Cyberspace for Humans
“They were saying that cyberspace should be designed by architects. I told them that it’s already being designed: by developers!”
- some guy at a party in 1994
I had to agree at the time that people who were used to designing buildings, bridges and bathrooms were under-prepared to impose structure in what we, at the time, called cyberspace. It was like proposing that jumbo jets be piloted by tour-guides. Just wacko.
We don’t use the word cyberspace anymore, because there’s rarely anything spatial about it. Under the “page” model the Web is a series of flat surfaces, each crammed with zones of information, each zone begging for your attention, enticing you to click and to find yourself on another flat surface, much like the one that preceded it.
“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” – Johnny Rotten
Back in the days when we used words like “cyberspace”, we had certain expectations of what the information revolution would bring. Since were living in a three-dimensional world where the information amassed daily was in a real three-dimensional context (TV notwithstanding), we naturally imagined that cyberspace would work the same way. What we got instead was an environment that was amazingly rich in content, but only two dimensions deep. There are 1,133,408,294 Internet users world-wide* crawling around on their bellies like reptiles.
(*ref: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm June 18, 2007).
In the real world we humanize our surroundings. We furnish rooms, not only with essential items such as chairs, tables and lamps. We also decorate them with objects that remind us of who we are and what we hope to become. We put pictures on the walls of our friends and family, and are glad to see our friends and family doing likewise.
When I first heard about frogans, Alexis and Amaury kept talking about how frogans can provide a way to really open up Internet publishing to the masses, and I must admit, I didn’t quite get it. Since then the Social Web has emerged, and it’s beginning to sink in: Frogans allow for a human dimension for publishers as well as end-users that’s hard to imagine on the Web.
It’s almost too simple: A principal idea behind frogans is that they can exist on your desktop in harmony with other elements. You can even have several on display and still go on with whatever else you’re doing. Or, you can zoom-up one or more to look more closely, navigate to another slide on the same frogans, or to another frogans, all without being obliged to lose sight of my other activities. You can treat a frogans much in the same way you would the physical objects that you’ve chosen to have around you.
I can imagine having an individual frogans for everybody I know, or at least care about. (I can’t imagine having a MySpace page constantly open, much less several.) I’m looking forward to the day that everyone in my family has published a frogans containing at least a recent photo, perhaps a whole selection of them, and a slide featuring text that rounds up everything that they’d like to share at that moment with the people on the other end. And I’ll do the same.
Suddenly my desktop environment has a vertical dimension. There’s a real world element to the cyberworld. I can stop crawling around like a lizard and get back to my human ways.