Friday, May 22, 2015
“Consistent mediocrity, delivered on a large scale, is much more profitable than anything on a small scale, no matter how efficient it might be.”
Fundamentally, there’s a theme in Olia’s speech (and the speech of others in that space, like Dragan Espenschied, Ben Fino-Radin, and so on) bemoaning the move away from a space on a website being the province of the users, and being turned into a homogenized, commodified breeder farm of similar-looking websites with only surface implementations, like WordPress, Facebook Pages, and so on.
…
There was a time when a person who was not particularly technical, or whose technical acumen was sufficient to get applications running on a machine and not much more, could code a webpage. The tags were pretty straightforward, the uses of them clear, and the behavior pretty dependable. Much how one could, in a weekend, learn sufficiently how to pilot a sailboat… such was that a few weekends of study could allow a person to craft a fun little webpage, with their voice, their stamp, and the idiosyncrasies of their personality shining through.
Those days are gone. Long gone.
Instead, we have this (as my buddy Ted Nelson calls it) nightmare honky- tonk of interloping, shifting standards soirees that ensure, step by step, bylaw by beta, that anybody who isn’t willing to go full native will be shut out forever. The Web’s underpinnings, at least on the basic HTML level, have been given over to the wonks and the engineers, making it an impenetrable layer of abstraction, not worth your time to learn unless you were looking to buff up your resume, or if some programmer pride resided in this whole mess being in your job description.
That Whole Thing With Sound in In-Browser Emulation « ASCII by Jason Scott
There's no need to read the full article (unless you are interested in the state of audio in webpages and how it's not serving web based emulators of old home computers letting people play thousands of games from the 80s and 90s); I'm just quoting the part that spoke to me.
I'm also reminded of this:
For a very long time, taste and artistic training have been things that only a small number of people have been able to develop. Only a few people could afford to participate in the production of many types of media. Raw materials like pigments were expensive; same with tools like printing presses; even as late as 1963 it cost Charles Peignot over $600,000 to create and cut a single font family.
The small number of people who had access to these tools and resources created rules about what was good taste or bad taste. These designers started giving each other awards and the rules they followed became even more specific. All sorts of stuff about grids and sizes and color combinations — lots of stuff that the consumers of this media never consciously noticed. Over the last 20 years, however, the cost of tools related to the authorship of media has plummeted. For very little money, anyone can create and distribute things like newsletters, or videos, or bad ass tunes about "ugly."
Suddenly consumers are learning the language of these authorship tools. The fact that tons of people know names of fonts like Helvetica is weird! And when people start learning something new, they perceive the world around them differently. If you start learning how to play the guitar, suddenly the guitar stands out in all the music you listen to. For example, throughout most of the history of movies, the audience didn't really understand what a craft editing was. Now, as more and more people have access to things like iMovie, they begin to understand the manipulative power of editing. Watching reality TV almost becomes like a game as you try to second-guess how the editor is trying to manipulate you.
As people start learning and experimenting with these languages authorship, they don't necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit out of designers.
In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that "work" in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.
Regardless of what you might think, the actions you take to make your Myspace page ugly are pretty sophisticated. Over time as consumer-created media engulfs the other kind, it's possible that completely new norms develop around the notions of talent and artistic ability.
Happy Ugly.
But sadly, no one cares.
