Do You See What I See? Probably Not.
I was exchanging texts with a friend not too long ago. As we are all by now (painfully) aware, I've got an iPhone. But I do remember the ancien regime, before I had one: texts were served up individually. Friends with smart phones would text me and then expect that I had the context of the thread available to me as they did, and understood very quick or nuanced texts. Of course I didn't. This was the case with my friend, too, who was left wondering, all too often, what the heck I was talking about.
This, or course, is one of the interesting aspects of the Internet and digital communications - what we experience is oh-so-dependent upon not only our technology (smart phone versus regular cell phone), but also the way we've set that technology up.
I can recall the very old days of video editing; a required step when starting an edit was to check the color balance, and make sure that all the tapes you were going to use where entering the edit system with the same color balance. This ensured that red was red, green was green, etc. You checked all this via a vectorscope, which showed the red of the color bars in the red target on the scope, and so on. You could adjust the balance slightly for each tape, as required.
I would remind clients as they sat with me (and fussed over the colors they saw on the monitors) that a) monitors drift over time, and we needed to frequently adjust the color by popping up bars and making sure the color looked good; b)if the colors were correct on the vectorscope, then they could be sure they colors were correct on the edited tape; and c) once the project went out (over the air or via tape), it was anybody's guess what the viewers would see, as all TVs were bound to be set up differently, based on user skill and preferences.
Well, it's kind of the same game for all things digital-and-Internet.
Have you ever tried, for example, to use somebody else's computer?
Just trying to find a file using someone else's file storage system is a nearly impossible chore.
Just looking at the many ways Outlook can display your information: preview on or off? Outlook Today view? What toolbars do you use? can change your entire way of thinking about this tool.
Needless to say, your choice of Browser, and how you have that set up, can change the way you experience the Internet - we remind our clients that the infamous "above the fold" rule (keep home page or important content in the viewable area of a window) can be a totally different thing for a user who loves toolbars (Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar, etc.), and those who don't. And we frequently remind our designers that Macs display color and brightness differently than PCs, and it's important to remember that most users see the Internet via an Intel computer. Oh, and we often remind our developers that the majority of users will view their work through the prism of Internet Explorer, not Firefox.
It's an odd dichotomy of information access we are experiencing: Once upon a time, we all had the exact same technology (books) to access information (and hence, everyone who read a book would have essentially the same objective experience), which books we had varied wildly - even our ability to access them was vastly different from person to person (a library nearby? lots of money to buy them?). Now, we all have access to the same information via a shared database (which is essentially what the Internet is becoming - and will become in even more significant ways with the development of the semantic web), the more personalized our experience of that shared data can be, as we gain more and more control over the organization and display of that information on our digital devices.
I suppose it's just a variation of that old French phrase, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
This, or course, is one of the interesting aspects of the Internet and digital communications - what we experience is oh-so-dependent upon not only our technology (smart phone versus regular cell phone), but also the way we've set that technology up.
I can recall the very old days of video editing; a required step when starting an edit was to check the color balance, and make sure that all the tapes you were going to use where entering the edit system with the same color balance. This ensured that red was red, green was green, etc. You checked all this via a vectorscope, which showed the red of the color bars in the red target on the scope, and so on. You could adjust the balance slightly for each tape, as required.
I would remind clients as they sat with me (and fussed over the colors they saw on the monitors) that a) monitors drift over time, and we needed to frequently adjust the color by popping up bars and making sure the color looked good; b)if the colors were correct on the vectorscope, then they could be sure they colors were correct on the edited tape; and c) once the project went out (over the air or via tape), it was anybody's guess what the viewers would see, as all TVs were bound to be set up differently, based on user skill and preferences.
Well, it's kind of the same game for all things digital-and-Internet.
Have you ever tried, for example, to use somebody else's computer?
Just trying to find a file using someone else's file storage system is a nearly impossible chore.
Just looking at the many ways Outlook can display your information: preview on or off? Outlook Today view? What toolbars do you use? can change your entire way of thinking about this tool.
Needless to say, your choice of Browser, and how you have that set up, can change the way you experience the Internet - we remind our clients that the infamous "above the fold" rule (keep home page or important content in the viewable area of a window) can be a totally different thing for a user who loves toolbars (Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar, etc.), and those who don't. And we frequently remind our designers that Macs display color and brightness differently than PCs, and it's important to remember that most users see the Internet via an Intel computer. Oh, and we often remind our developers that the majority of users will view their work through the prism of Internet Explorer, not Firefox.
It's an odd dichotomy of information access we are experiencing: Once upon a time, we all had the exact same technology (books) to access information (and hence, everyone who read a book would have essentially the same objective experience), which books we had varied wildly - even our ability to access them was vastly different from person to person (a library nearby? lots of money to buy them?). Now, we all have access to the same information via a shared database (which is essentially what the Internet is becoming - and will become in even more significant ways with the development of the semantic web), the more personalized our experience of that shared data can be, as we gain more and more control over the organization and display of that information on our digital devices.
I suppose it's just a variation of that old French phrase, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
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