These little boys in the Dunkin's would rather play on the i-pad than have ice cream (I asked them). (C)Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick 2012.
I'm confused.I thought the cardinal sin of the Metaverse was to design your web site using frames.
I thought frames were a marker of total dweebhood. That's why I have sites when I've helped other people more clueless than me make websites 15 years ago that are still in frames -- because I'm not a web site designer. That's why, when thinking of a spring trip, I went hunting for this old favourite restaurant in Dundee, New York -- the Dresden Inn -- I was happy to find their web site was still in frames, because the ravioli might be as good as it was 50 years ago (I wonder if they still have the chestnut trees in the front yard).
Frames, we're told by many bossy geeks -- and have been for a decade -- are just all wrong.
And yet, frames are back. Aren't they? They're back even though they aren't called that. They're back -- even though they may be called something else and are more hip and are built on Agile Ruby on Scrum C+ Rails -- or whatever the new thing is called (yeah, I know it's not really called that).
The thing is, somebody got the idea that if you should optimize your site for mobile readers swiping their hands and pushing their fingers on the screen, then the whole site should turn that way even accessed on the web (which I guess nobody uses anymore -- but then, we're told the entire thing is a "social construct" anyway! I guess that's why Twitter goes down a lot! It's just a social construct!)
Actually, the whole world is turning into the mobile view now. Bus shelter ads now shift as if you are finger-swiping them -- giant billboard ads on 42nd Street and Times Square shift and move rapidly as if they are on your cell phone or tablet. I've noticed TV has started putting in cuts and jumps that are designed to make you feel you are on a cell phone. Everything is getting smartphonized. Tabletized. It's creepy. And not always pretty. In fact, annoying.
Scoop.it has just moved my cheese by changing their interface. I complained, and they told me that this is what customers wanted (well, they mean friends of the devs, because no one ever polled or asked the wider customer base to my knowledge). That customers "wanted" to have less clicks, so they didn't mind if the curation and the view functions were combined.
Except now you have to click 100 times more because you are inside a frame. Yes, a frame. With one of those sliders -- right next to the other, outer slider that moves the whole page, so you slip and mix them up, or you can never grab it quite right, or you grab it and release it and it bounces you back to the beginning instead of the place where you just were ("focus" is what they call this in Second Life, and bug reports are often filled with "loss of focus" problems like that).
It was already hard enough with this Scoop.it system of seeing only so much within the old frame, but it was to the left so that you could operate it easier. Most people read left to right. Now you have to look up into the right corner and struggle with sliders and try to pick and then get rid of the things you didn't pick. It's made something that was mildly enjoyable and easy into such a chore, you just don't want to do it.
I hate reading Mashable now. It's bad enough seeing that guy full face on Twitter just about ever second. Now the site is like his face, too. It's a big white box -- the geeks thing you need a blank white background so you can feel like you're on Google's medicinal white sterile web page. And it has these, well, frames, for lack of a better term. Boxes in which other stuff happens, which is distracting. You read a line, and don't bother. Maybe that's the idea.
This boxation stuff also happened to The New York Republic, where their new Big White Background from their Silicon Valley tycoon is par for the course, and where the awfulness of the articles now, like from Marxist propagandists they would never have published in the old days, are diminished because you only read a few paragraphs on the big block -- it fits in your phone screen -- before moving on. There's more underneath the box -- but oh, who cares, there's another shiny to click on.
Pandodaily.com has a real big case of this -- they were pioneers in it. There are frames -- er, boxes -- and then a moving ticker of stories across the page. Catch them if you can.
Quartz has the worst case of this. It's so bad that if I ever find myself on a link that goes to Quartz, I back out of there immediately. I just hate it so much. Quartz even reduced their Twitter handle to just @qz recently, because they found that they were losing people's attention span by having it @quartz with too many letters. And that "u" after the "q" and all...
"Quartz is a digitally native news outlet for the new global economy. ... This website uses technologies not supported by this browser."
But I have Firefox. Wouldn't Mitch's thing be the coolest?
