Some rules to communicate in Ucronia - Chapter 13

Immediacy, multimediality, interactivity and more...

Let’s turn our focus on whether or not some rules apply after all in the anarchic mayhem of the Internet. These are tenets based on some fundamental points that are specific to the Internet medium and not as likely in other media.

They are:

• Immediacy

• Multimediality

• Interactivity

• Depth

• Chattyness

• Space-time change

Let’s look at the first one: Immediacy.

There’s no medium of information that can bring as many news and data, meaning text, photo, video, graphics, sound, faster than the Internet.

A radio speaker, after receiving it from the press agency or in that free-for-all of the blogosphere, can read you the news, but you’ll get to hear it only if you are listening at that very moment.

News agencies can be read if you consult them, but now they exist only through Internet.

In a newspaper printed in our real, tangible non-digital life, the news are a day old—they are not immediate. That is not the paper’s strength, which now would be that of analysing and providing meaning subsequently from the event.

Tv has the same limits of radio, you can hear it and see it but only if you are, in that moment, concentrated on that medium. You can get the news you are looking for only at certain times. It is push, not pull, to use Internet parlance meaning it provides data to you, it doesn’t allow you do pull out data from it on command.

Internet, through the network connection via computer or 3G or 4G, now 5G or GPRS, LTE connection is always on, in your phone, 24/7 allowing you to have all the different shape of a single news-item on demand, when you want it, where you want it. News reaches you more immediately than any other media.

Of course there are some red flags about immediacy.

All this constant availability—in time and in volume—can feed a sort of info-neurosis, forcing you to search rabidly news item after news item to no end, one over the other, without the time, again, to understand the meaning of these news, in the specific and wider context. This immediate availability, once again, actually feeds the loss of meaning fuelled by a need for pointless novelties, doesn’t it?

Internet is the info-nightmare predicted by Saul Wurman and the post-modern cultural critic Jean Baudrillard who have explained why excess of information eliminates information itself.

“One copy of the New York Times,” wrote Wurman in his ‘Information Anxiety’, “contains more information than a person would encounter, on average, in an entire lifetime in 17th century England.”

We are reminded, once again, that data is not information, but also that information is not immediately knowledge if it doesn’t come accompanied by the understanding of its meaning.

Baudrillard in “The perfect crime: how tv has killed reality” sees the elimination of a reality substituted by the simulacrum of tv entertainment.

And now it is substituted by the Internet.

We could now add that Internet has built upon that, chaining the user into an interactive mode which engages even more the attention in high-participation, giving most web surfers the delusion of participation and of creativity. But in most cases, it is indeed a delusion.

Baudrillard pushes even further by saying that we do not control at all this process:

“All our technologies, then, are simply an instrument in a world that we think we dominate, whereas it is that world that imposes itself through this machine of which we are the mere operators.”

This bring us to the next rule of Internet information which is: multi-mediality.

Internet communicates through writing, with headlines, graphics but, above all, with photos, videos and animation.

Multi-mediality means being able to use these different languages in cohabitation. Knowing that they will inevitably be contaminated by forced osmosis.

Text transforms itself in the form. It becomes dried, more essential, often just a glorified caption.

It rarely pushes beyond the four paragraphs rule invented by Jakob Nielsen, first guru of web usability. Beyond four paragraphs, said Nielsen two decades ago, you lose viewers’ focus. That was a very long time before Substack, of course.

Photos are laid out on the web page keeping in mind they will appear in all likelihood in a small screen, whether it be a computer, tablet or smartphone.

Racier shots are preferred, capable of attracting attention, preferably transgressive or out of the ordinary, without breaking the traditional bounds of journalism (no cropping at the joints—wrists, knees, ankles).

A photo is the main centre of attention to a web user. It has a fundamental and primary importance, often overlooked by Internet neophytes.

Video must have a good encoding quality so quality control is central. High-definition. There may be poor resolution fads, videos that look rough on purpose, to create a style, an aesthetic narrative. These fads exit, but rarely last long. They have their niches.

Audio must be sharp without inferences. Interviews still favour close-ups, talking heads, rather than wide shots, difficult so see in detail on small screens.

The size of the screen…resizes video and filmmaking! But it resizes also what we demand from image culture, lowering our standards, moving our visual experience more and more towards low definition. If that meant our minds are more engaged to create meaning with higher participation it could have a positive angle. But it does not seem to be what’s happening.

