Digital Scarcity

By Erik Hekman on 7 December 2009

I can remember the first website I created when I was 14 years of age. The website title was ‘Erik’s Little Home on The Web’. Come on… I was 14! On this website I gathered Visual Basic scripts, had a section for the Orlando Magic (was huge fan of that team), published music made with FastTracker2 and had a small section for StarTrek. I used animated GIF’s such as a rotating @, had repetitive backgrounds and the < blink > tag was no stranger to me.

It were truly great times! At home we just got commercial Internet and I can lively remember the ‘distinctive’ handshake of the 14k4 modem. I guess my parents can remember the telephone bill. Around the Christmas period I received my first book about HTML 4.0, or was it 3.0, and started to script away in Notepad and later, a slightly better interfaced, DiDa HTML editor (http://netvigator.com/~godfreyk/dida/). My choice of browser: Mosaic, later Netscape Navigator. To my biggest shame I started out in MS Paint before I moved on to Adobe Photoshop 4. It was difficult to find server space (eventually GeoCities) and on top of that bandwidth was not as fast as now! HTML pages with the images should never exceed the 20kb otherwise it would take ages to download the website!

I had to deal with digital scarcity. In order to make websites run on those ‘old computers’ I had to make sure my scripts were tidy and readable. I had to compress my images in order to save disk space and write optimal queries so the server would not be overused. Also due to the lack of bandwidth I had to be creative in order to create nice looking websites. There were some serious limits in tooling and availability of technology (server space and bandwidth).

Even though some horrible usability errors one could suspect with blinking letters and animated GIF images, I ended up teaching web design and programming related courses. When I look at the current generation of web designers they work in a limitless domain–a domain of digital abundance. Tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver have WYSIWYG interfaces making it very easy to create a website. Adobe Photoshop has a nice array of plug-in’s making it very easy to create nice looking images/banners et cetera. Because of the abundance of bandwidth students don’t have to think about server usage. AJAX will query the database with every keystroke. A digital web design heaven indeed but because of the digital abundance students use photos of 5mb and drag and drop them in Dreamweaver and scale the picture to a thumbnail. Can you imagine… a 5 MEGABYTE thumbnail of 75x75 pixels?

The digital abundance is making some students poor in their decisions to create websites or web applications. Since they are used to WYSIWYG interfaces they get stressed out when they have to complete a task in plain code. Modifying or creating own web components is out of the questions since they are used to download them. Heavy open source content management systems are the first choice instead of creating their own which would fit better to the clients needs. If something is out of the scope of the CMS they will deem it to be impossible and will not create it.

Would students be more creative in finding design and programming solutions if they have digital scarcity? If so, bring in the 486dx computers with monitors capable of handling only 640x480 resolution.

tagged with: digital scarcity, webdesign

Comments

Stoff on 14 December 2009 at 23:03

Well this is interesting. Let me immediatly answer that question with a definitive nope. In which I hope to be representative for the group “students”.
It is always good to learn history to know the best ways of doing things, but that doesn’t mean we should repeat it.

For instance: Imagine that you want to make a computer. You know what components it needs to actually work, but should that mean you need to know the exact workings of the processor to do it?
With this I mean to say: Please teach what is needed to effectively reach our learning goals instead of backtracking and wasting time. Teach us the lessons you learned from what you learned from the old website making techniques and apply those to the present technologies.
Something someone somewhere said: Stand on the shoulders of our fathers to reach higher goals or something…. Ohwell look it up if it is’nt clear.

Ps. I don’t want to stop you in thinking in this way. It’s great to ponder about these kinds of things ^^

Erik Hekman on 15 December 2009 at 10:32

@stoff, in a sense you are correct. In the modern times electricity as a technology is ubiquitous in a sense that it is completely invisible. I use electricity yet I am not able to construct a new wall outlet in my house. However I would use your strategy to just learn how to do this single task it or look for it on Google.

Perhaps computer software such as website builders is becoming increasingly user friendly to an extend it becomes ubiquitous. But are those WYSIWYG editors not limiting in website creation?

I will definitely not stop pondering about these subject. And I will also not stop giving classes about the history of the internet with its limitations in e.g. bandwidth.

Rogier Brussee on 17 February 2010 at 00:04

>Stand on the shoulders of our fathers to reach >higher goals or something….

The correct quote is

If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.

or in the original latin

Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident

with my very poor knowledge of latin that translates into something like

a dwarf supported on the shoulders of giants sees more than said giants

The quote is usually attributed to (although quite
probably only made famous by)  Isaac Newton, as formidable a giant to stand on as any.

It comes from a Letter to his rival Robert Hooke (15 February 1676) [dated as 5 February 1675 using the Julian calendar with March 25th rather than January 1st as New Years Day, equivalent to 15 February 1676 by Gregorian reckonings]. 

Source Wikiquote, Newton.

By the way, Robert Hooke is the guy who gave the name to Hooke’s law : the force exerted by a spring is proportional to its extension ((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooke%27s_law). This is just about the simplest physical law there is, and easy to discover and formulate, if you have Newton’s apparatus that is, and very, very much less subtle than Newton’s law of gravity.  Newton was very much aware of his own genius, so I think the remark was more a snub of a giant to a dwarf than a sign of his modesty.

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