Leaning Towards Babel

Posted by Mike Walsh

3/31/06 8:53 PM

William Gibson said it famously in Neuromancer - "the street finds its own uses for things". Playing with some of the current favourite Web 2.0 toys this week - flickr, youtube, MySpace, del.ici.us, feedburner, typepad - I realised how easy it was for users to appropriate these platforms for their own creative purposes.

The diversity of MySpace is a good example. Arguably MySpace was never intended to be the sprawling virtual metropolis of individual teenage expression that it has become. Although user page design is riot of random permutations, this is not the easiest feature of the site to access. Changing your page styles is actually not obvious, and requires cutting and pasting code into a tiny "About Me" text field.

That's not all. Users have spliced video stream modules from video hosting services, incorporated music feeds, or used MySpace as a publicity feed for blogs hosted on other networks. 

The resulting structures and relationships that are emerging from social media are chaotic but have a kind of internal logic. Part scaffolding, part armature - what seems to be unfolding from the mashup of these new web applications is perhaps nothing new. Just a true visual representation of the underlying complexity that has always existed in the simple but infinitely inscrutable hyperlink.


New call-to-action

Latest Ideas