In 2000, at the height of the dotcom hype, I had a startling realization: the internet sucked. It was slow, cluttered, ugly, unintuitive, full of spam, required a lot of troubleshooting, and it didn’t even do very much — at least not much more than I could do without it. Whatever the internet offered, it cost just as much in return, in the form of frustration and aesthetic dissonance.
Finally, the internet is approaching complete non-sucking status. I realized this a moment ago watching videos from Harvard’s Nieman Jounalism Lab.
It’s great to see what the New York Times R & D Group is doing in these clips. It isn’t just “here’s a new app, here are some more features.” You get a sense of platform (or rather, multi-platform) integrity, with everything working together towards a whole new model of what it means to deliver information to people.
Here’s a look at how news can be shuffled between devices. Here’s an elaboration on the newspaper reaching into the living room . Here’s more on what they’re doing for the living room experience . (I hesitate to say “TV” because that notion comes with a lot of unhelpful baggage.) And here they are looking even further ahead to what they can do with devices that aren’t on the market yet — some cool stuff there.
In that last video, Nieman’s Joshua Benton brought up the need to “step out of the browser.” That’s something I’ve been wondering more about lately (I think it was something Benton wrote that sparked that).
So far we’ve tended to assume ‘web = browsing.’ There are a lot more possibilities out there and it’s exciting to see new paradigms evolve.
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