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- Right off the bat Halavais wants us to think. Question the convention and see it as meaning within itself. Perhaps a bit dangerous to Krug's business model. Fundamentally change the way users see conventions, perhaps take some power away from the designer/design.
- An interesting notion, the way we structure thought/text, reflects structures of knowledge in society. Halavais' point seems to, in part, be that if we recognize this and deliberately construct a new structure of knowledge, that structure becomes self-reflective, acknowledges itself as an abnormality within the social construct in resides.
- Cervantes had a handle on this concept of linked citations as a message unto themselves back at the start of the 17th Century. Seeing them utilized with certain motivations, which Cervantes lampoons as mostly scholastic posturing and taking a dubious stance of authority, something Halavais does not investigate, taking a more objective approach.
- Note that I have, ironically, done the same with the above notation.
- I have never thought of the Amazon 1-click purchase button, or the zoom tab on google maps as a type of hyperlink. But understanding all these various digital tools (search bars, navigational tools, keeping multiple tabs open, "liking" a social media post) as part of a hypertextual field, complicates the matter tenfold, especially if we are looking for meaning within the action of selecting these options.
- This approach might help students see the importance of properly and effectively utilizing citations and sources in their written work. It has become clear to me that students are often vastly unfamiliar with the practice and its purpose, and for the most part, even after it has been explained to them, are guessing. Perhaps seeing it as a hyperlink may be more tangible or direct. It also nicely sets up the idea that we don't cite text for the heck of it, or to pad papers with other people's writing, but to link what we are trying to accomplish to the work of other professionals.
- Digital links mapped onto physical space. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. Even if the study itself is simple, the implications of the idea are tremendous. Questioning what we define as a "real" social structure.
- From Halavais' description, to understand why and how things become associated and linked, we will understand the nature of our society and will begin to be able to predict what will be connected to what. This could be potentially dangerous, knowing what makes things viral, popular, how to instantly gain recognition or attention or authority on a global sphere. Of course Halavais is looking at this as a study in sociology, a theoretical social structure that no one person could control...at least I don't think...
- Quotes like this lead me to think this is not so off the mark:
- Google is built on the assumption that hyperlinks somehow transmit power or credibility. On the basis of that assumption, the search engine sends more traffic to the heavily linked sites, reinforcing that position of authority and leading to even more links. This occurs, arguably, to an even greater extent in the blogo-sphere, where some bloggers closely watch their ratings on Technorati and seek to rise in the rankings to the coveted A-list. Those who reach the most linked positions are likely to attract not only fame but fortune.
- Halavais' example of practical use of this power - Google bombing - is rather amusing, although still has insidious implications for all its harmless fun.
- This does concern me as even I fall prey to using the simple and efficient access of information on the internet as a source of truth.
- Again, I understand Halavais is speaking about theoretical social structure. Just because people have gained understanding of how hypertext traffic works and have used it to artificially create their own prominence within that system, doesn't necessarily give them any control over other who use that system, or determine knowledge, or the form of said social structures. However, they certainly become factors in how social knowledge bases are built, which may or may not be concerning.
- I found this piece interesting, but I after playing with it and being able to listen to most of the dialogue, I can safely say I am no closer to really understanding the writer's intent or message. If I were to take a stab at some interpretation, I would say he is using a combination of media, audio, and text to create what is at once harmonic and dissonant, blending the familiar with the foreign to destabilize the notion of information gathering, which would fit with his cryptic text that seems to be a kind of critique of media culture and society's naive intake of soundbites, video clips and digital text.
- Again, Moulthrop deliberately seems to complicate every notion of reading here. The image is in constant flux, changing and reorganizing itself, while the audio does the same, immitating a radio with a stuck dial, looping through channels. This divide's the reader's attention as he attempts to decipher meaning from the visual/audio interplay.
- Like islands, this results in an artifact that is completely unique, again questioning the nature of text as length of time spent waiting, number and order of picture screens captured, and length of time spent listening/reading, giving the reader the option to skip a text if they so choose.
- The speech to text element here also complicates a sense of static text. The text runs at about the speed most users can read, while the audio lags behind. This can be rather dissonant, the text being read by the reader, and supplied by the defined parameters of the designer, is different from that being read on screen. Giving the reader the option to slow down and contemplate the text and sync the two in their brains, or to try to overpower the dissonance through sheer willpower. In either case this represents quite plainly to the reader the power struggle between the designer and the reader.
- The gamelike quality of this artifact forces the reader to make hypertextual connections/correlations for themself. The text is linked via a type of fluidic visual hypertext field. It is the reader's responsibility to make their own connections, much like Vanavar's memex. However, to play the game, one must directly challenge one's own ideas about a hypertext, the patience and split attention can feel at once comforting, as the images pulse in rhythm, and disconcerting as the times between matching links seems to be without rhythm, forcing one to maintain an intentional amount of scrutiny.
- The experience seems almost metaphorical in light of the articles we have been reading. Representing the current status of the world wide hypertext, just a mass of unrelated links, equally salient, vying for attention amidst the need to understand, the need for completion, and the compulsion to be distracted by image and sound, all swirling, all portending to meaning, but ultimately falling short of a holistic idea. Certainly not what Nelson would have wanted, although he would have wanted this piece linked to everything else on the web..
- I don't think Krug would have really given this the time of day. It is in no way self-evident, what few instructions there are only instruct on the movement through the piece (thus creating a complicated set of conventions that must be explained, but aren't evidently valuable in conjunction with the material) and nowhere gives us Krug's basics of what I'm supposed to do or where I am supposed to find anything (or nothing!). The links themselves are often ambiguous, and what one finds is not always obviously tied to the link. The navigation is the opposite of permanent, constantly shifting and changing, broken in a revolving door of competing noise.
- That is perhaps why I like this piece, it takes all of Krug's user friendly, sterile little dos and don'ts and flips them on their head, producing a cacophony that speaks more clearly, in some ways, than the most polished product of Krug's.
- The message seems to be that we HAVE to think, or have our thinking done for us by designers like Krug who want to provide environments that encourage us to buy whatever they sell us.
- Like many of the other commentators we have looked at, we have to challenge and confront these conventions, draw attention to them, in order to disempower them and allow us to create new, truly user friendly, user centered, user powered hypertext, digital spaces.
- I'm not sure what to make of the "punishment" system here. Failing to make the correct link results not in just the end of the game, but in a sense of demise, or death. While in one sense this fulfills a Krugian sense of position, a convention by which to return to the home screen, I'm not sure if it really acts in that way. It sort of brings into focus, perhaps, the fractured nature of this hypertext, a divide between the user, the designer, and the medium. Dissonance in that the experience is endless yet has these sudden bounds that are enforced on the user.
