Jeg mener at for å vaere intressert i samfunnsomvandling er det bemerkingsvert lite diskussion på kk forum og i kk om de den raske revolutionseringen av produktivkreftene i disse dager.
Er det ikke dags å formulere noen perspektiver og krav som komplement til de mange brev om hvem som var mest og best kommunist på 20 og 30 talet ?
Ungdomen i skulene, er dere förnöjde med datapolitikken til skulen
Må vi fortsatt bare bli representert i besluttningsfora på samme maate som paa tiden före computern/internet, isteden for å delta aktivt i besluttningene ?
Som en stimulanse vedlegges fölgende intervju:
A COMPUTER ENGINEER SHARES HIS THOUGHTS ON THE WEB OF THE FUTURE
Copyright © 1998 Nando.net
Copyright © 1998 Los Angeles Times Syndicate
http://www2.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/info/041498/info7_10476_noframes.html
Jakob Nielsen's official title at Sun Microsystems is "distinguished"
engineer. But "supreme guru" better describes what he actually does
at the Silicon Valley computer company, he says.
A native of Denmark, Nielsen worked at the advanced research
laboratories of IBM and Bellcore before coming to Sun four years ago
to help design easier-to-use computers. With the emergence of the
Web, Nielsen was put in charge of designing Sun's Web site.
Today, Nielsen is part of Sun's five-person science office, which is
charged with looking at how people will use technology in the future.
Nielsen's task is to study how people use the Web today and how it
will evolve.
Nielsen is participating in the Conference on Computer-Human
Interaction (CHI 98) at the Los Angeles Convention Center running
April 18-23.
He spoke with this reporter about the growth of the World Wide Web and
the issues surrounding it.
Question: Is the Web over-hyped?
Answer: I don't think so. There is a huge, huge untapped potential.
The Web can be compared to the telephone or electricity. Today people
wouldn't feel it if they suddenly didn't have the Web anymore. But
that won't be true in the future. Like electricity, it's a foundation
... Once you are connected all the time, no matter where you are,
everything will be different.
Q: How soon will that happen? Can the Web maintain its current growth
rate?
A: While the rate of growth is slowing, the absolute increase is
dramatic. In 1993, the Web grew by about 18 times from 34 Web sites
to 623 sites. This year, the Web will grow by only three times but it
will grow from 2.2 million sites to about 6 million sites. That's
nearly 4 million new sites. In 10 years, there will be 200 million
Web sites. In that time, we will go from 50 million to 100 million
people worldwide (on the Web) to 1 billion people. Once you get to a
billion people continuously connected on a single system, that is
completely unprecedented.
Q: Does the world really need 200 million Web sites? What will they be
used for?
A: I think that every single company will have a Web site. Most
people will have a Web site. The personal Web site will be like your
face to the world. Every time you hire somebody, you will go look at
their Web site. It's like an online resume. You might also have a
truly personal Web site with family pictures for friends and
relatives.
Q: What about privacy?
A: There will be a control agent that determines how much you will
reveal to whom. That control agent could also decide who is allowed
to contact you (by phone or e-mail). It will be like having a
personal secretary, except it will be cheap enough to give it to
everybody. It will drive a huge productivity increase because it will
help you manage your time. Today computers are time wasters to a
large extent, but (with the Net) they will become time managers and
time optimizers.
Q: What kinds of changes do you foresee in the economy as a result of
the Web?
A: Most Web sites now are like an online business card. But in five
years, when 70 percent of the people (in the United States) are
online, then the Web becomes your primary way of doing business. In
five years, the Internet will be a $1-trillion economy. It will
restructure the way you do business. There will be a lot of
unbundling of businesses. Right now, if you go to a shop, you get
advice about a product and you pay for the advice through the price
of a product. In the future, there could be a one-person bookstore
(on the Web) that recommends books. The site would provide a link to
Amazon.com that would be the fulfillment service.
