It’s critically important to note that nobody I spoke with was against digital. That is, nobody was enraged. Digital books simply didn’t make sense to many of these folks on a wholistic or gut level. To dedicate yourself to a book is to want to form a relationship, and the strictures and webbing of the digital book world seemed to do everything to... See more
In the words of MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle: computers empowered their users, making them feel smart[er], “in control”, and “more fully participant in the future”.
I think related to this idea of constrictive mediatypes and layouts is the notion of premeditated workflows verses totally in the control of the user workflows. So typically with software, you have workflows that are designed by a product manager, and they write that into the software, and that's that. So you can imagine, for world building, you... See more
The browser has historically been a thick platform for thin apps. The browser engine does most of the heavy lifting. It gives you a standard interaction model, standard affordances, standard accessibility features, standard tags, standard scripting environment. Things like Google can be built on top of the open web because everything is written... See more