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Permeable Portals: Designing congenial web sites for the e-societyRichard Coyne, John Lee and Martin ParkerPage 1 ¦ Page 2 ¦ Page 3 ¦ Page 4 ¦ Printer-friendly version 4. Time-based mediaThe portal suggests an opening through which people, objects, or information may be transacted. The ideas of temporality and flow are also promoted by the medium of sound (as a time-based medium). Since the introduction of smooth packet switching protocols and improved bandwidth, it is common to think of the web as a broadcast medium. The portal becomes a transmitter. Or perhaps there is a stream or channel flowing past into which we can tap. The URL link provides a portal into this flow. The sound medium readily promotes a culture of evasion, abetted by the fact that a sound source is often difficult to detect. We have created streams of sound on our work-in-progress website, and students are experimenting with the continuous transmission of video and sound, and with timed broadcast events. This idea of flow feeds back into the production of graphical web sites as we think of sites that change in a time-based way. One simple device is to maintain a database of images created by students from which a random selection is made each time you load the web page. The page can change its form and appearance, perhaps thereby straining the relationship between form and content. The information delivered determines to some extent the appearance of the site (fig 3), and this varies over time. This is an intriguing concept that is still being explored. What of the temporality of the portal? Doors are sometimes left ajar, fully opened, closed tight or locked, and this depends on the time of day and the activities around the door. The web portal can similarly exhibit a time dimension, responding to cycles and activities. During vacation periods access could be restricted in some way. When there is a lot of activity then anyone can have free access and post messages, as then the community is minding its domain. We will return to this possibility subsequently. 5. Web page as fetishThe random presentation of text and imagers is suggestive of the idea of collage, where meanings emerge by virtue of unusual juxtapositions [12]. This happens as we arrange web pages from different sites on a computer screen. A page from a bookseller is juxtaposed against an online ticketing system, in turn juxtaposed with a word processor page, and with a broadcast radio channel playing in the background. With broadband communications it is possible for an author (or designer) to array all of these resources, as distractions, or as a multitude of concurrent portals from which new insights emerge by virtue of their imaginative combination. By various accounts this juxtaposition is in the nature of the workings of metaphor [13]. We have suggested that the portal is a metaphor. It is also a metonym. Technically a metonym is a subspecies of metaphor in which a part stands in for some whole. To use a picture of a knife and fork to represent a restaurant, or to depict a house with an icon of a front door would be metonymic. User interfaces are replete with metonymic references. Desmet relates this to concepts of the web as fetish [14]. A fetish is an application of metonymy, particularly in the case of altars and shrines constructed in certain cultures. The devout assembly of a hair brush, handkerchief, theatre ticket, lock of hair, or bracelet serves as a reminder of someone, or some occasion, and such objects may be arranged on a wall, table or cabinet. The arrangement is improvisational, personal, and has the character of a bricolage, presenting strange juxtapositions, that in turn suggest new meanings. The whole is an attempt to grapple with some situation that transcends the mere monetary or use value of the parts (love, loss, adoration, fortune, reverence). Desmet constructs an interesting argument about the tensional relationship between metonymy and the more transcendent character of metaphor. We do not need to explore this further here, suffice it to say that the arrangement of the fetish objects acts as a portal to some supposedly transcendent condition. There are strong resonances with the character of web pages here. Arguably, the prototypical web page is not the well designed, controlled, corporate e-commerce site, but the humble personal web page: the instinctual, improvisatory page made up of favourite colour schemes, fonts, personal details, pictures of pets, and links, easily dismissed as risky, amateur self indulgence. To what transient entity does the page refer: freedom, self expression, participation in a community, asserting one’s place in the world? The web is a unique medium for circulating this fetishistic propensity, and for transforming and taming it. By this account the display of database content, the online collection, or the corporate web portal is a diminished extension of a more primitive and domestic mode of expression, which belongs at the hearth of the city. A fetish is also an obsession. A shoe fetishist may have rooms full of trainers. To fetishise is to reduce something to metonymic status, as when an architect makes a fetish of the idea of the column and parades them to extreme effect (as at the Czernin Palace in Prague). Rather than ennoble the idea of the column it can diminish it, or render it ludicrous (or “mannerist” in architectural terms). This overindulgence is one of Marx’s complaints about the fetish of consumption [15]. Mass production and mass consumption reduce everything to the commodity. Unlike the fetish of the devotee, here the fetish is a trivialisation. The sociality of e-consumption is answerable to this charge. One can also make a fetish out of security. It is easy enough to reduce issues of access to matters of how best to exclude and contain. This would be tantamount to architects using bank vaults and prisons as their models of access. Security in portal design is no less subtle. Our argument is that the permeable portal requires more design finesse than is suggested by the supposed imperative of network security. Footnotes12. Coyne, R., 1999. Technoromanticism : Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. return 13. Coyne, R., 1995. Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age : From Method to Metaphor. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.: Turbayne, C.M., 1970. The Myth of Metaphor. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia. return 14. Desmet, C., 2001. Reading the Web as Fetish. In Computers and Composition, Vol. 18, pp. 55-72. return 15. Marx, K., 1977, Capital. in McLellan, D., ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 415- 507. return | |