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Dumb internet
Over the past 20 years has the modern web became a dumb internet? That’s essentially a less nuanced version of what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff proposed.

In his essay ‘The Internet Used to Make Us Smarter. No Not So Much” Rushkoff outlines the following points:
- Too much focus and analysis has been put in the new, new thing. Novelty gets the attention over human impact
- Consumer movements or subcultures become fads when they lose sight of their purpose
- Rushkoff thinks that netizens let go of the social / intellectual power of the web. This provided the opportunity for them to become yet another large corporate business
- Bulletin boards, messaging platforms and email lists facilitated non-real time or asynchronous communications. Asynchronous communications channels allowed people to be ‘smarter’ versions of themselves.
- The move to an ‘always-on’ medium has been detrimental
  Going online went from an active choice to a constant state of being. The resulting disorientation is self-reinforcing.
Rushkoff’s commentary is interesting for a number of reasons. He had been a herald of how online culture would change society and consumer behaviour.

But his essay posits a simple storyline. It wasn’t people that ruined the internet, it was big business that did it when people weren’t looking. So I wanted to look at the different elements of his hypothesis stage-by-stage.

Too much focus and analysis has been put in the new, new thing

With most technologies we see the thing and realise that it has potential. But it is only when it reaches the consumer, that we truly see its power.

Different cultures tend to use technology in very different ways. Let’s think about examples to illustrate this. Technology research giants like Bell Labs and BT Research had science fiction writers onboard to try and provide inspirational scenarios for the researchers. So it was no surprise that mobile wireless based communications and computing was envisaged in Star Trek.

And yes looking back Star Trek saw that the computer was moving from something the size of a filing cabinet, to something that would be a personal device. They realised that there would be portable sensing capabilities and wireless communications. But Star Trek didn’t offer a lot in terms of use cases apart from science, exploration and telemedicine.

These weren’t games machines, instead the crew played more complex board games. Vulcan chess seemed to be chess crossed with a cake stand.

Yes, but that’s just the media, surely technolgists would have a better idea? Let’s go to a more recent time in cellphones.

Here’s Steve Ballmer, at the time the CEO of the world’s largest technology company. Microsoft Research poured large amounts of money into understanding consumer behaviour and tech developments. In hindsight the clip is laughable, but at the time Balmer was the voice of reason.

I was using a Nokia E90 Communicator around about the time that Ballmer made these comments.

I was working in a PR agency at the time and the best selling phone amongst my friends in the media industry were:
- The Nokia N73 I’d helped launch right before leaving Yahoo! (there was an integration with the Flickr photo sharing service)
- The Nokia N95 with its highly tactile sliding cover and built in GPS
The Danger Sidekick was the must-have device for American teenagers. Japanese teens were clued to keitai phones that offered network-hosted ‘smartphone’ services. Korea had a similar eco-system to Japan with digital TV. Gran Vals, by Francisco Tárrega was commonplace as the Nokia ringtone, from Bradford to Beijing. Business people toted BlackBerry, Palm or Motorola devices which were half screen and half keyboard.

The iPhone was radical, but there was no certainty that it would stick as a product. Apple had managed to reinvent the Mac. It had inched back from the brink to become ‘cool’ in certain circles. The iPod had managed to get Apple products into mainstream households. But the iPhone wasn’t a dead cert.

The ideas behind the iPhone weren’t completely unfamiliar to me. I’d had a Palm Vx PDA, the first of several Palm touch screen devices I’ve owned. But I found that a Think Outside Stowaway collapsible keyboard was essential for productive work on the device. All of this meant I thought at the time that Ballmer seemed to be talking the most sense.

Ballmer wasn’t the only person wrong-footed. So was Mike Lazaridis of Research In Motion (BlackBerry) repeatedly under-estimated the iPhone. Nokia also underestimated the iPhone too.

