You can find just about anything on the World Wide Web, from dissertations on particle physics to tender photographs of a rabbit in Japan balancing a pancake on its head. Elaborate genealogies of people you don’t know, the latest software driver for your printer, handcrafted lesbian fiction starring the main characters of Xena: Warrior Princess—it’s all out there. The hypertext web has become a hyperactive populist press that can afford anyone with a vague bit of technical expertise and something to say a public place to put it up there for the world.
In the ten years or so that the web has been around, people who figured out how to make pages did so—and this was both good and incredibly awful. It made for some very inventive, unfettered creations that found new tools and new ways to use the mass media, but it also paved the way for hundreds of id-driven brain dumps that have clogged up servers and search engines for years.
While there has always been an underground press and various malcontents fixing the world over pints in bars, the information industry used to be the province of large, well-funded organizations with the distribution muscle to get their product out to the public by truck, airplane, or airwaves. Professional-quality publications or broadcasts required money, equipment, and an infrastructure that most amateurs couldn’t ante up, and most of these companies accepted the responsibility to provide data to the public in an accurate manner.
In a way, what desktop publishing software did for zine creators and conspiracy theorists in the late 1980s, the World Wide Web has done on a global scale in the late 1990s: it has given a voice to anyone who desires to make a message available to millions of people. But do web page creators feel the same sense of responsibility to the public that media professionals profess to feel or are held to by that very, often opinionated, public? As online gossip Matt Drudge has proven, the web can make everyone a publishing house/TV station with varying degrees of accountability.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, y’all, when every Tom, Dick, and Harry Knowles is a watchman? The issue of responsible web pages is as complex and intertwining as the web itself, and involves not only functionality, but form as well.
To start off, a web page should be conscientiously designed so that readers can find what they are looking for with the least amounts of time, effort, aggravation, and snarling homicidal thoughts involving edged weaponry. Part of the problem with the web is that it is a new medium and many designers do things just a little bit differently.
For example, over the centuries, most people have basically figured out how to operate a book like the one you are holding in your hands. You take the book, anything from The Book of Kells to the latest Harry Potter novel, open it up, and turn the pages sequentially to navigate through the material. The only major variance in navigating through the typical book was in which direction you turned the pages—and that usually depended on which language you were reading in or possibly your frame of mind at the time.
Although they both contain text, web pages are very different from books. Most books cannot instantly link you to a vast resource of collected human experience and knowledge, plus electronic pictures of strawberry Pop-Tarts exploding into flame inside a toaster. Then again, a book is not going to make you wait for a bloated animated toolbar to squeeze through a tenuous dial-up modem connection onto your computer before you can read it, either. Given the vast capacity of web pages to present anything, from live video clips of Britney Spears to a long text scroll of someone’s senior-year paper on the Voynich manuscript, the webcrafter has a huge collection of potential tools that can be used in creating a page.
Web designers could see that creating pages for online viewing was much different than creating them for the printed world. For one thing, web pages had to load quickly in order to snare the impatient surfer. Large image files had to be reduced in size and quality, fonts had to be streamlined, and the page had to have a layout that was easy enough to navigate and comprehend at a fleeting glance—because as many quickly found out, unless the surfer was waiting for an extremely detailed picture of a naked woman to download on the screen, he wasn’t likely to wait around for a slow-moving document to unfurl in his browser.
Then there is the issue of navigation. Once on a web page, where do you go from there? With the nonlinear virtues of hypertext, Interactive Alices often have dozens of potential rabbit holes to fall into, and the web designer must put up obvious road signs for the reader. Responsible web pages get the user where he or she wants to go, and always give them a way backward, forward, and out of the site through obvious links and icons.
When the web emerged from the computer-science department and was dubbed the Next Big Thing by a feisty, inquisitive public in the mid-1990s, more than one Archimedean revelation was had. These revelations led to a stampede of business people hoping to sell things, gleeful online diarists hoping that someone would read their musings about Fig Newtons and give them a screenplay deal, and designers hoping to make the whole thing look just a little bit better.
Software like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage, that was designed to help print-based designers, spreadsheet jockeys, and those who knew not a lick of HTML code create slick web pages easily, is both a blessing and a curse. While it did make the creation and design process less fraught with dental gnashing, it allowed just anybody to put just anything up there. The matter of content is another area in which the web has run willy-nilly with irresponsibility, and we are not just talking about bestiality sites freely finding their way into little Bobby’s browser when he is clicking around after school.
The responsibility to the public to present accurate or necessary information can often fall by the wayside for those on the quest for the Holy Grail of Hipster Cred. Take, for instance, the doctored photograph of a scowling Bert the Muppet sitting next to Osama bin Laden that was plucked from a joke website and turned up printed on pro–bin Laden posters in Bangladesh in the fall of 2001. Although the creator of the fudged photo apologized and took the picture down from his site (a snarky set of pages called “Bert Is Evil” that showed Ernie’s pal craftily Photoshopped alongside the likes of Hitler, Michael Jackson, and other bad influences), it was picked up by anti-American protestors halfway around the world who obviously did NOT get the joke.
This is not, by any means, a call for censorship of the web. The Bert Incident was pretty darn funny. The right to free speech is celebrated wonderfully and exuberantly all across the Internet, from the most uplifting tales of surviving oppression to the vilest hate site. But when one is practicing the art of free speech, one should make absolutely clear that everyone reading or looking at a site understands exactly what it is the creator is trying to communicate. Although sites like the clever creation for The Blair Witch Project, which provided backstory about the movie’s fictional spook, proved to be an excellent marketing tool, doing this sort of thing sparingly can cut down on the amount of misinformation in the world. The net has established itself as a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of rumors, hoaxes, and flat-out untruths to run wild, and purposely adding more junk data is irresponsible. It’s almost like falsely yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
Deception is another irresponsible practice. JavaScript programmers should not redirect surfers to unwanted sites. Designers should not try to mimic the look of other sites in an effort to dupe people into thinking they are in a place that they’re not.
Keeping the net neighborhood orderly is important, too. If they are going to put up that page, the creators should take the effort to maintain it—making sure links are always functional, outdated information is corrected, general relevance sustained, and the page removed when it has outlived its usefulness. Stumbling across a stale page in the search for fast, accurate information is a real buzz-stomper for most surfers unless they are in a nostalgic mood.
Seeing how things have progressed over the past few years, Ease of Use is going to be a smoother task to accomplish in the area of Web Responsibility than will be Useful Ease. In the hands of designers and design conventions that will inevitably begin to take hold in the Darwinesque march to get attention, making web pages intuitive, accessible, and nice to look at will be a snap compared to screening out or shoveling off the scads of pointless pages, screeching scrolls of hate, and other detritus from the collective consciousness that finds its way online.
True responsibility is shown not necessarily by censoring others, but by censoring one’s self and the more churlish impulses we all have. (So the next time you get dumped, keep those revenge notions out of your public HTML files and scribbled in your private Hello Kitty diary where they belong.) Website creators should think long and hard about what they are putting up there and who is going to read it. We need to think globally as we upload locally. The web may have given everyone a voice, but responsible folks know when to shut up.