Webb’s Media

I fortuitously aggregated upon the essay Vernacular 2.0, which discusses the development of user expression as it has morphed from the 90s into the 2000s. First, her observation: “The space that we’ve researched as a new medium for the last ten years has turned into the most mass medium of them all” rings so true that it gives me pause. But the internet is not mass media as we understand that even somewhat neologistic term, given the relatively short context of “mass communication.” Thus, should a construct of mass communication whereby a few formulate and communicate messages to many be modified? Has what we call “new” media, for lack of a better term really, actually been just a new mass communication tool that has flipped all the rules of mass communication around? Maybe this is just semantics. Certainly, with the direction that “new” media has gone, with the proliferation of tools at the “common” person’s disposal, the power of mass communication is placed in the hands of a whole lot more people. Whether their message will be part of a mass communication message will depend on a number of other factors, but certainly the whole “famous to 15 people” may be true. (Although this confounds the meaning of fame and suggests it has nothing to do with mass anything but instead social distance?)
As usual, I digress. What Lialina’s Vernacular 2.0 article brought to the forefront of my thoughts is the increasingly intensified expectations for web presence today. An early assertion in the article, picking up from earlier observations about home page construction and early user expression in web environments is about the usurping from ordinary users:

“It is also clear now who owns the home with the garden and who are the gnomes grimacing on a manicured lawn in the company of plaster ducks and real flowers.” - From Vernacular 2.0

Ok, pulling that quote out of the context that abruptly requires you, the reader, to head to the essay and figure out why we’re talking about gnomes in the first place, but essentially the idea is that a home page was never analogous to a home, but to a gnome hanging out in the garden outside the home. Enter Web 2.0 interfaces: google pages, myspace, etc., and suddenly the garden gnome/traditional home page is a duck out of water among the corporatized, more standardized designs.

Certainly, on the one hand, the availability of these tools has given users a whole lot more robust usability. Whereas with a standard traditional web page, if the page got big, one struggled with file management underneath the surface, today it is possible to set up a CMS and create a database-driven web-site, where the user doesn’t have to concern themself with back-end data management. But I hear what Lialina is saying loud and clear, and for me it begs a larger question: what skills are necessary to move from an amateur to a specialist in “new media?” If you have students developing a home page, which is so 1995, is this a valuable skill and necessary step in the process of learning, or is it so old school as to be obsolete? My web design abilities grew up simultaneously with the medium, to an extent, so to me it has been a natural progression, but if one were to come in without that context, does the whole big world of creating art, objects, communication, etc. for the web seem overwhelming? Or does it seem touch-of-a-button easy as all the message-creator needs to do is learn to exploit existing tools? Which is it? Or can it be both?