So often organisations have the future in their hands, they just don’t realise it yet; or don’t have the corporate patience to capitalise on it. A classic example is Wildfire Communications and Orange. Wildfire Communications was a start-up that built a natural language software-based assistance system.

In 1994 the launched an ‘electronic personal secretary’. The Wildfire assistant allowed users to use voice commands on their phone to route calls, handle messaging and reminders. The voice prompts and sound gave the assistant a personality.

Orange bought the business in 2000 and then closed it down five years later as it didn’t have enough users taking it up. Part of this is was that the product was orientated towards business users, like cellphones has been in the 1980s and early 1990s.

But growth took off when the cellphone bridged into consumer customer segments with the idea of a personal device. There wasn’t a horizon-scanning view taken on it, like what would be the impact of lower network latency from 3.5 and 4G networks.

Orange had been acquired by France Telecom and there were no longer executives advocating for it.

Demo of Wildfire’s assistant that I found on the web

In retrospect with the likes of Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant; Wildfire was potential wasted. Orange weren’t sufficiently enamoured with the new, new thing to give it the time to shine. And the potential of the service wasn’t fully realised through further development.

The reason why the focus might be put on the new, new thing is that its hard to pick winners and even harder to see how those winners will be used.

Consumer movements or subcultures become fads when they lose sight of their purpose

I found this to be a particularly interesting statement. Subcultures don’t necessarily realise that they’re a subculture until the label is put on them. It’s more a variant of ‘our thing’.
- The Z Boys of Dogtown realised that they were great skaters, but probably didn’t realise that they were a ‘subculture’.
- Shawn Stüssy printed up some t-shirts to promote the surf boards he was shaping. He did business the only way he knew how. Did he really realise he was building the foundations of streetwear culture of roadmen and hype beasts?
- Punks weren’t like the Situationists with a manifesto. They were doing their thing until it was labelled and the DIY nature of doing their thing became synonymous with it.
- The Chicago-based producers making electronic disco music for their neighbourhood clubs didn’t envisage building a global dance music movement. Neither did the London set who decided they had such a good time in Ibiza; they’d like to keep partying between seasons at home.
Often a movement’s real purpose can only be seen in hindsight. What does become apparent is that scale dilutes, distorts or even kills a movement. When the movement becomes too big, it loses shape:
- It becomes too loose a network
- There are no longer common terms of reference and unspoken rules
- The quality goes down
But if a community doesn’t grown it ossifies. A classic example of this is The WeLL. An online bulletin board with mix of public and private rooms that covered a wide range of interests. Since it was founded in 1985 (on dial-up), it has remained a disappointing small business that had an outsized influence on early net culture. It still is an interesting place. But its size and the long threads on there feel as if the 1990s have never left (and sometimes I don’t think that’s a bad thing).

When you bring in everyone into a medium that has an effect. The median in society is low brow. This idea of the low brow segment of society was well documented as a concept in the writing of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World. Tabloid newspapers like The Sun or the National Inquirer write to a reading age of about 12 years old for the man in the street. Smart people do stupid things, but stupid people do stupid things more often.

It is why Hearst, Pulitzer and Beaverbrook built a media empire on yellow journalism. It is why radio and television were built on the back of long-running daytime dramas (or soap operas) that offer a largely-stable unchanging backdrop, in contrast to a fast-changing world.

Netizens let go of the social / intellectual power of the web

When I thought about this comment, I went back to earlier descriptions of netizens and the web. Early netizen culture sprang out of earlier subcultures. The WeLL came out of The Whole Earth Catalog:
- A how too manual
- A collection of essays
- Product reviews – a tradition that Kevin Kelly keeps alive with this Cool Tools blog posts
The Whole Earth Catalog came out of the coalescence of the environmental lobby and the post-Altamont hippy movement to back to the land. Hippy culture didn’t die, but turned inwards. Across the world groups of hippies looked to carve out their own space. Some were more successful than others at it. The Whole Earth Catalog was designed as an aid for them.

