HOW USERS SHAPE THE NET
We may think that as mere searchers, using resources other people have developed on the net, we have done nothing to develop and shape the net, but we would be wrong. What users want to do has been the guiding force behind the development of storage capacity, computer speed, modem speed, bandwidth, website design, and search engines.
How long, for instance, do you think the original designers of personal computers would have been perfectly happy with the storage capacity and processing speed of their inventions if it hadn't been for the game players who wanted graphics, special effects, sound effects, music (all of which required enormous storage capacity), and, above all, speed of response? Even guys who used the net to download pictures of Pamela Anderson demanded systems with lots of bandwidth and ever faster modem speed. So, when you look at search voyeur results and note that the 20 most popular search terms all relate to games, music, and Britney Spears, do not despair of the state of our culture but recognize what we've all gained from it. As Barbara Quint said, "knowledge . . . piggyback[s] on pleasure's shoulders."
It's also true that in the early days of the net, when everyone was figuring out how to create pages, there were no rules of good web design, and the most common experience for new users was feeling lost if not downright seasick -- Where am I? How did I get here? How do I get back? Then people like Jakob Neilsen began studying how hapless users approached the net. They watched how users read the screens and moved back and forth between them. They observed how quickly users got impatient waiting for a screen to deliver its content, how quickly they gave up in disgust.
As a result, standard conventions for navigation evolved: the constant navigation bar along the left-hand side of the screen or across the top or bottom. People who had created unusable pages stuffed with undifferentiated content began to use better logical headers and internal links so users could move quickly to the parts of the page that interested them; better yet, they learned to create and link in more, but smaller, pages.
Many site owners toned down their byte-intensive graphics, which took too long to download, began to use "alt" tags to indentify content of images that were slow to load, and created text-only pages as an alternative for users with slow modems and connections.
Creators of search engines pay a great deal of attention to how we look for things: How do we ask questions? What kinds of subjects interest us most? What do we do after we get a page of search results?
Careful analysis of this data proved conclusively that we all could use a little help. Obviously we were asking questions that were too broad, and were befuddled or aggravated by getting 87,000 hits. So search engine designers developed software that provided suggestions for narrowing the search. Northern Light and Vivisimo divide search results into logical subtopical folders. Excite's "zoom-in" feature produces one of those annoying little pop-up boxes with related narrower search terms. AltaVista and HotBot invite you to search inside your results. Ask Jeeves offers related searches and tells you "People with similar queries have found these sites relevant." Google and AltaVista both refine searches based on what you like, with their "more like this" feature. Ask Jeeves and Subjex respond to natural language questions, albeit with often bizarre and puzzling results. (Let us never forget that even the most sophisticated search engine is still a software program that in no way requires results to make sense.)
So, even if we've never created a web page, even if we're the kind of searchers Dummies' Guides were written for, even if all we want to do on the net is play games and download Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition, we can think of ourselves as people who helped the Internet evolve. Kind of makes you feel warm all over, doesn't it?
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READER PARTICIPATION TIME
A topic that has long been of interest to me is what it's like to be a man in a primarily female profession like librarianship -- I know what it's like to be the only female in a male environment, and it requires a fair amount of adaptation. So I'd like to hear from male librarians. Tell me about your experiences, funny, annoying, or uncomfortable (I always found it a little awkward when conversations drifted into discussions of how men just don't get it, until suddenly somebody noticed that, oops, a guy was present).
I'd also like to know what you find enjoyable about working with and for women, and what are the biggest drawbacks. How does it compare with working for and with other guys? Do you sometimes see signs of female sexism? Do you think your library, and libraries in general, do a good job of serving men's interests? If you supervise male and female employees, are there differences in how you motivate and evaluate them, and how they respond to supervision? Do you think you understand the women in your own life better because you spend your life at work listening to women?
Please send responses to any of these questions, or any other issues you can think of, to: marylaine at netexpress.net. I realize it's awkward to talk publicly about past and present colleagues, so the article I will write will not mention respondents' names without their express permission.
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NOTE: I have an article in the June issue of Yahoo! Internet Life, "Secrets of an Expert Searcher," and an article on medical reference in the Consumer Health supplement to the May 1 Library Journal.
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COOL QUOTE
Truth is after all a moving target
Hairs to split
And pieces that don't fit
How can anybody be enlightened?
Truth is after all so poorly lit.
Rush. "Turn the Page." Hold Your Fire.
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You are welcome to copy and distribute or e-mail any of my own articles for noncommercial purposes (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:
Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 2000.
Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.
