Re: QED & Marshall McLuhan

At 10:07 AM 6/8/99 -0700, Kelly Ford wrote:
>
>1. I'd really appreciate it if someone could explain what's happening on
>that site and how it is supposed to work.  I'm trying to gain an
>understanding of what folks are wanting with that site.
>

Let me tell you what strikes me about the way it is put together.  There is
a lot of motion, and rapid-fire interaction is what it is designed for.

This immediately raises in my mind the notion of Attention Deficit
Disorder.  Not that Jonathan's clients have such a disorder, but that what
he has done seems to me to match what pay-for-play video games do to retain
their customers' devotion and what it would seem to me would be rational to
do for someone with such a disorder.  [It helps that in earlier posts
Jonathan has mentioned that clients getting bored with tedious material is
a problem.]

So this is why things move or are replaced frequently with fresh stimuli.
And the basic rule of operation is "pick the picture that most appeals to
you and poke it." The pictures are selected to attempt to be suggestive of
where their links lead.  Given that Jonathan doesn't have the resources of
Stephen Spielberg or Dream Works, the results are mixed.

But the rationale that I inferred from this design is

a) something that moves will get at least a moment's attention

b) something that responds when you poke it will sustain your attention.

So the hypothesis I extracted from this experience is roughly 

1) the problem is sustained attention

2) the solution is a highly dynamic screen encouraging fast-paced interaction.

If Jonathan had a partner with a big left brain, we might see more
effective text alternatives.  The problem is that with heavy use of REFRESH
and scripting, it is not that easy to walk the flow of events backward to
go to the outcome, understand the outcome, and then migrate back to the
source of the link, and mark it better as a hint as to the outcome.
However, he in turn could help others select thematic images.  It would
help if we had more "teacher's guide" type stuff for these pages but I
think that it will take a team approach to get to both the composition of
the material and its exegesis.

Received on Tuesday, 8 June 1999 17:49:57 UTC