The hippy back to the land movement mirrored earlier generations of Americans who had gone west in the 19th century. Emigrates who had sailed for America seeking a better life. Even post-war GIs and their families who headed out to California from the major east coast cities.

The early net offered a similar kind of open space to make your own, not bounded by geographic constraints. Underpinning that ethos was a certain amount of libertarianism. The early netizens cut a dash and created net culture. They also drew from academia. Software was seen as shareable knowledge just like the contents of The Whole Earth Catalog. Which gave us the open source software pinnings that this website and my laptop both rely on.

That virtual space that was attractive to netizens also meant boundless space for large corporates to move in. Since there was infinite land to stake out, the netizens didn’t let go of power.

To use the ‘wild west’ as an analogy; early netizens stuck with their early ‘ranch lands’, whilst the media conglomerates built cities that the mainstream netizens populated over time.

The netizens never had power over those previously unmade commercial lands which the media combines made.

Asynchronous communications channels allowed people to be ‘smarter’ versions of themselves

Asynchronous communications at best do allow people to be the smarter version of themselves. That is fair to a point. But it glosses over large chunks of the web that was about being dumb. Flame wars, classes in Klingon and sharing porn. Those are things that have happened on the net for a long long time.

In order to be a smarter version of yourself requires a desire to reflect that view to yourself; if not to others. I think that’s the key point here.

The tools haven’t changed that much. Some of my best discussions happen on private Facebook groups. Its about what you choose to do, and who you choose to associate with.

In some ways I feel like I am an anachronism. I try and read widely. I come from a family where reading was valued. My parents had grown up in rural Ireland.

I remember that my Dad brought home a real mix of secondhand books from Modern Petroleum Technology and US Army field manuals for mechanics to Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Hammond Innes.

This blog is a direct result of that wider reading and the curiosity that it inspired. I am also acutely aware that I am atypical in this regards. Maybe it is because I come from a family of emigres, or that Irish culture prides education in the widest sense. My Mum was an academically gifted child; books offered her a way off the family farm.

My father had an interest in mechanical things. As the second son, so he had to think about a future beyond the family small holding that his older brother would eventually inherit.

Being erudite sets up a sense of ‘otherness’ between society at large and yourself. This shows up unintentionally in having a wider vocabulary to draw from and so being able to articulate with a greater degree of precision. This is often misconstrued as jargon or complexity.

I’d argue good deal of the general population doesn’t want to be smarter versions of themselves. They want to belong, to feel part of a continuum rather than a progression. And that makes sense, since we’re social animals and are hardwired to be concerned about difference as an evolutionary trait. Different could have got you killed – an enemy or an infectious disease.

The move to an ‘always-on’ medium has been detrimental

Rushkoff and I both agree that the ‘always-on’ media life has been detrimental. Where we disagree is that Rushkoff believes that it is the function of platforms such as Twitter. I see it more in terms of a continuum derived directly from network connectivity that drove immediacy.

Before social was a problem we had email bankruptcy and information overload. Before widespread web use – 24-hour news broadcasting drove a decline in editorial space required for analysis which changed news for the worse.

James Gleick’s book Faster alludes to a similar concept adversely affecting just about every aspect of life.

Dumb Internet

I propose that the dumb internet has come about as much from human factors as technological design. Yes technology has had its place; algorithms creating reductive personalised views of content based on what it thinks is the behaviour of people like you. It then vends adverts against that. Consumers are both the workers creating content and the product in the modern online advertising eco-system as Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget succinctly outlines.

The tools that we have like Facebook do provide a base path of least resistance to inform and entertain us. Although it ends up being primarily entertainment and content that causes the audience to emote.

But there is a larger non-technological pull at work as well. An aggregate human intellectual entropy that goes beyond our modern social platforms.

