I suppose I should have here a button that plays for you the Shaker hymn: "'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free." However, I do not have an audio file of that, and anyhow to provide such would be contrary to the ideas I want to discuss here. It's quite a pretty tune, though - you should find Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring to hear a beautiful rendition of it.
What I want to communicate here is a defense of the fact that I haven't tried to put a lot of multimedia glitz and sizzle on these pages. That this needs defending at all is unfortunate.
The Web is a new communication medium, but it is rapidly succumbing to the fate of other contemporary media, in which too many people expect fancy graphics, elegant typography, slick presentations. "Eye candy." People are turning to the Web for entertainment, and such people will be disappointed with these pages, even though a large part of what I have to offer is photographic imagery.
My feeling is that all the fancy graphics and multimedia effects are not inherently of little worth, but they are expensive and time consuming to produce. I would prefer to devote such time and resources as I have available to putting together what I consider to be real content, rather than flashy appearance.
If you feel the need for all the graphics and so forth, then perhaps what you really want is entertainment, and you may as well turn to other Web pages than mine, or perhaps to Television.
CD-ROM is another new medium which has already been ruined by this tendency. It seems to be considered necessary, in a mass market CD-ROM product, to have movie clips (even if of poor quality), music (which has to be licensed or composed at a high price), and tons of elaborately rendered graphics. The cost of such quality "production values" is usually hundreds of thousands of dollars. Far beyond the means of practically all individual authors, even if they had the personal skills to use some of the necessary tools themselves. And even if they had all the necessary skills, they would lack the time to do it all.
Yet the content of the typical CD-ROM is very thin. In most cases I have seen, the actual information content, be it words, data, or images, would fit nicely in a slender printed book, perhaps even a few pages in the most egregious cases.
Why? Because useful information and truly worthwhile creative work is scarce and valuable. Those who own it and wish to make money off it have incentives to spread it around as thinly as possible and to lard it as heavily as possible with flashy glitz that only passes as content but is not. The glitz is ultimately cheaper to produce or procure than genuine content - and people seem to want it, perhaps even prefer it.
However, this avenue is not available to an individual working alone, at least in the CD-ROM medium. An individual can still write a conventional book in his or her "spare" time. And the same is true of Web pages. In fact, Web pages are much better, since an individual can actually afford to publish them alone, which is not usually feasible for a printed book.
But all this is lost to the extent that it is considered necessary for Web pages to have the same unnecessary glitz as a CD-ROM.
What pressures in this direction do I have in mind? For one thing, there is the herdlike mentality that says all pages have to be "Netscape enhanced". And to hell with you if you don't have the latest Netscape browser. Why, you don't deserve to read these pages! Can people who do this really care about how widely their content (if any) is communicated?
And then there is the aesthetic of "cool" or (worse, bletch!) "kewl". It is this that demands fancy 3-D rendered logos, image maps for navigation, and the like. Everything, apparently, must look like an ad in Wired magazine to be worthy of top honors. (But I think the editorial content of Wired is actually pretty good.) Never mind that all those graphics add nothing but take forever to load, and the textured backgrounds make the text nearly impossible to read. To the point where you again have cause to doubt whether the perps care whether they communicate anything besides how "cool" they are.
This is just pop culture, of course, and a lot of the blame can be laid at the feet of professional advertising folks and Web page consultants on the prowl for business. They may even be correct, in general, that this sort of thing is what the masses respond best to. But count me out, please.
Lastly there is the white hot competition on the technology side to gain advantage from ever more complex techno-toys. Technology companies live by convincing everyone that their technology is the coolest. This is what drives Netscape to keep promulgating new "standards", and Microsoft is charging along after them with its own incompatible "standards". But wait! VRML and Java are bearing down on us too!
Well, all that stuff may be amusing to adolescents of any age, and undoubtedly makes for great interactive networked games.
But I'll pass. At least until I figure out how to use it to actually communicate ideas that seem important to me. In the meantime I'll continue to eschew ostentatious display. (Irony intentional.) My epigram could be Thoreau's: "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." Or perhaps, "Less is more." (Which was, as far as I can tell, originally written by Robert Browning, though often attributed to Mies van der Rohe, who appropriated it.)
In fact, the major purpose of clothing in general, and flashy clothing in particular, is to attract attention and to send conventional social messages which actually have little useful information content (except as regards personal image). We would do well to note Nietzsche's remark:
Men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them.(See quotations for more along these lines.)
Returning to the subject of Web pages, one has to admit that personal pages (and commercial ones too, for that matter) have a lot in common with Personal Ads in the newspaper, so the attempt to project a certain image by such means is not surprising. I don't mean to deprecate this either, since one might make the same observation for even the most respected authors of literature or composers of symphonies. It reminds me of some of Lewis Thomas' musings on the songs of whales and what an extraterrestrial vistor might think of our human music:
I suppose that my extraterrestrial Visitor might puzzle over my records in much the same way, on first listening. The 14th Quartet might, for him, be a communication announcing "Beethoven here," answered after passage through an undersea of time and submerged currents of human thought, by another long signal a century later, "Bartok here."
It is just unfortunate that there is so much pressure to use flashy graphics and the like, instead of useful or creative content.
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