I’m at a web design panel at sxsw. The presenter, Dan Willis, is making the interesting point that a vast majority of what we put up online is merely print in disguise. It’s certainly common in transitions to new media that we (humans) initially treat it just like the old media. When we first got television, we just filmed people reading radio scripts. Are we making that faux pas with the web?
There is an unfortunate disconnect between artists and techies. The nature of technology exploits a flaw in the human mind – we are divided into analytical folks and emotional folks, and there are few precious minds that can bridge that gap. Things can’t get onto the web without going through a techie. Techies can put things online without artists, but artists can’t put things online without techies. As a result, the web is focused much more on taxonomy and categorizations and text, and lots of things that we’ve had in libraries and newspapers for generations already. The web lacks emotion and art.
How do we bridge this gap? I think the techies can make themselves obsolete. You don’t need a techie to start a wordpress blog, or put a video on YouTube. The mission of techies should not be to put up information, the mission of techies should be to get out of the way of the artists, to give them increasingly powerful platforms (think sketchup) with which to populate the web.