But I ask you, those of you who remember the 1990s. Isn't Quartz made in a verboten frames mode? I mean, there's just too many boxes and too many sliders. I hate that big black bar at the top and the way it moves up and down, seeming to slam on you. I just don't want to read something that does that.
Please tell me how Pandodaily, Mashable, and Quartz are now different than The Worst Web Page in the World. Seriously. I'm not getting this.
Another site with a bad case of this is Gawker. Sometimes when I'm there, it feels as if there is no way to move behind the front page stories. You have to grope for the slider.
G+ is such a chore to move. Have you ever noticed that it's the place gifs go to die? But try it on your smart phone. It actually looks *better* than it does on the web. The pictures pop up large at you and slightly settle down after grabbing your attention. They look less goofy in that format as a result, more important, somehow.
Have you noticed that you can make just about any story feel more important if it has a big old picture coming at you first, especially if part of it is a little out of focus?
It was with these issues in mind that I caught site and re-tweeted something from Stowe Boyd, even though Stowe Boyd himself is one of those interface issues all unto himself, if you know what I mean. I remember when Amanda Chapel (Strumpette) used to target him with her parody account that took down all the Silicon Valley egos (it's too bad she's not around any more).
Stowe's website had a summary of the discussion about the "invisible interfaces," and then you could go directly to the original author, Timo Arnall, No to NoUI.
This is something we passed through which v2.0 of Second Life, remember? What a hell. They were even going to get rid of landmarks as shareable objects and objects you could put into objects and just have them be backspaces. The UI is still recovering from that scrum software nightmare....
Then I realized despite having thoughtlessly retweeted these blogs like an Internet myrmidon that in fact this critique from Arnall was more Luddite than I thought, and in fact then I wouldn't likely endorse it -- because I don't tend to the extreme Luddite position -- it's pastoral Marxism of the conservative technocommunist bent.
There were calls for making interfaces more rough to let us know the machines were working or that people had to labour to make them -- part of that old socialist fetish with labour as a blue-collar physical worker emblem of the communist movement -- the advance guard of intellectuals preordained to lead these lumpen would often glorify them (even as they would even devise terms like "lumpen proletarian"). It was out of touch with the complexities of life.
Why should we have to have raggedy interfaces just to see the moving flywheels and gearshaft that so satisfy the souls of the technocommunists? I don't mind if you keep them out of sight. After all, I drive a car without knowing the theory of internal combustion or even how to change the oil. The Internet should be more like that. The Internet *is* more like which is why we are having this pastoral backlash. Says Timo, fussily, with hatred for capitalism back behind it all:
We already have plenty of thinking that celebrates the invisibility and seamlessness of technology. We are overloaded with childish mythologies like ‘the cloud’; a soft, fuzzy metaphor for enormous infrastructural projects of undersea cables and power-hungry data farms. This mythology can be harmful and is often just plain wrong. Networks go down, hard disks fail, sensors fail to sense, processors overheat and batteries die.
I agree "the cloud" is a childish mythology that is meant us to overlook the fact that it is just "other people's computers."
Shouldn't he love those big technocommunist infrastructure projects though, which are the digital equivalent of all those huge Soviet dams and irrigation canals that led to things like the Aral Sea drying out? NTR! NTR! (The Russian initials for the words "Scientific Technical Revolution") -- that used to be the rallying cry at the Knowledge Society sessions and any local Party meeting. NTR is what drives Sergey Brin.
I loved this quote though, which I felt would be a good coda to the insanity of Morozov playing academic on Nick Carr's website over his book (sell more books! sell more books!):
Computing systems are suffused through and through with the constraints of their materiality. – Jean-François Blanchette
Yes, they sure are. That's why you have to turn them on and off again all the time to get them to work.
Eric (Spin Martin) asked reasonably the other night on G+ -- why can't we rename all these talking things like Siri with our own names? Like "Jeeves" or whatever. Yes, why not? And configure many other things as well (Scoop.it needs tear-off menus like we finally got put back on the Second Life menu; wouldn't it be great if Microsoft Word also had tear-off menus!)
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