|
Warning: I wrote this document
during smoker-pauses in an
Internetworkshop and it is a first
draft. I will rewrite and finish it
when time permits. This is a bold statement. (Vincent
Vega in Pulp Fiction)
Well, why are PWPs (Personal WebPages)
useless?
Another approach: why are PWPs usefull?
Now, let's try to find out what the
WWW is for. I'd say it's for
information exchange. I think most of
the surfers out there would agree. As
far as I know, the original thought behind the
WWW was for exactly that reason. You
know, back at CERN...
Anyway, when I look at 99% of the
homepages I come across, the same
thing happens again and again. First,
there is a welcome page. It hosts some
more or less fitting graphics, as well
as technical gimmicks like animated
gifs, frames and many more or less
interesting effects. Nettraffic ole!
(That's not plain bad, it helps
pushing the hardware ahead) But I
suppose enough has been said about
Nettraffic, so I'm going to skip that
section.
What's more important about these
pages is the content. I am a firm
believer that information itself is
neither good nor bad - but as a human
being I
often reel from the pages I visit in
my naive search for quality. I don't
refer to the uncountable XXX-Pages.
They are part of our culture and they
stem directly from that very culture.
They belong to the WWW like any other
topic (science, music, history...).
The point is Quality.
Of course, quality is a very personal
matter, so everbody has his own terms
in regards of defining quality for him/herself.
And there is the first problem: Most
people I talked to don't even know
what they like about a website.
Furthermore, they also don't know why
they like or don't like a particular
feature. Most of the time, I get
answers like: "Looks cool", "Dunno",
"I just like it, I don't bother
why"
Okay, it's not easy trying to find out
the whys. It takes something most
people don't like to do anymore:
Working with information.
Look at our information landscape
today: TV, Radio or Papers.
The information are presented in a
very comfortable way: ready for
consumption. It seems no longer
necessary to process the information
you receive. You just perceive them, and
that's it. The brain is left out. The
information go straight from your eyes
to your memory. You don't ask questions about the information. Who
presented it to me? Where are they
from? What's the background? Can I
bring them in conjunction with information I already possess?
And the same phenomenon is behind the
most websites. There's just
information for nothing. There is
nothing behind. The only things behind
a website are several thoughts about the
presentation. And well, at least this
field of the WWW gets ahead. A good
presentation is important, and I think presentation has far outdone
information itself. And that's not
good. Look at a computer. As fast as
the CPU may be, a slow graphics
adapter cuts down the performance. It's the
same with the WWW. As long as only one
part of it goes ahead, there will
never be a further evolution and the WWW will get stuck in its present
state. Happened to the tv years ago.
So, why are PWPs useless?
|