In fact, this leads us to the next rule of Internet communication, which is: interactivity.

The peculiarity of the Internet medium consists in being, as the word suggests: INTER-ACTIVE. Action between two elements.

The user needs to have a chance to dig into the content, choose a photo-gallery, and article, a video and then interact in a forum, commenting, posting his or her own multimedia contents.

In this sense as well, on-line journalism is a hybrid, because it has to seduce more than other means of communication. And by seduction I mean the active need to engage the other party, to lure him or her in.

The users must feel that their opinion is necessary, that their reaction to the content counts, that they have been invited to participate and give their opinion.

“The Guardian” has done this aggressively, taking leads for stories from its comment sections and opening the comment pages to readers. By doing so, it inadvertently eroded the very same prestige of the op-eds who attracted the readers. If everyone can write in the op-eds why would you want to read them? Is the mild editorial filter of “The Guardian’s editors enough? Popularisation of what once was the real of the expert runs the risk, in the long run, to destroy the very same worth of the content it is democratising.

This is how you create the illusion of a “democratic” aspect of information. But is it really so?

The next rule would lead us to believe in one of the promises of Internet, because of its almost unlimited space of data: the profundity. The next characteristic is depth.

Internet allows you to deepen your knowledge, through search engines and to really research and expand a topic.

Knowledge expands, but only if you have the curiosity to dig, the time to focus long enough on a concept without distractions and interruptions and especially by having the capacity to make meaning out of data.

The problem is that the medium itself feeds your adrenalinic need for often useless and fleeting new data, not your need to understand in depth their meaning.

The tool is there, but it requires a pro-active, self-aware predisposition to fight against its innate need to make you superficial. To move you away from the depth of knowledge that is available into the lightness of the constant need for empty novelties. It also requires you to know how to look and what to look for. Not a guarantee.

The next rule of Internet communication is filled with a very human need.

We’ll call it chattyness.

The language in Internet has to be drier but also, often, poorer: faster. Headlines communicate the meaning of the article, even in the choice of font. The immediacy of a phrase is much more important, as the attention span is much shorter when looking at a screen.

Radio news language is boxy, but even more so when it comes to Internet. Internet can afford being more colloquial, conversational, real, direct. You are dealing with users, not readers. It is useful to remember that.

It is difficult to concentrate on reading a long text on-line.

You have the psychological pressure that every second is valuable, even if you have nothing to do.

And your adrenaline needs that new item to look at.

So language has to hook the user, and it can do so only by being more pungent and direct.

That is why language is evolving on the Internet and through the Internet. But as we know, since we think in words, the pauperisation of meaning, of our capacity to make meaning, also is accompanied by an equally impoverishing vocabulary. As language simplifies to the lowest common denominator, so does our capacity to think in nuances and complexities that would render a clearer picture of reality.

All this happens on a ground that doesn’t follow the normal rules of non-digital reality. We are talking of a field where there’s a sense of unlimited time and unlimited space. The next rule of Internet communication deals, in fact, with the space-time change.

Internet doesn't really have what is called the “journalistic moment”—the morning newspaper reading, the evening news, the radio newscast on the hour, the weekly in-depth program, the talk show at 9.

Its contents and information must be available at any moment. They belong to the past as much as the present. It must be available at any moment, like in a library.

Internet has only two times:

THE IMMEDIATE

THE NON-TIME

In the non-time we can call back from archives contents that can be one day or 100 and more years old.

Internet is timeless and it loses thus the sacrality of time, those brief tv instants of the show host, the opening greetings of the anchor-persons etc. It cuts to the chase scene, eliminating and resizing the need for human presence in the delivery of information. It’s post-modern. It only gives you a collage of the essential, doing away with ceremony and throat-clearing.

Internet is also missing space, because while in tv space is occupied by the tv studio, by a reportage or advertising, and in newspapers spaces are set aside for well delimitated articles, on the web you have fluidity of space.

If I click on a link, I open another page and I am in a different visual space. I open a pop-up and create tridimensionality. I shrink a window and all the content inside changes size. Internet is out of time and out of space. Or rather, it has its own time and its own space.

It’s tridimensional. It is in its own dimension.

This dimension could be called Ucronia, a place above Cronos, time.

(this is one of the chapters of “The Autopsy of Truth.” You can read the previous ones and the next one as they are released by subscribing to “GlobalSpin”)