Re: <nettime> don't Disassociate Webdesign (as an aspect of app engineering) from Usability

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

I hardly find this a 'deeply boring age' - if anything, judging by the
email lists I commoderate or online conferences I've participated in,
things are incredibly wide-open. Some flash is boring and some leaves me
awestruck, and what affects me might well not affect someone else.

I'm fascinated by the world-wide dissemination of online media, and atti-
tudes. Maybe I'm naive, but the Net still on occasion fills me with
wonder.

Re: flash animations 'empty and meaningless' - for whom? This isn't an
absolute modernism here; as you point out, it's numerous discourses.

I also think there's more dialog going on than you might see or be willing
to admit - I'm thinking of open-source, or the program URLs Chris Pirillo
sends out on his list, or the tremendous variety you can get in linux
guis, for better or worse.

Most portal pages _are_ terrible and most flash and java for that matter
are not only unncessary, but also take up cpu and user time when they load
(if they even load properly; Opera 5.01 is fairly jumpy). One's trying to
please components of corporate, geek, and consumer cultuers.

What surprises me about your post, though, is the other, the fin-de-de-de-
siecle ennui that seems to inhabit it.

Finally, I don't see our worlds or worldings as perfect or self-referen-
tial; if anything they're open, porous, ragged, hacked, cracked, dissemin-
ated, etc. Again that sounds like a kind of modernism to me, or what I'd
associate with conceptualism - which did attempt that sort of referential-
ity.

- Alan

Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt
Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html
Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm
CDROM of collected work 1994-2000/1 available: write sondheim@panix.com

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