If we want a web that makes us smarter, complaining about technology or the online tools provided to us isn’t enough:
- We need to want to be smarter
- We need to get better at selecting the tools that work for us as individuals
- We need to use those tools in a considered, deliberate way
May 2, 2020
Is there a luxury smartphone segment?
There are luxury smartphones, but is there a meaningful luxury smartphone segment?

From Apple’s iPhone price inflation to Huawei and Blackberry’s Porsche Design devices, manufacturers have looked to cater to a ‘luxury’ consumer.

Prior to this is you had the Vertu phone with its concierge service and niche players like Goldvish catering for the the Gulf based clientele and Russian entrepreneurs. TAG Heuer tried launching its own phone.

Pierre Cardin approach to licensing

Prada and Bang & Olufsen had collaborations with Korean manufacturers. Even Dolce & Gabbana allowed their names to be used on a gold anodised Motorola RAZR. But these brand licensing deals rather like what Pierre Cardin were famous for in the 1970s and 80s.

There was little input in the product beyond doing a launch.

Luxury is an attachment

Luxury brands have been smart enough to jump on the tech bandwagon in their product accessories. I used to have a Coach-made pouch for my Palm V courtesy of Sun Microsystems that I got given as part of a conference goody bag. (The dot-com era meant that money was thrown around willy-nilly).

There were a variety slide in pouches from the likes of Louis Vuitton for Blackberry devices and Apple iPhones respectively. This then evolved into cases like Moschino’s famous ‘McDonald’s fries’ box.

Where’s the missing space?

We know that China has become the workshop of the world. We know that Qualcomm’s reference designs, Google’s Android and Jolla’s Sailfish OS make smartphones easy (relatively speaking) to roll out.

We also know that luxury firms are not afraid of:
- Global supply chains and manufacturing in China
- Attempting to step into complex manufacturing (like Louis Vuitton and Montblanc’s entry into watchmaking) or to do technology
One only has to look at connected watches from the likes of Breitling or Louis Vuitton. Montblanc’s e-strap was way ahead of Sony’s WENA Wrist Pro Smart Watch Band.

We know that luxury brands have moved away from the the stereotypical luxury buyer being an older western person of means to a younger Asian person with family money. That’s why we’ve seen the coalescence of streetwear and luxury brands.

So where is the luxury smartphone? And why aren’t luxury brands embracing the space?

Price elasticity

I suspect that the issue is technology isn’t price elastic in the same way that luxury product categories are. Technology products by their nature are ephemeral. The benefits of technology products depends on network effects rather than exclusivity.

In his blog post, Is the pace of technology adoption really speeding up? Nigel Scott put together evidence to show that price points and technology adoption are intrinsically linked. We are not in a state of constant acceleration of technology adoption, but instead only adopt it when the price is right.

It would be reasonable to assume from this work that there is an inelasticity in technology pricing that makes luxury smartphones hard to sustain. It also explains why relatively low price accessories make more sense than ‘luxury’ smartphones. This seems to be a conclusion that Apple has some to (at least in China). It has rolled out discounts through third party channel members and made devices cheaper to purchase with zero interest financing.

This makes the moves by Huawei and Samsung beyond Apple pricing with their latest phone launches a bit odd and a definite move to define a luxury smartphone segment. These must be halo effect handsets with no expectation of real profitable production; rather like Ford’s special cars like the GT-40. More luxury related posts here.
February 24, 2019
My decade of the iPhone
A decade of the iPhone – last week has seen people looking back at the original launch. At the time, I was working an agency that looked after the Microsoft business. I used a Mac, a Nokia smartphone and a Samsung dual SIM feature phone. At the time I had an Apple hosted email address for six years by then, so I was secure within the Apple eco-system. I accessed my email via IMAP on both my first generation MacBook Pro and the Nokia smartphone.

Nokia had supported IMAP email for a few years by then. There were instant messaging clients available to download. Nokia did have cryptographic signatures on app downloads, but you found them on the web rather than within an app store.

