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The Frontiers and Challenges of Online Publishing

Keynote speech for Multimedia InterCD '96 Conference

MAYO 30 DE 1996

WORLD TRADE CENTER, CIUDAD DE MEXICO, MEXICO

by John December (johndecember@gmail.com)

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ABSTRACT

The World Wide Web and the Internet offer new opportunities to reach
global audiences. Publishers can create structures for reaching users
in new ways for information, communication, and interaction. But the
technologies and techniques for publishing online are changing fast.
New technologies using Java allow for more interactive communication.
New techniques for shaping networked hypermedia are emerging. The
resulting online environment pushes the frontiers of possibilities
while at the same time challenges publishers to develop online
environments that are innovative, meaningful, and compelling.

 ****

THE RISE OF THE GLOBAL INTERNET

Five years ago, the Internet had been around for two decades, yet it
was was still largely the province of researchers and academics in
laboratories.

Today, the Internet is everywhere, it seems.   The popular press
routinely covers the Internet's use in business and education as well
as its sensationalistic and lurid aspects--hackers and online
subcultures full of mystery and misdeed.  In any bookstore, you'll see
shelves groaning with Internet books.  Internet interest worldwide is
very great, and it seems to just keep increasing.  The Internet has no
central point of authority or governance, yet it has been adopted
worldwide as the way for instant, global communication.  We're all
struggling to understand what the collaborative growth of this
worldwide communications system means.

We struggle, too, to understand how to express ourselves in this new
medium.   The evolution of communication media stretches back
centuries.  Certainly, the invention of moveable type in the fifteenth
century was a major advance in the communication of text.  Printing
stretched the reach of publications.  No longer tied to only
hand-reproduced copies, many more copies of a work could be
disseminated more cheaply and quickly.  Many compare the significance
of the Internet to the invention of print.

But a much older invention changed thought even more dramatically.
That invention, in the 4th century BC, was a Greek one: the invention
of vowels.  The invention of vowels changed the alphabets that had so
far existed up to that time.  Vowels permitted texts to be written
which more closely matched speech, and the Greek alphabet standardized
writing and lead to widespread literacy--at least among the elite--in
Greece.  The written word later played a big role in bureaucracy: the
codification of laws, the collection of taxes, the administration of
far-flung territories. Writing still plays a big part in empires
today.  I will suggest that the invention of vowels marked a shift that
is more closely analogous to how we should be thinking about the
Internet, Web, and global hypermedia now--because today, we are
creating a new kind of communication, not merely old forms of
communication speeded up in new ways.

Not everyone has approved of the shift to writing as a means of
communication.  Marshall McLuhan noted that the linear nature of print
sundered the "aural space" that had existed before writing.  Franz
Kafka's book, "The Castle," evokes the anxiety of a individual facing a
bureaucratic culture obsessed with print.  Does this mean that our
civilization has taken a wrong turn for the past two thousand five
hundred years?  Have we mistaken print for knowledge, literacy for
wisdom?  Have we lost our sense of self in the world within named,
certified, and official identities based on only written records?

Yes, I think we probably have.

The compelling adventure we have for us now is the creation of a new
literacy in a new medium.  It would be presumptuous and premature to
say that global computer networks have or will play a part in a
reshaped civilization.  I don't think we will know that for perhaps
hundreds of years.  But these larger philosophical and political issues
that surround human communication can give us a way to understand even
the minute details of what we are doing on the Internet, the World Wide
Web, and in multimedia.  Remember, vowels are just symbols; the
inventors thought it was just a good idea to implement them.  There
were probably no design meetings where the need for vowels was
discussed.  Vowels were simply used, then widely accepted as standards
because they provided a way of recording speech that had not been
possible before.

Similarly, what you do--each small decision in design, each
socially-affirmed practice of expression in hypermedia--shapes emerging
practices and traditions of human communication.  The hypertext link
that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned on the Internet just seven years ago,
the wonderful browser that Marc Andreesen and his team came up with
three years ago--these changed expressions in the online world
forever.  These innovators probably didn't forsee how much their work
would later impact global communication.   But just those two
innovations--the development of the World Wide Web system and the later
development of graphical Web browsers--has brought us to this point,
today, to a dramatically-enlarged and enriched Internet.

