Miscellanea Sensibilium

Jack my bitch up

The internet becomes increasingly schizophrenic. Art sites that want to show off their textual skills, literary sites that are coated with so much graphical slickness that the mere touch of them is enough to make you slide right off to somewhere less pretentious. And then we have the sites that don't really know what they are, but my, don't they have pretty interfaces.

To find information on the net it has become almost de rigueur to have to bludgeon your way through ever more unnecessary 'intuitive' graphical interfaces. Why? Why the fuck is this necessary? If I pick up a newspaper to check out the score in the latest minor war, I don't expect to have to negotiate my way through several beautifully printed but ultimately useless plastic coatings. Likewise, if I walk into an art gallery, I feel no great desire to have copies of the artists diaries lying around so that I can read about the torturous minutiae of their lives. Half of the attraction of a painting, or a photograph is the act of mutual creation between artist and viewer, that mingling of perception, the grey area between conceptual vision and derived understanding.

So, I ask you, why is it suddenly so common for a website to have a finger in every single pie going? Why is it that on the net, an collection of images cannot speak for itself, or a piece of writing cannot be appreciated without graphical interjection?

It would seem obvious that there is a whole load of 'me too' psychology behind web design. Not only does everyone want a website, but they want their website to include every single 'cool' feature that the designer has ever coveted on other sites. Websites have to be seen to be providing something for everybody, or at least to prove that they can do everything that everybody else can. The net still doesn't seem to have understood that the maxim 'more is better' is completely false, and ultimately leads to lowest-common-denominator content on any platform.

One thing stands out. Although the internet is undoubtedly a far more aesthetically pleasing place to be these days, on a purely eye-candy level, it becomes ever more difficult to find anything that stands out, that is new or different. The focus on content is being lost behind the sharp, design-led revolution of a thousand geeks who know how to code, but haven't got a clue when it comes to filling their sugary confections with content of any value. The American dream of slick, mass-market homogeneity is slowly enveloping the net. All-singing, all-dancing, all-suffocating.

To be perfectly honest, I can't see the point of the internet at all if we are merely going to transform it into another cable network. Why not just sell the whole fucking thing to CBS and start a new revolution. Maybe this time we can get it right.