World 1.0
The more contact I have with the web community, the more I feel that people that don’t have contact from it - or knowledge of it - are missing out.
People I show things like Flickr or Google Maps or Calculator to love it, and I’m quite sure both use it/them, and pass the word on.
But I’m talking about not just web apps, but the culture, spirit and conventions that they embody. Thanks to my newsreader, subscriptions to some great mailing lists, the email contact of people I respect, and the odd bit of diligent surfing, I’m abreast of what’s going on in my industry, and increasingly in a wider sphere too.
Many of the consultants, entrepreneurs, civil servants and not-for-profit workers I know would kill for these tools - yet they simply haven’t reached those audiences yet. Whenever I do rave about something or another (37Signals’ approach to PM via Basecamp was only the most recent in a line of boring lectures to friends) I feel I speak as an enthusiast, and the ideas or solutions I’m putting forward are just one of many options, and a pretty left of field one at that.
There are two sides to this: we, as a community, overstate our own importance (it’s just a web site, folks), and everyone else is slow on the uptake. Though to call people ’slow’ is a bit unfair - many revolutions in our industry happen almost overnight: the emergence of new ways of using JS to enhance User Interfaces, for example, is still a new technology for most people.
So there is definitely an aspect of our own enthusiasm for the tagged, socially networked, accessible wonderland that’s hype.
But equally there’s something truly marvellous about this webby world we live in, and the culture it has spawned, which makes other cultures seem, well, a little redundant.
Yesterday I found myself in central London on the day of a tube strike by members of the RMT union. Commuters (in London at least) have a spectacular attitude to any sort of disruption on the tube. They take it as a personal inconvenience, barely pausing to think about why their journey has been disrupted. I remember Eddie Izzard doing a great routine about how Londoners used to react to bomb threats to the tube by the IRA: “OK, there’s a bomb on the Northern Line… well never mind, I can get the Circle Line round to Moorgate, then a bus up to Angel…”
But for their part the RMT did nothing to get the public on their side. They claim they are striking in the interests of public safety. If this is true then it’s something that all commuters should applaud, and all union members should be proud of. But in central London yesterday there were no union members to be seen, and the only information given to commuters was from Transport for London, not the RMT.
So, how would a strike by half-decent web developers go?!
Well, firstly we’d know that you have to let users know what is going on at all times. So, while in our professional lives this means changing the navigation to tell the user where they are in the site, on a picket line it would mean letting the user know why you were doing what you were doing, what you were aiming to get out of it, and that you understood and apologised for the inconvenience your actions may have caused.
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