The Internet world is dizzy with what is new:  Java, Shockwave,
Javascript, server push, client pull, Virtual Reality Modeling
Language, RealAudio--the list goes on.  Each month it seems, some
serious new component of online communication is introduced.   And most
of these innovations are not mere toys, or variations on what has gone
before, but dramatic new ways to shape information and provide
communication and frame interaction.   For example, while the Java
language itself presents no radically new departure in terms of the
computer science technology it represents, it was at the right place at
the right time with the right stuff one year ago when it was introduced
to the Internet.   Today, Java holds the promise of providing a way for
developers to implement interactivity online and in other devices that
had not been before possible.  Java is not all hype--its potential is
very real.  And the Java offshoots and related
technologies--development environments and architectures such as Common
Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) to allow object-oriented
applications to communicate with one another--promise to truly
transform the online world to a new kind of trade that we could have
not forseen even just nine months ago.

This is a shocking influx of new technologies--but I'm not worried
about our ability to sort all of this out and to discover what works
well and what doesn't.  Humans have demonstrated time and time again a
keen ability to adopt or reject technologies based on their needs.  How
many of you have used a picture phone in the past month?  How many of
you have used the Internet in the past month?  Large telecommunications
companies began promoting the picture phone more than a quarter century
ago as "the phone of the future." They dreamed that the convergence of
a kind of television with the telephone was inevitable, yet people
stubbornly refused--and still refuse--to adopt the picture phone for
anything but specialized uses even today.  The technology landscape
today is probably littered with neat gadgets that will never be adopted
on a large scale.  Almost all are transition technologies serving a
need until something more significant sparks the imagination of
developers building applications for the real needs of people.

So what I want to tell you today is that I don't have all the answers
for the direction of communication technologies for the next hundred
years.  But what I do want to tell you is that by keeping the big
picture of human communication in mind, you're more likely to be able
to make more successful decisions.  You'll be better prepared to choose
technologies to adopt and shape meaning using those technologies at the
very detailed level.  That big picture is, of course is:  you're trying
to make a connection to and among other human beings.  You're trying to
connect with people whether you are creating a telecommunications
infrastructure, developing computer hardware or software, maintaining a
library, educating students, or creating lively content to entertain
people.  This is a fairly obvious "big picture," but I'm amazed to see
this perspective lost at almost all levels of systems and tools
development on the Internet.  Without keeping this big picture in the
forefront of your work, the technologies alone--the sheer flood of
them--may seduce you into constructing Kafka-esque castles:  online
content that is full of technical flash and fury, but signifies
nothing.

We now have the exciting opportunity to create meaning.

I want to share with you three specific ideas that I in my experience
as an Internet publisher have found work, and what I as an Internet
researcher am still exploring.   These are:

1)  Build online communities.

2)  Approach Web publishing as a process.

3)  Rethink interactivity in terms of human activity.


BUILD ONLINE COMMUNITIES

What we think about now as global media--tv, radio, newspapers,
books--doesn't fit into anything that we would call a community.
Certainly, a global network like MTV connects to a youth culture, a
lifestyle, an audience with a set of very particular demographics.  MTV
is a testament to the power of a global brand.  There are online global
brands--Global Network Navigator, Yahoo, Lycos--these are brands that
grew right from the Internet and distinguish online content that media
moguls no doubt are happy to own.

But brands are not what the Internet has been about for the past two
and a half decades.   I'm not saying brands will not or ought not to be
a part of the Internet now--in fact, I would say that brands have an
extremely important role.  What I am saying is that the commercial
construction of value in a brand needs to mesh with the social
construction of value through communities on the Net.

The idea that the online world is a confluence of communities is not a
radical one.  Howard Rheingold in his book, "The Virtual Community,"
traces the rise of a community on the WELL, a computer conferencing
system based in California.   He documents an expressive and intricate
interplay of human emotions and thought--conflict and attraction,
seduction, intrigue and anger--this isn't a world ruled by wires and
bit rates and screen resolution specifications, but a world of complex
human interchange, emotion, and society.  There's a pull of one human
being to another that compels participants to overcome technical
barriers and trivia to make a connection.

