and especially the world wide web was once commonly thought of as a vast uncategorized library <zaphod.mindlab.umd.edu/docSeminar/pdfs/p223-duncker.pdf> with each website something like a book composed of many “pages” of information.

back when

The kinds of sites that I commended to your attention back when I first started writing this column—in 1998, for those of you who haven’t been keeping track—were informed by these last two metaphors: the metaphor of movement and place and the metaphor of the library. These were for the most part static sites, sometimes updated regularly, often not. If they were well-constructed, they might open through the magic of hyperlinks out into the greater web, but many were as self-contained as a book or a fenced-in suburban lot.
For example, in a column in February of 2000 called “Readers Writers,” I went through the list of my colleagues whom you had voted into the top slots in Asimov’s thirteenth Annual Readers Award and reviewed each of their websites. I was croggled that not everyone had a site, and chided friends like Michael Swanwick <michaelswanwick.com> and Lisa Goldstein <brazenhussies.net/Goldstein> and Robert Reed <robertreedwriter.com> for being behind the times. We were, after all, science fiction writers! Fortunately, they’ve since gotten with the program. What were the authors who did have sites of their own posting? Stories, essays, reviews, upcoming appearances, bibliographies, autobiographies. Good stuff, yes, but not necessarily stuff that would bring a reader back again and again. Because they were static, one visit usually sufficed. Which was okay, because the world wide web was, well, world-wide and there was a lot of other cool sites to visit and more coming every day.
For both the new writer breaking into print, and the established pro seeking to bolster her name recognition, putting up one of these static websites seemed like a no-brainer. But in time the net stopped being quite so shiny and became just another utility, like water or electricity or cable television. The old-fashioned website began to lose its gloss as well. Meanwhile, the relentless pace of change introduced us to the blog, and editors instructed their writers that blogs, updated as often as possible, were now the key to fame and fortune.
Blogs were big news in 2005, and so in the April/May issue, I listed my forty favorite writers’ blogs. At that time I noted that Technorati <technorati.com>, the top search engine dedicated to the blogosphere, was tracking over four million blogs. How many are there today? <infotoday.com/linkup/lud021510-stern.shtml> Hard to say: in 2009 Technorati, which was then tracking 112.8 million blogs, changed its focus. There were way too many zombie blogs, still online but never updated. Not only that, but according to publisher Eric Olsen, defining a blog was getting awfully complicated. “It’s become almost impossible to distinguish what’s a blog from a blog site. There are hybrid sites of blogs and news, and mainstream blogs. . . .” For example, I’m a fan of the Huffington Post <huffingtonpost.com>. It presents as a classic blog, but calls itself “The Internet Newspaper.” Now I’m as confused as Eric Olsen. Are Locus Online <locusmag.com> and SF Signal <sfsignal.com> blogs or newszines? Is the New York Times a blog?

exit

Which brings us back to the little survey with which we began. When I sit down in front of my laptop with my grapefruit juice and bowl of Captain Crunch in the morning and start Firefox, what exactly am I looking at? Certainly not those good old-fashioned websites of the 1990s!
For the record, here is my daily routine:
1. Check email.
2. Browse for news/opinions: New York Times, Boston Globe <bostonglobe.com>, Huffpost, Locus, SF Signal.
3. Skim Facebook, Google+, Twitter
4. Ego surf on Google Blogs <google.com/blogsearch> and Addictomatic <addictomatic.com>
5. If there’s time, hit some of my fave blogs
I may run through this sequence in a different order again over the course of the day, depending on how busy I am wasting time.

Copyright © 2012 James Patrick Kelly