Jakob Nielsen (and you should listen to this man) tore Web 2.0 a new one today, pointing out that the glam and flash of nifty interfaces has obscured the honest truth: that people using the web don’t use it for its own sake, but use it as a tool for some other purpose, absent that relatively small but vociferous group of basement-dwellers who inhabit the web like an identity.
I’ve been saying this since 1994 or so, and it has helped me advise clients and friends well. You want to make something people can use for a function you have to offer. If you have no function, either invent one (put out content germaine to your topic) or keep your web presence at the level of a muted hybrid between advertising and a phone book listing. Some people have initially resisted this and later found it meaningful.
This brings us to the question of philosophy in the indefinite sense, meaning philosophy as a language in the usage that gives us the idea of “a philosophy of” each topic. Is there a philosophy of the web? Well, first there is a language for discussing the web in the sense that philosophy excels at, which is describing the invisible but structural connections between ideas. Anyone can describe a widget. A theory of widgets that connects use to design? Rare.
After we stumble around with more verbiage about whether a philosophy is the philosophy, and the many types of philosophy and their possible appeals, we come to an end of the line of thinking, as must always happen when we leave our minds to make things work in whatever shadow of The Real World we manage to inhabit. The web is made to be used. Similarly, in my view, philosophy peaked with the ancient Greeks because all of their theory aimed toward what we might idealize as “common sense,” but really was plain arguments for making life better through systems of thought.
There will undoubtedly be a seesawing argument over Web 2.0 in the coming days, in which one side will say Web 2.0 is style over substance, and the other side will claim it is the second coming of Christ. All I can say is that for me, what matters is connecting a target audience to a function that makes their lives better. If Web 2.0 helps, as it does with Gmail, I’m all for it. But if an earlier technology works better, I won’t shirk from that either.
Recently I switched back to 1970s technologies for email. I use Mutt on a UNIX box, without the benefits of GUI or really any extended function, and I like it because it requires deliberate usage. Keeping track of friend’s emails and aliasing them is an active process. Sending an email requires thinking about each step deliberately. And there’s no glam and flash in the background. Like design itself, usage must match form and function some master science of philosophy that describes the context of usage itself — a thing often known as “life.”