A Multimedia Mystery: What has Happened to the Web's Words?

A bare decade ago, the lucid media critic Neil Postman lamented "the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television". The World Wide Web, the fastest-growing new text medium in history, might seem to prove him wrong. The Web hosts on-line news- papers like The Age, a multitude of scientific papers, government documents, corporate manifestos, poetry, and just plain weird prose, all sitting on tens of thousands of servers just waiting for someone's browser to come get it.

And words are ideal for the Web: they load into browsers quickly and you can create them with humble but effective programs like Wordpad that come free with your computer's operating system.

Anyone doubting the power of the humble word need only visit a few of the web sites which exploit the age-old technology of the alphabet. Be it the pages of Salon, the web-essays of design guru David Siegel, or the "parenthood test" in the Children's Corner of Richard Darsie's Home Page, good writing makes great Web pages.

Web designer Nathan Shedroff, creative director at San Francisco design firm Vivid Studios, is famous for his declaration that "The Net is a communications medium, not a publishing medium!". But his own pages nevertheless look a little like an exercise in publishing - publishing words, that is. They contain the obligatory links to other sites, and a personal resume, but they also contain essays about the Web. There are a bare half-dozen simple pictures. "The Web and Net will become less text-dominant," said Shedroff in an e-mail interview in October, "but whether text will ever lose its dominance is a question yet to be answered. My guess is no".

And yet, when you turn away from the scientific papers, the on-line news- papers and magazines, and the occasional thoughtful work like Shedroff's, the Web often looks surprisingly ... well, illiterate. If you go cruising the thousands of home pages springing up on the Web today, you might start to think that writing is on the defensive, text of any length almost outlawed. All too rarely does a personal page use text to describe experience or ideas - be it a list of top bushwalking tracks or some thoughts about Neighbours. For a book with an estimated five million-plus pages, the Web seems surprisingly sparsely and sloppily written.

Strange to relate, the authors of personal sites are generally trying to copy not Nathan Shedroff's own well-written pages but his professional work, the sites Vivid has built for clients like Sony (www.sony.com) - entertaining sites rich in images. Since most people don't have the graphic resources available to Shedroff and Sony, they use the cruder tools available. The result, not surprisingly, falls short of Sony-style entertainment. You haven't really surfed until you've surfed into a page which consists of nothing but a scrolling "this page is under construction" sign, a gaudy background image, three rainbow-colored horizontal bars and a half-dozen gold-toned buttons which take you precisely nowhere.

And anyone wanting to discover how to write for the Web will have a hard time finding the information they want on-line. Sites offer endless pagefuls of in formation on how to create Web page images, but very little on the best techniques for Web writing.

Why is so little attention being paid to text on the Web? Replies Shedroff, with rather brutal simplicity: "Because everything you need to write text for the Web is currently there. You can't sell more software based on it."

An ANU behavioral scientist, Matthew Ciolek, has put the argument at its most extreme in an angry Web essay on Multimedia Mediocrity (see the link below). Most people don't have "access" to high-quality analysis and facts, he argues. So "sites will inevitably vie with each other for the status of being the Web's biggest (in terms of the cataloged hypertext links and the size of their logos), or most technically advanced ... or most colorful and dazzling (in terms of visual effects and virtual-reality technologies) ... Good data is not readily forthcoming, hence the preoccupation with hypertext and multimedia techniques, and the "cool" appearance of pages." Ciolek is unsure whether the Web can be rescued from this "cyberjunk".

In his "Being Digita", Nicholas Negroponte describes the Internet as a magnificent ballroom full of beautiful people - most of whom learned to dance the night before, and don't know what to do with their feet. Right now, personal Web sites are proving the truth of that statement. Remember, when digital guru Negroponte wanted to convey ideas, he wrote a book. He used no pictures at all, but merely the 26 letters of the alphabet and a few punctuation marks, all arranged into not very Cool but nevertheless usable words and sentences.

Dex mounts its own defence of text.

Matthew Ciolek's "Multimedia Mediocrity" essay.

Easter Egg Hunt

Lighthouse wants to find the best examples of Web writing from personal sites - not high-powered Web media like Hotwired or Slate or Suck but writing from people who just want to use the Web to share their ideas. Please e-mail your suggestions.

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