The objective is to get people to come to your space, provide lots of value and have them hang out as long as possible … The consumer is free to have a relationship with anybody they want to. Our job is to facilitate that relationship.
If more and more Internet users erect one-way barriers, “the services you can use are more limited.”
To attain wide appeal, the Internet must not simply be efficient, useful, or entertaining: It must present itself in an agreeable manner. The enormous problem for interface design is the fear and hostility humans nourish toward machines and toward a dim recognition of a changing relation toward them, a sharing of space and interdependence. The Internet interface must somehow appear “transparent,” that is to say appear not to be an interface.
The technical characteristics of the information superhighway and virtual reality are clear enough to call attention to their potential for new cultural formations. It is conceivable that the information superhighway will be restricted in the way the broadcast system is. In that case, the term “second media age” is unjustified. But the potential of a decentralized communications system is so great that it is certainly worthy of recognition.
Assuming the U.S. government and the corporations do not shape the Internet entirely in their own image and that places of cyberdemocracy remain and spread to larger and larger segments of the population, what will emerge as a postmodern politics? If these conditions are met, one possibility is that authority as we have known it will change drastically.
If the prospects of democracy on the Internet are viewed in terms of encryption, then the security of the existing national government becomes the limit of the matter: what is secure for the nation-state is taken to mean true security for everyone, a highly dubious proposition. The question of potentials for new forms of social space that might empower individuals in new ways are foreclosed in favor of preserving existing relations of force as they are viewed by the most powerful institution in the history of the world: the government of the United States.
We are moving beyond the “humanist” phase of history into a new level of combination of human and machines, an extremely suggestive assemblage in which the futures of the cyborg and cyberspace open vast unexplored territories … Perhaps the new modes of self-constitution encouraged in electronic forms of association will develop “postmoral” gestures and figures of well-being, in the sense of Nietzsche.
Restaurant reviews are more properly considered as a database than as a series of articles, and users should access them in a table-driven search and/or be informed personally when a restaurant appears that has a high similarity score with other restaurants preferred by each individual user.
You don’t need much human factors expertise to predict that a human being cannot keep track of 50 or more different user IDs and passwords, and yet it is not at all uncommon for users to have at least 50 sites on their hotlist. Users will be writing down their passwords (leading to complete loss of security) and they will rebel against the time wasted in finding their user ID and password every time they follow a link to a different site. The user’s computer will have to negotiate registration information with the remote site automatically, based on user-controlled preferences for what demographic data to reveal to whom.
Online publishing of newspapers, magazines, and books is really a meaningless concept. We have to leave the legacy publications behind as we invent the world of online publishing. Information will have to be organized in new ways that match the properties of the new medium rather than being derived from the way the physical limitations of the old medium caused information to be split up among specific publications.