It's true that I generally skim a website. Even a blog I read (www.urbanmusewriter.com) has just so much content that I skim a little, go to a different page, skim something there, and then come back the way I'd read a billboard or a posting board somewhere on campus- my eyes are always flitting to different information. Why is that? I personally think it's because it's all there, spread out before us in an almost dizzying arrangement of information that, when all is said and done, just spirals into the infinite (like this sentence).
Satisfice stuck out to me. We satisfy the reader with a sufficient amount of information when we apply information to the web (or we should, anyway). One website that I think does the job is www.googlemaps.com. You find a bar at the top, toss in the location you need, and the rest is cake. It's skimmable (graphs are easy to read), it's fast and there's not a lot of time-consumption involved.
And yet, at Google Maps, I often get carried away looking at street views and satellite views....all visual....billboard like....not really "reading" in the traditional sense of the word. What does capture our attention online? What creates a sense of fascination? In "an almost dizzing array of information," as you way, how do we focus our readers' attentions? What happens to our notions of persuasion.
ReplyDeleteDid you read Bethany's blog and the comments in response to her about the difference between NYT online and USA Today online? I think that discussion is relevant to yours here.
as you say. not as you way.
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