At the time BlackBerry was mostly a business device, though BlackBerry messaging seemed to take off in tandem with the rise of the iPhone. The Palm Treo didn’t support IMAP in its native email application, instead it was reliant on a New Zealand based software developer and their paid for app SnapperMail.

Microsoft had managed to make inroads with some business users, both Motorola and Samsung made reasonable looking devices based on Windows.

The iPhone launch went off with the characteristic flair you would expect from Steve Jobs. It was a nice looking handset. It reminded me of Palm Vx that I used to have, but with built in wireless. Whilst the Vx had a stylus, I had used my fingers to press icons and write Graffiti to input text. It looked good, but it wasn’t the bolt from the blue in the way that others had experienced it.

But in order to do work on the Palm, I had a foldable keyboard that sat in my pocket.

By the time that the iPhone launched, I was using a developer version of the Nokia E90 which had an 800 pixel wide screen and a full keyboard in a compact package.

I had Wi-Fi, 3 and 3.5G cellular wireless. I could exchange files quickly with others over Bluetooth – at the time cellular data was expensive so being able to exchange things over Bluetooth was valuable. QuickOffice software allowed me to review work documents, a calendar that worked with my Mac and a contacts app. There was GPS and Nokia Maps. I had a couple of days usage on a battery.

By comparison when the iPhone launched it had:
- GSM and GPRS only – which meant that wireless connectivity was slower
- Wi-Fi
- Bluetooth (but only for headphone support)
- No battery hatch – which was unheard of in phones (but was common place in PDAs
- No room for a SD, miniSD or microSD card – a step away from the norm. I knew people who migrated photos, message history and contacts from one phone to another via an SD card of some type
I wasn’t Apple’s core target market at the time, Steve Jobs used to have a RAZR handset.

As the software was demoed some things became apparent:
- One of the key features at the time was visual voicemail. This allowed you to access your voicemails in a non-linear order. This required deep integration with the carrier. In the end this feature hasn’t been adopted by all carriers that support the iPhone. I still don’t enjoy that feature. I was atypical at the time as I had a SIM only contact with T-Mobile (now EE), but it was seemed obvious that Apple would pick carrier partners carefully
- There was no software developer kit, instead Apple encouraged developers to build web services for the iPhone’s diminutive screen. Even on today’s networks that approach is hit-and-miss
- The iPhone didn’t support Flash or Flash Lite. It is hard to explain how much web functionality and content was made in Adobe Flash format at the time. By comparison Nokia did support Flash, so you could enjoy a fuller web experience
- The virtual keyboard was a poor substitute for Palm’s Graffiti or a hardware keyboard – which was the primary reason that BlackBerry users held out for such a long time
- The device was expensive. I was used to paying for my device but wasn’t used to paying for one AND being tied into an expensive two year contract
- Once iPhones hit the street, I was shocked at the battery life of the device. It wouldn’t last a work day, which was far inferior to Nokia
I eventually moved to the Apple iPhone with the 3GS. Nokia’s achilles’ heel had been its address book which would brick when you synched over a 1,000 contacts into it.

By comparison Apple’s contacts application just as well as Palm’s had before it. Despite the app store, many apps that I relied upon like CityTime, MetrO and the Opera browser took their time to get on the iPhone platform. Palm already was obviously in trouble, BlackBerry had never impressed me and Windows phone still wasn’t a serious option. Android would have required me to move my contacts, email and calendar over to Google – which wasn’t going to happen.

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July 4, 2017
Generational user experience effects

This post fell out of a conversation I had about mobile applications in particular SnapChat. The idea of generational user experience effects came from my own experience of consumer electronics. This crossed over from wired and analogue devices through to the present day, which provides me with a wide perspective on how things have changed.

My parents grew up in an environment where the four most complex devices they would have been exposed to as a child were a watch or clock, the household radio, a sewing machine owned by the local seamstress and the piano or organ in the parish church.

