I found this web essay pretty interesting. I wasn't really on the web early enough to remember many of the trends she brings up, but it did get me thinking about what some of the current internet trends are that could possibly be mocked or laughed about in the future. It's hard to try to identify those things, because it's easy to take the internet we have for granted. Afterall, I think the modern internet and search engines are very efficient. The internet is rapidly becoming more and more accessible, and the changes happen so often and so easily (we don't have to go download "internet version 2.0"..."internet version 2.1", etc), that it's hard to remember how things looked 5 years ago. I attended a presentation at SMU by a google employee, and he said that you can sign up to test out the new builds of Google Chrome each night when they all go home. So I feel that in the 90's, changed to the internet could probably be tracked more easily, since the general progression/development was a bit slower. Now that we have so many professions dedicated towards improving and advancing the web, the changes are going to be (and currently are) very seamless.
My web intervention idea would be a combination of web editing and programming. Basically, the website would have a textbox and an output window, and everything you type into the textbox gets "internet-ified". For instance, if you type in "Hey, do you want to see something tonight?", it would output "hey do u wanna c sumthing 2night". I cant decide if I need to incorporate this idea into something else, to make it less blatant, or if the website would be fine with just this one function. The user would obviously have to "cooperate", and write normally for the changes to be noticed.
Hi Chris,
ReplyDeleteYour "internetifier" at first glance sounds like a good idea, but I think $0m37h1n9 $1m1£4r m19h7 4£r34Ð¥ 3x1$7(something similar might already exist), for example, the 1337 translator. (http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/leet)
But if you have the ability to create one of these text translators, I think this could be a good idea if you push it a little further. Essentially what you're proposing is to make someone's coherent speech more "vernacular" or less formal, perhaps incoherent if pushed far enough. What might this mean for more formalized language? It makes me think of certain artists who use google translator to compose purposely inaccurate texts, because no algorithm (at least at this point) can perfectly translate from one language to another without a margin of error (which is usually quite large). Morehshin Allahyari has used this conceptually in some of her collaborative projects with citizens of other nations (http://www.morehshin.com/)
I think something really cool could come of this, it's just isolating what aspect of communication and interrupting it you're interested in and what you want to produce in the user (frustration, contemplation, both?)