Comment The pendulum swings (Score 1) 75
We went from walled gardens like AOL CompuServe, the WELL, Delphi, etc., to open authorship of websites, and now we are back to a lot of walled gardens, we just call them social media - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all with their own revenue generating enclosures.
I was teaching undergrad and graduate level teachers in 1998 through 2000, and they would almost universally come in demanding that they know how to make a webpage and write HTML. I also had to make sure that they knew what a student experience was like, so we were, at that time, still pretty big on LOGO. They were convinced that LOGO was utter nonsense and a useless toy, and that they had to learn HTML or they would be left as the jetsam of the Internet. A week into HTML, where are syntax errors beget digital avalanches, they were ready to tear their hair out. A week into LOGO and they were just as inspired and happy as the kids they would eventually teach it to. You didnâ(TM)t get a syntax error in LOGO, the console simply asks you to teach it how to do the thing you typed that wasnâ(TM)t in its vocabulary.
Even after we had some of the early foolproof web authoring tools, people realized that the hard part was not necessarily coding, it was making sure you knew what you were going to talk about, how to say it, how to present it, how to have it make sense and how to use the hyperlinking that the web was built for.
Of course, revenue has a lot to do with the overall frustrating Web experience today, to read the first story on my local newspaper site. I have to dismiss no less than five ads and pop-up offers. Iâ(TM)ve never been to the Vegas strip, but I imagine the visual assault of the current web means I really donâ(TM)t need to experience it in person in the physical world. And of course, like operating systems, every major provider wants to make sure you stay in theirs. Itâ(TM)s kind of like how CVS is no longer a pharmacy, they build a separate building that has enough stuff so that you donâ(TM)t even try to shop elsewhere when you go in to get your RX. You grab all the other things you need there so that you wonâ(TM)t go elsewhere. META has adopted this model, they want to make sure that everything you need to get through your day is available in their brand. Google as well. Google is an advertising company that happens to be willing to supply you with some serviceable tools to do other things. Kind of like the car Homer Simpson designs. And Iâ(TM)ll stop now because Iâ(TM)m starting to sound like grandpa Simpson with the onions.