Form follows function

I was just old enough to remember electricity coming to the family farm were my Mum grew up. The 1960s vintage Bush TR82C radio still ran off a battery until the mid-1980s. This provided the agricultural mart price changes and weather forecast, as well as the musical entertainment on a Saturday night. Non-rechargeable batteries were relatively expensive and battery operated devices where used sparingly.

My Dad saw electronics enter industry, where previously electro-mechanical systems and pneumatic circuits had driven simple processes that would now be governed by a microprocessor.

They were fine with new appliances and even the new 1970s Trinitron TV with touch controls; hi-fis and kitchen appliances usually had neatly labelled buttons that may have had logic controls rather than the physical ‘clunk’ of a mechanically operated mechanism behind them.

This is the kind of generational user experience that Dieter Rams developed. The nature of the design if done well made the operation seem self evident.

Modal interface design

The problems started to come with digital watches and VCRs (video cassette recorders). The user experience in these devices were different than anything that had gone before. VCRs and digital watches were like the computers of their day modal in nature.

You had to understand what mode a device was in before you could know what pushing a given button would do. In my case this wasn’t an intuitive experience, but I got there by reading the manual. If you own a G-Shock or similar Casio watch, you still experience this modal experience, this is the reason why a G-shock comes with a user manual the size of two packs of gum.
My Dad had the head to deal with these technologies but didn’t have the time to go through the manuals. In the late 1980s / early 1990s Gemstar launched a simple way of programming the video with the correct time and channel with a PIN number for each programme that was between six and eight digits long. It was known by different names in different regions; in Europe it was called VideoPlus. And it was easy enough for anyone who could use a touchpad phone to grasp. Panasonic launched a rival system based on scanning barcodes that wasn’t successful, though programming sheet still goes for £10 or so on eBay.

VideoPlus allowed me to skip duties as the household VCR programmer. But I didn’t get away from modal interfaces.

Menu driven interfaces where all the rage with friends digital synthesisers. None more than the Yamaha DX-series, which not only had a complex way of creating sounds and a byzantine menu system of accessing them. Knobs and dials in interfaces were expensive, menus driven by software were virtually free once the software was written – and the microprocessors to drive them continued to drop in cost. This was one of the main reasons why albums from that time often credited someone with being a ‘MIDI programmer’. From a manufacturing point of view robotic pick-and-place machines that automated the manufacture of consumer electronics (until the rise of the hand-assembled Chinese electronics from Foxconn) were an added driver for having ‘dial-less’ circuit boards.

During the day, I worked with a range of computers at work and my first email account was on a DEC VAX as part of the All-In-1 productivity suite; think of it as a Google services type application on a private cloud with a ‘command line’ like interface that operated on the same modal principles as the VCR or digital watch.

All-In-1 had a simple email client, word processor, a ‘filing cabinet’ – think of it as Google Drive and the front end of business applications – we used VAX for stock management and to order supplies.

Given the spartan interface, it seemed appropriate that I learned how to touch type on an application for the VAX – mainly because after you had read the newspaper cover-to-cover there wasn’t much to do on a night shift.

We had a few other computers in the labs for running test equipment, usually some sort of DOS, a couple of Unix-variant boxes (HP, SGI and a solitary Sun Microsystems machine), an Amiga (because they had handy features for video) and Macs.

WIMP

I naturally gravitated towards the Mac. Once you got the hang of the relationship between the movements of the mouse and the cursor on screen, the interface of Windows Icon Mouse Pointer (WIMP) was remarkably similar to the form follows function design of analogue consumer electronics. Interface design aped real-world button designs, folders and filing cabinets, even waste paper baskets. Even the spreadsheet mirrored a blackboard grid used at Harvard University to teach business students.

Once one you had got used to the WIMP environment it was remarkably simple. More complex devices required menus but for many applications, once you knew some basic rules you were up and running. Part of this was down to Apple laying down interface standards so cmd Q meant quit an application, cmd C meant copy, cmd X meant cut and cmd V meant paste in any programme.

