Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I’ve seen it before, the early days of a system, when you can see the bare bones, the empty spaces, the potential. A horde of systematic thinkers move in and make order, covering the bare bones with regulations and Best Practice. Even for the people who have seen those bare bones it is difficult to remember where they were and how lovely it was to see them. Our Web has become systematized.

For a while there websites were a little mysterious. Difficult to know how to get the information from them. Difficult to know where to click. Unexpected things would happen. But then, people worked out that people just wanted information; they wanted to know how to most easily navigate the site. Designers backed out of their play and sat down to figure out the most user-friendly paths and formats. Sadly, though, that sensible rule-making phase does not end. People want to know how to make things pay. They work out ways to lead people through the information. People, who by this time have become other things like browsers, viewers, clicks, once educated in how things should be, can no longer see possibilities for how things could be.

I started using the internet about 1996. I used to make art on it. Not put art on it, make art on it. We played with HTML and fiddled with animation. Once things got past the initial black and white, there were no rules for how things should go. I should have known that we would quickly hit satiation of play-time and the rules would set in. Rules for how things should be placed, how things should be read. Rules that dictated what was good design and what was bad.

People worked out how to make things move, using code. Figured out how to put in layers. Perhaps that was the first interesting feature of this medium, that made it different from television, books. There was some very lovely work done. And, of course, people quickly came up with software and we all became animators. Very new kinds of design, quirky and energetic, using the limitations of the medium. The frame of a computer screen, the point of a mouse, the virtual space. With animation came movement. With increases in speed and power came more virtual space.

With more space came photographs, images. Home-made video. Which necessitated more space, and another industry sprang up to find ways to provide it. And another to find ways to use it. Digital cameras, digital video cameras. Design had been focused on text and hyperlinks to connect to other pages. But it moved back somewhat to let in embedded images. A sudden shift back to the media of newspapers and magazines. There is no doubt that the internet has affected the design of newspapers and magazines in positive ways. But I’m not at all sure that the effect of newspapers and magazines connecting to their online components has positively affected the design on the internet.

It’s easy to bemoan the passing of a beginning, it happens all the time. We don’t notice it much once it’s gone. I can’t help but feel, though, that we had great potential to develop new ways of thinking, by developing new ways of reading – and we gave that up for an easier read. I can’t help but feel that rather than giving different things a voice, the internet has caused different things to sound and look more and more like everything else.

You make a template, a format, a style. It makes it easy to keep order, to be a recognizable brand. Like The Drum. But every page starts to look alike. There is no recognizable difference between a story on children and a story on genetically modified wheat, except for the photograph. Which makes the photograph more important than the design in giving information. The design is now about not giving information regarding its contents. The design has now become a background feature, the design has lost its importance and its value. The design now has the same function as the design of a newspaper – simply to hold things together and keep the order the same, so that we can find things easily.

Perhaps its good to have The Drum as a recognizable Brand. But I’m curious about Brands, and the way they have become such an important feature of our information life. It seems to me that at some point in the development of the internet as an information source, that we had the chance to make it a deeply exploratory and meditative source. And instead, we took the other road, and made it a source of quick bites of information. Of which the Brand is the ultimate example. Perhaps, though, the Brand was helped along by that short time (short in the life of information) that we didn’t have space for more than a simple graphic on our web pages. It could be that the evolutionary process of the medium was its own downfall.

I am writing this because I don’t think I’m the only person who misses something that was here and then gone, the great exciting frontier of the World Wide Web. I cannot complain about the web, it has probably helped me more than any other connective device in my life. What it is now is an absolute playground of possibilities. Anything you want to do, it seems, is here or on its way. But what I do miss is the potential for more difference. That seemed to disappear into more of the same and more just like that. I wish that more people would take the time to see the rules and disregard them. But I guess it might simply be too late for that.

There is a time to be new, that time ends and something else gets to be new. In becoming a medium heavy in photographs and videos, the internet is losing the opportunity to be something else. But of course it goes the way of all commerce; the more functions the more money can be charged. That’s probably the simplest answer to why it went that way and not this. I hope that people are able to subvert it, remembering how it was before it became the luxurious RV it is now. I hope that there is still room for piracy.