Q: But isn't there a problem with the business model? Not many people
are making money on the Net today.
A: Oh, yeah. The only way (to make money) today is to aggregate
people's eyeballs and charge for advertising. But advertising doesn't
work on the Web except for search engines. A user reading an article
on one of those online magazines is very unlikely to click on the
ads. The overwhelming number who do click on an ad bail out
immediately by clicking on the back button, because they don't find
what they want.
The current business models don't work because they lack a
micro-payment system. That's where you pay per page view or per
transaction. Without that system, (Web sites) lack the ability to
extract value from (attracting) people to their Web site.
Q: So how would the micro-payment system help?
A: In principle, it is ridiculous to have a network like CBS. What you
should have is 10,000 different editors, each of whom will assemble a
package of recommended stuff for you based on the films, news or
shows they like and have seen. Each editor produces a Web page that
has links to each of the shows they recommend. You click on them if
you want them. That goes to the production studio and it downloads to
you that show. The production studio gets a certain percentage of the
payment and the editor who recommends it gets another percentage. You
need a system for all those payment streams.
Q: Doesn't this model assume huge communication pipes into each home?
A: Yes. This specific example with television is at least 10 years
away. But the same general principle could apply with newspapers.
Each reporter could have a Web site.
Q: How do you see this medium affecting the way people communicate?
A: Most people today just take stuff written for printed material and
put it online. But the reading situation (on the Web) is different.
One issue is printed screen quality and (another is) long wait times.
In 10 years, most people will have a fast connection and a
high-quality screen.
But another difference is that when you are online you are in
control. What you do online is information foraging. If you are
reading a newspaper at the breakfast table, you are likely to just go
to the next article or the next page. Online, there are (millions of
Web pages) that are one click away from where you are now. Therefore,
you will be motivated to skim it fast and move on.
Q: So how do you adapt to that?
A: Well, when you write for online, you are not really writing a
story. You are contributing to an experience, a navigation space.
Rather than writing one long article, you split it up into smaller
pieces and have them linked together in meaningful ways. Rather than
having a linear progression of arguments, you state your main points.
If you want to see (supporting arguments), click here and we'll give
you another page full. Click here if you want to see the
counter-arguments. If you already know something, or you don't care,
you just skip it.
Q: And you believe schoolchildren should be taught to write this way?
A: I really think they should, because it will be the dominant means
of communication in the future. I think print will go away, telephone
will go away, television will go away. There will be video and
telephone but it will be over the Internet.
Books will survive the longest because of the pleasure of sitting
there and reading. The form of the novel doesn't lend itself to
hypertext (jumping from page to page).
We need to teach kids skills they will need 20 years from now. It's
not about how to use a spreadsheet, because before they graduate,
hopefully, there will be much better ways of doing calculations on
the computer.
Q: So what would a student assignment be like?
A: Say you are doing a project on tigers. You do a Web site rather
than write a report about it. It includes your own writing, but it
links to appropriate resources. Learning how to link will be very
important. What you then do is test the site with other kids to see
whether they are able to use it, whether they understand it and like
it. Is it persuasive? That's very important. There is so much
information in the world, so how do you get people to worry about
your stuff? You need to do (the Web site) in such a way that it is
appealing.
Q: Many people are skeptical of how much computers have added to
productivity. Will the Web change that?
A: Computers have added very little to productivity so far because
they aren't easy to use. There is some reason to remain skeptical
with the Web, too. We've just reached the stage where each computer
company has usability experts. All products today are far better than
products five years ago. But now the responsibility is moving to
everybody in the world who does a Web site. And most people don't
have a clue how to design interactivity into a site.
But on the Internet, people move right to where the quality is. Web
sites will mainly have links to other good sites, and they won't have
links to bad sites. I call it design Darwinism. It's survival of the
best design. You get lots of traffic on good sites and little traffic
on bad sites. That will drive up the overall usability of the
Internet.
By LESLIE HELM, Los Angeles Times