This was something that Microsoft took as a design lesson for themselves when making Windows, however it was interesting that they started to break these rules in applications like Outlook.

Things became more complex with applications like Adobe PhotoShop which became so feature rich, it meant that there was more than one right way to achieve a particular task, so instruction manuals tend to be of limited value.

The leap from WIMP to hyper-media was a small one, the act of clicking on a link was relatively easy. What one didn’t realise at the time was the new world this opened up. We went from interlinked documents to surreal worlds created in Macromedia Flash and similar authoring tools on CD-ROMs and eventually the web. An immersive experience was promised that was never fully delivered mainly because we expected William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy to be our manifest destiny.

Icons under glass

In the early 1990s Newton had pioneered a simple version of the icons-under-glass metaphor that consumers would really take to heart with the iPhone and later Android devices. The Newton was too ambitious for the technology available at the time. The Palm series of devices pointed out the potential of icons-under-glass as a metaphor. The Palm V can be scene as a conceptual model for the modern smartphone.

With a metallic case, slim lithium ion battery that was not removable and a bonded construction were all eerily reminiscent of the industrial design for the iPhone models rolled out some eight years later.

The launch of the iPhone marked a sea change in consumer adoption if not technology. Apple built on the prior generations of touch screen devices and improvements in technology to update the experience. They made one choice that made the iPhone stand out from its competitors, dominant player Nokia made devices that were designed to be used one handed – phones with a computer inside. Apple flipped it around so that it was selling a computer that happened to do phone things as well. When you went into a shop, it had a bigger screen and a more polished interface so was great for sales demonstrations.

Eventually the technology started to appear everywhere. The coffee machine at work has an iOS like interface complete with skeuomorphic icons for buttons.

Social interfaces

In some ways, mobile interface design aped existing analogue devices. But things started to change within applications. Designers started to build applications that focused on a particular use case, which made sense given the software feature bloat that had happened on desktop applications and even web experiences like Facebook. Most social app designers haven’t managed to squeeze as much functionality out of their real estate as WeChat/Weixin. You then started to see the phenomena of app constellations where non-game single purpose apps deep linked to other applications.

Designers started to take a minimal approach, to cut down ono the screen real estate taken up by controls.

Instead controls only appeared in what might be broadly termed a contextual manner. The only difference that applications which have contextual menus tend to ‘telegraph’ the options and offer a help section in the app.

I am not sure when it started but Snapchat is a prime example of this phenomena of the ‘social interface’. Their interface features are not explained by a design or manual but are more like cheat codes in a game, shared socially. It feels like a fad, minimalism taken to an extreme, a design language that will move on yet again.

More information

VCR Programming: Making Life Easier Using Bar Codes | LA Times
Quick History of ALL-IN-1 | The Museum of Email & Digital Communications
Jargon watch: app constellation

December 13, 2015
An odyssey to get online

I have gone through a number of journeys to get online. This year I will have been connected to the internet for 20 years. I actually had email even longer. Back in 1994, I was working on a temporary contact at a company called Optical Fibres – a collaboration between Corning and UK cable maker BICC. Even back then there was price pressure on optical fibre as globalisation kicked in, less than a decade later where I worked is now a greenfield site, half of which is included in the space for expansion of a Toyota engine factory.

I had an email address that was a number.

It was attached to a DEC VAX ALL-IN-1 productivity suite account. I was able in theory to email anyone who worked at Corning sites around the world. But email was my only form of being able to get online..

While ALL-IN-1 was able to support external (pre-internet) email networks like CompuServe, I only dealt with people internally. It was a step up from having to check the pinboards in communal areas and the sporadic internal mailroom deliveries.

Having managed to get online, I sent my first spam email, when I tried to offload some Marks and Spencers vouchers that I had been given on to my colleagues, but that’s a story for another time.

In September that year I went back to school, this time to university. Computer labs had changed a bit in five years or so since I left secondary education. The computers were on an ethernet local area network, this local network was connected to the nascent internet.