Of course, the global flux of millions of participants and a wide range
of forums online is far more complex than what happens on a single
system.  On the WELL, most of the participants shared a fairly
privileged and educated background.   Today, the shift of global talk
is far more ephemeral on systems such as Internet Relay Chat, where
text exchanges on channels rages and shifts second by second.  In
Multiple User Dimensions (MUDs) and their Object-Oriented counterparts,
MOOs, this transitory behavior is slightly more fixed.  Participants
construct rooms, and active objects within those rooms draw settlers to
participate in these online worlds.  Developers tend their own
creations and evolve their own characters.  MOO participants sometimes
get consumed by this work--serious cases of addiction have been
reported.  It is hard for me to believe that the technology itself
draws and keeps these people online--that the mere mastery of the
jargon and intricate syntax to become a player in these worlds
justifies the passionate loss of oneself into a form of expression.

I think instead that it is the intoxication of connecting with other
human beings that draws these people online.   Some would say that they
are not engaging with other human beings, but only some electronic
simulation of others.   But I don't think people would risk so much for
such an inward-looking experience.

If IRC and MOOs demonstrate the strong pull of people to each other in
transitory and semi-permanent forms,  the World Wide Web now is more
like an agrarian form of civilization, in which participants no longer
zoom from channel to channel as in IRC or from group to group as in
Usenet seeking a connection, but come to settle on large Web sites,
where the Web developers tend their pages like fields, nurturing links,
weeding out the stale and dead links, developing a harvest of
content--all for the very same purpose--connecting with other people.
These sites, permanent broadcast centers for content, lend a permanence
to online communication that Usenet or IRC or even MOOs in some sense
could never offer.   And, like the farms that gave rise to agrarian
settlements, Web sites now are components of associatively linked
cliques of content--hypertext associations of what matters most to the
participants.

Think of how your work fosters human contact.  Better yet, tirelessly
seek to find out how actual users employ your digital creations.
Observe how the pull of communication and interaction is already
happening online--but look for the significant human-to-human issues.
For example, Java software makes possible an unprecedented level of
interactivity.  But it also makes possible some pretty goofy and
trivial animations.  Look how Java is being used for interactive
collaboration, the real killer application of the Internet.  If Web
sites are like cities, Java may be the fuel that brings the citizens in
contact with each other.  There are few things I can think of as
complex, powerful, and exciting as human beings in communication with
each other.  There are few things that are as difficult to understand.
And there are few things as important for creating communities online.


APPROACH WEB PUBLISHING AS A PROCESS

I'm tired of seeing HTML portrayed as the portal to Web publishing
mastery.  HTML has as much to do with Web publishing as changing a
typewriter ribbon as to do with writing a novel.  If you're not
thinking of the audience(s) you are trying to reach, and taking active,
continuous, process-oriented steps toward reaching them, you're merely
making interesting little marks on the Internet.   Web publishing is
primarily about a negotiation of meaning and value in communities.  We
are used to negotiating the value of published works in terms of
objects, like a paper book or a CD ROM.  But online, the ties of value,
the kinds of attachments are different, because the published works are
part of--in fact they are--the very fabric of those online
communities.  Publications are just the artifacts of those
communities.

I come from a creative writing and technical communication background,
so my view of human communication is shaped by my own instruction.
I've learned rhetorical strategies of shaping communication and
arguments to achieve desired the response.  I've learned, in creative
writing, how language affects readers at a variety of levels.  Not once
in my graduate work toward a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing
did we talk about typewriters or how to format a computer disk.
Technical skills do play a part in Web Publishing.  Indeed the
production of your work relies on technical skills; But don't
substitute the mechanics of online work for the meaning behind it.

I've outlined my methodology for Web Development in my writings and on
at my web site (http://www.december.com).  My methodology includes six
phases: planning, analysis, design, implementation, promotion, and
innovation.  In brief, you can approach web development as a continuous
interplay of these processes:

1. Planning: define your target audience, purpose, objectives, and
policies for information development and use.

2. Analysis: check technical construction of web with validation tools;
evaluate information consistency and verify correctness of domain
information.

3. Design: separate information into page-sized chunks; connect pages
along routes of use and user thinking; provide information, context,
and navigation cues; create a consistent look and feel.

4. Implementation: create an extendible directory and file structure;
use HTML tools where helpful; use templates for supporting consistent
look and feel; check implementation in various browsers.

5. Promotion: target publicity releases for general Web audiences,
potential users, and current users; follow online community norms and
practices; innovatively connect with users to meet their needs.

