Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 92.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 08:40:42 +0100
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: detachment from attachments
Willard,
[Given your recent asides], I was wondering if those engaged in marketing
exercises for conferences use the WWW to store additional information more
than those engaged in marketing products. In either case, the URL-less
nature of certain promotions over the Internet is at times not only
irksome for the receipients (who may or may not successfully conduct a
search to glean more information) but also bothersome for moderators
having to purge attachments from email.
As I know you are fond of typologies, I offer the following
* email with no URL and no attached file
* email with URL and no attached file
* email with no URL and with attached file
* email with URL and with attached file
I was also wondering if any of the students of cyberculture would care to
venture a sociological reading of the behaviours that fall into the
categories of the four part typology. Also, I wonder if the teachers of
human-computer interface design might speculate on the apparent collapse
into a single category of experience of the Internet and the World Wide
Web (they are equivalent in some user's vocabularies) and whether this
apparent collapse can be associated with the convergence of applications
that handle both hypertext and email through a set of Graphical User
Interfaces with similar look and feel [not to forget the receeding from
the screen (and sound output) of feedback regarding conectivity a la
dial-up].
In general terms, one asks: at what cost transparency? Or how does the
deployment of interfaces designed for so-called transparency affect access
to information and fora for exchange?
[Sent to you via a telent connection to a unix account and composed in
elm from the console of a Macintosh Performa 611CD.]
Pining for gophers,
Francois
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/ivt.htm
per Interactivity ad Virtuality via Textuality
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