•Introduction
•The nature of formats
•How new formats come to be
•The state of creative formats on the web today
•The next wave of format
Formats for coherence
Formats for diversity
Formats for navigation
Formats for flux
Formats for ubiquity
Formats for identifying origins
•Conclusion
Version 1.01 • This essay was published by Global Business Network as a "Deeper News" article in August 2001. It is about the principal restraint on the web's development as a business and a creative medium -- not technology, but the kinds of formats that have always constrained and abetted media. I will incorporate more illustrations, links, and comments into this as time goes on, so I am grateful for any suggestions or notice of any links that should be made. Thank you for taking the time to look at it. For more information or comments please email us at art@well.com.
For the printable version published by GBN, please download the .pdf file.
(Note: this is a 3MB file)
There is something terribly right going on...
A mood of doubt and dread has overtaken conversations about the future of the internet. Late last year, even before it became clear that the "dot-com bubble" would burst, there was a growing sense of doubt about the Internet as a viable mass communications medium - or even a commercial medium. The business models all seemed increasingly weak; online advertising, micropayments, and subscriptions were all discredited as money makers. Prominent information sites like Salon and Oxygen cut back; digital retailers no longer seemed to have the edge on their brick-and-mortar counterparts. To attract the web audience — which was now seen to be far more fragmented, fickle, and enervated than its TV and newspaper counterparts - information, electronic commerce and entertainment sites are becoming pithier, punchier and more self-consciously outrageous. Those of us who thought the Web might spark a Renaissance uniting commerce, media and the arts in unprecedented ways now began to wonder if we'd have to sell coffee mugs and and t-shirts to support our creative endeavours. It’s tempting to think that there is something terribly, terribly wrong going on right now on the World Wide Web.
More likely, there is something terribly right going on. We are watching the new, incredibly rich medium of computer-based communication go through a natural and expectable transition, in which invention passes from technologists to creative designers. All media make similar transitions in their early years, and it has little to do with technology per se.
The software and hardware technologies of the internet and Web — from DSL and cable modems to router and server design to TCP/IP to broadband to HTML to the system of URLs and internet addresses — are brilliant technological achievements. Nor are they static; they are rapidly being expanded into an always-on, real-time-access ever-evolving worldwide computer network that will replace or subsume most other communications and computer technologies. Powerful though this "global computer" may be, it is not enough, in itself, to create a viable mainstream communications medium, or a truly hospitable e-commerce environment.
To cross the threshold, you need something else, something that technologists, financiers and engineers all tend to ignore, or to discount as trivial. You need formats -- the story-telling, information-weaving, and attention-directing conventions that publishers, editors, producers, writers and designers adopt to systemize their work. The web is still in its infancy precisely because the formats for mainstream web medium have only barely begun to be developed. The creation of these formats, far more than the development of new hardware and sofware tools, will be the focus of the Internet’s "killer app" activity during the next few years. And that will be disorienting, because the kind of businesses and strategies that develop successful formats are very different from those which develop successful technologies, especially in the early stages of a new medium.