6. Innovation: continuously and creatively work for improvement to meet
user needs; use testing, evaluation, and focus groups to shift and
change web's content as user needs change.

I try to merge traditional technical communication and rhetoric
practices with software engineering practices in my methodology.  I try
to focus on reaching an audience in a new medium that has unique
qualities and characteristics.  In this way, I may not have all the
answers for my audience--in fact, those answers will probably change
every day--but I have a process for getting better and better at
providing those answers.


RETHINK INTERACTIVITY

The meaning of the word interactive perhaps has been eroded by the
incessant claims that everything is interactive--we have interactive
multimedia, interactive games, interactive television, interactive
learning, interactive entertainment.   But what does interactivity
really mean?  A dictionary definition calls interactivity, "mutually or
reciprocally active; 2: of, relating to, or being a two-way electronic
communication system (as a telephone, cable television, or a computer)
that involves a user's orders (as for information or merchandise) or
responses (as to a poll)."

But when we think of interactivity, we think of a range of
order-response activities that vary in their richness.  Some people
think the selectivity of hypertext is interactivity.  Some people would
call the server-side computation available with Common Gateway
Interface programming interactive.  My contention is that interactivity
can be looked upon as a continuum, where you may have rich
interactivity or a fairly low level of interactivity, depending on the
kind, quality, and scale of those orders and responses.

Critics have rightly questioned how much selectivity and interactivity
we want.  Do you want--via interactive fiction--to choose the ending
for a story you are reading?   The kind of interactivity that Java
makes possible has the potential to allow us to develop something far
richer than just this kind of selectivity.   But in order to do this, I
think we need to rethink interactivity in a new way.

Instead of focusing just on the technical give and take of data across
a network or the filling out of information in a form and its
processing with a database, we need to look at how people work within a
community of practice.  People don't work online in a vacuum--they have
colleagues, bosses, customers or suppliers, and others who they work
with or communicate with.   They are constrained by certain rules, and
their work is defined by certain roles.  That community of other users
defines both those rules and roles.  I've suggested a methodology which
approaches rethinking interactivity in these terms for Java
developers.  My hope is that the Java industry can play a role in
creating compelling content to bring interactivity to the Web by
approaching the social context in which people work.

This same triad--a user, a community of practice, and an objective--
can shed light on the entertainment possibilities for the online
world.  If a user wants to play a game alone, they can go to an arcade
or stay home with their personal computer.   But if you can create a
game that fuses a community with interactivity, in which people are
playing with others all over the world--that is where you'll start to
explore the frontiers of interactivity.  This kind of work has already
been done--I see students at my school playing a game called
"Nettrek"--this kind of activity grows from a student subculture for a
reason--it wasn't market researched or packaged.  The kind of fusion of
interactivity and community that a student-developed game like that
represents is the direction that creative online publishers can go in
if they keep the big picture in mind and rethink interactive
communication.


CONCLUSION

Community, processes, interactivity:  these, I think, are the
cornerstones of creating meaning in the online world.

There's a definite aesthetic sense we must build in addition to the
technical sense of the Internet and the World Wide Web as a medium.  We
also need good practices based on a solid mastery of the medium, and
practices which reach for a greater significance than merely the
expression of what has been said before in only a new format.

For two thousand years, we've largely relied on print.  This century's
television, radio, and movies have brought new kinds of communication.
There were pioneers of technology who helped to bring these vehicles
for expression into use. Our challenge is to join them and to be
pioneers of content who make the new media come alive with connections
to other human beings.

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Question and Answer

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See http://www.december.com/present/micd96.html for online information
about this talk.

John December (johndecember@gmail.com, http://www.december.com) is president
of December Communications, Inc. and the publisher of Computer-Mediated
Communication Magazine and several widely used and frequently accessed
World Wide Web-based reference publications about the Internet and the
Web. An experienced Internet writer, teacher, software developer, and
author, he holds an M.S. in Computer Science and an M.F.A. in Creative
Writing and is a PhD Candidate in Communication and Rhetoric at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is co-author of the books, "The
World Wide Web Unleashed" and "HTML & CGI Unleashed," and author of
"Presenting Java" all published in 1995 by Sams.net, an imprint of
Macmillan Computer Publishing.

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