I had an email address with a ‘@hud.ac.uk’ domain, but my name was still a number. My teachers didn’t use email as part of their teaching process then and you couldn’t submit your work via email. Email was a POP3 format. Given that it saved emails on the machine I spent an inordinate amount of time getting my own computer up for running on the college facilities against the rules.

It involved a mix of software and hardware kludges, since I had to make use of the AppleTalk port on the laptop to somehow connect to the ethernet network at college.

Internet access at college was quite liberating. I was able to do online research and cite online articles. I kept in touch with a couple of friends at college and university from home who also had email at the time: for free.

I got a Yahoo! email address during my last year of college so that I had something which would last me beyond graduation.

My year after graduation was largely lacking in connectivity. I hunted around for an cyber cafe which were starting to crop up around the place. I eventually found one around the corner from James Street station which I used to go to with my friend Andy on a Saturday. I would bring a floppy disk with my CV on to reply to a series of job ads from The Guardian, PR Week and Campaign. I showed Andy how to use Netscape during this time.

The cafe atmosphere and dedication to good coffee was reminiscent of independent cafes today in London, I remember seeing a couple of multimedia art exhibits there occasionally – this was back when Flash was bleeding edge and promised a whole new world of visual stimulation.

A move to London meant around the clock access to the net through work. I lived in a house of five Serbs and no phone line and smartphones were HP personal organisers that allowed you to clip a Nokia 2110 on the back or an infra red connection between an Ericsson SH-888 phone and a laptop or early PalmPilot device.

I built up a collection of early house music sets encoded in Real Media files from an FTP site in Chicago hosted by the people who ran what become Deephousepage. At the time they used a faculty account at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which would have provided high quality free hosting.

A lot of this material was legendary to me, only a small amount of it made it on cassettes as far as Liverpool in the late 1980s. 1980s Chicago was as distant to me as the Northern Soul scene in Wigan some 20 years previously. My FTP client would run at work during the weekend, I would bring in a CD-R and get it burnt down during the week. I also did the same for the latest software that I used on my Mac.

After 18 months of shared housing, I bought my own place to the north of London in the Home Counties, nothing fancy, but it was my own space and I could finally have a phone line. At this time, Freeserve was offering fixed price connectivity dialling into a free phone 0800 number. And I had my first email account at home.

I had a Palm Vx PDA which allowed me to sync web content on to the device and read it on the way home .

I moved job, wasn’t that keen on it and started to think about what was next and getting ready to potentially go freelancing.

The economy went into dot.com freefall and I finally upgraded my computer to a second generation iBook. I then upgraded that machine to OS X and the new operating system highlighted to me the need to go and start using internet broadband. Freeserve was my first choice of DSL provider, simply because it was easy to upgrade from my dial up connection.

The internet suddenly started to become much more useful. Yahoo! Messenger and email kept me connected to my London-based friends when I walked out of the agency role I had into the world of freelancing.

Around this time, I got my first smartphone, a Nokia 6600. I had tried using my Nokia 6310i phone as a wireless modem for my Palm PDA but it was a painful process. What moved things forward was the IMAP email account I got as part of Apple iTools. IMAP allows email to be synched across different devices.

This was all still done over GPRS and later EDGE. 3G services were limited, crippled and the network reception was awful – truth be told it still is in many places. Truth be known things have improved incrementally.

I went through a succession of Palm Treo and Nokia Symbian smartphones until finally moving to the iPhone. The killer application was an address book that just worked rather than corrupting my data or bricking the handset.

Whilst the first five years I saw big changes in my wired netizen status, over the past five years my connectivity has changed little if at all. The key change being an iPad at home as an additional mode of access. I still use DSL, mobile internet which is patchy and upgraded equipment around the same essential paradigms. More online related content here.

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Quick History of ALL-IN-1 | Email Museum

June 23, 2015

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