Communication:
Normally we think of "communication" as
being between two living beings -- John talks to Mary. I could go into the
mechanics of what is communication, but the essential factor here is that
there are two living beings -- say within sight and hearing of one another.
Consider that this example of
communication is the ideal -- or perhaps standard for the comparisons I
would now make.
Now we take the thoughts in John's mind
and put them as "words" on paper -- and pass that paper to Mary. This is a
substitute for the live communication we use as standard, but see what a
tremendous multiplication of effects we can create.
The paper can be reproduced,
distributed, and the thoughts are now "communicated" to thousands or
millions of people.
It is certainly not the same as live
communication, but it has many advantages that might make up for the
less-than-personal nature of the medium.
We can "improve" the written words by
adding pictures -- so the "less-than-personal" communication becomes more
personal -- more alive.
We can greatly improve on that
communication by removing the "material aspects" of the communication while
leaving the "significance" there. The "material aspects" include the paper
and ink. The "significance" includes the thoughts represented by words.
When you can convey the words with less paper and ink, the communication can
move far more rapidly to far more people with less effort.
Take, for instance, the days of the Pony
Express -- when a piece of paper, with writing on it, was carried by a man
on a horse, relayed to another man, on another horse, and thus traversed
perhaps a thousand miles. There was a certain amount of "effort" in getting
that communication from John to Mary.
Contrast this with an eMail from John to
Mary -- where the same thoughts, perhaps the same words, are now carried
with a tiny percentage of the mass that accompanied the Pony Express
communication.
This is a look into the revolution that
is occurring with "communication" in the modern era. There is much more to
come!
One thing that is sorely lacking on that
piece of paper or that eMail is "liveness!"
In a live communication John can ask
Mary a question and get an answer.
So, the challenge then becomes, "How can
you modify that piece of paper so that someone can 'ask the paper' a
question and get an answer??" Well, with Pony Express it might take the
question 30 days to arrive at Mary, and another 30 days for the answer to
return to John. With the eMail the question can arrive at Mary in seconds
and a response be received by John in more seconds.
And thus, further, has the nature of
communication changed.
Could this be improved?
If Mary is absent from her computer the
question may lay in her eMail basket for hours or even days before John gets
his answer.
So, we move into "instant Messaging"
where two people, at some distance apart, agree to set up a simple
communication device so that they are "always connected" on the basis of
instantaneous -- the communication connection is always "alive" but there
are no messages on that live line most of the time. If John and Mary have
this arrangement, each can be busy at work (on their computers) and suddenly
John has a thought -- wants to communicate that to Mary. He puts that
thought into his "instant Messaging" service and Mary receives it just about
as fast as if John and Mary were in the same room.
If Mary wants to, she responds to the
Instant Message and the communication has become instant, as if John and
Mary were in the same room.
And so does the concept of
"communication" continue to be tweaked by modern technology.
Let me move ahead rapidly and leave out
some of the other changes that have occurred.
"Live Two Way Communication" is the
essence of life -- John interacts with Mary, using communication.
Life is not the passive receipt of
pieces of paper with the thoughts of John on those papers, but the
interactivity of John with a million Mary's! How can this be done?
What you need is a piece of paper with
built in ability to respond to questions from John. Can you devise a piece
of paper, or a web page, that emulates "John" where "John" can ask a
question, without being truly alive, and Mary can answer that piece of paper
and get a further response from John.
We might be able to approximate "live
two-way communication" with one living being communicating with a very
clever piece of paper -- the web page in a shopping cart!
Mary comes to the shopping cart -- she
knows that the "cart" is not a live being, but she still wants to
"communicate" TO the cart -- she wants to convey her thoughts to the cart.
She wants to ask questions of the cart. She wants to get answers to HER
questions from the cart. And, she wants that to be as instantaneous as it
would be between John and herself, in the same room.
The closer our shopping cart can
approximate live communication between two people the closer we are to a
truly modern miracle in the new age.
The language, HTML, is well suited to
present words, thoughts of John, to Mary, but certainly not well suited for
interactivity.
You get some "interactivity" with Java
Script, but it would be "mindless" and certainly not personal
interactivity. You run your mouse over a drop down menu and get the
impersonal interactivity of the expanded menu -- but this interactivity is
NOT personal to you.
With PHP and MySQL, and very clever
programming and design, you get not only interactivity but personalization
of the communication.
The PHP and the character of the
database that it works with will have a great deal to do with the quality of
the communication, and the speed of an accurate response to a "question."
At some point you start realizing that
PHP and MySQL are not alive -- even if they allow approximation of life, and
that it then becomes the cleverness of the designer to anticipate the
thought processes of the visitor and be ready, mechanically, to respond to
what is very likely to be the communication from the one living being in
this equation.
There are "trouble shooting" help
features, increasingly, in many programs -- they are wisely moving in the
direction of the "machine" presents a question with, say, two possible
answers. The live being chooses one of those answers, and gets the next
question, with the next set of possible answers. If the designer is smart
enough, the whole experience can approximate Mary asking John a fairly
complex question and getting the answer.
I recall just such a scenario recently,
for me, when I couldn't get my new scanner to work. I went through the
trouble-shooting routine. About the first question was, "Is the scanner
plugged into a live power source?" I looked. It was not. I had spent some
hours trying to get a new scanner to work while it was plugged into a power
strip where half of the strip was alive with power but the part I had
plugged into was NOT alive.
The skill of the shopping cart designer
STARTS with a full knowledge of the tools by which the shopping cart (or any
web page) is constructed. For many purposes, and pages, HTML is still the
sine qua non, but for the further advancement of our electronic age
we need to leave the static world of HTML and find other languages which
allow for "personalized interactivity."
THEN we go beyond the mere tools and
conceive of the thought processes of our visitor -- to anticipate what his
purpose is upon entering a page of a web or a page of a shopping cart.
That is where the word "clutter" raises
its ugly head.
When there is no effort to anticipate
the thought processes of the visitor, the web designer feels compelled to
answer ALL possible questions on every page -- so we get complex drop down
menus that allow the visitor to ask ANY question -- choose any change of
venue.
It takes courage to design this way
because your failures, now, will be in "guessing" wrongly about what the
visitor wants out of a page -- so that, in effect, there is no way by which
the visitor can pull out of the page the answers he wants.
The "shopping cart experience" is an
excellent place to start -- but it is only a start compared to what can be
done with "ordinary web pages" that are made "extraordinary" with the magic
of personalized interactivity -- and personalized with no wrong guesses as
to the questions that will be asked, or the answers which will satisfy.
In the long run, no machine can equal a
live being who duplicates a question and provides an answer. But that
technique brings us back to the Pony Express days. As much as we can be
brilliant in using the tools, and anticipating the thought process of the
visitor -- to that extent will our shopping cart, and then all web pages
which are designed with this in mind -- that extent will we be successful.
Others will be doing this -- it is not a
matter of "taking it easy." These concepts are too natural to the
electronic era and I hold no monopoly on these concepts, but we can be among
the first to recognize their validity, and to design around them.
