Today is the first day of the Hypertext conference. After a great day of workshops last night and open bar (unheard of at conferences according to Chair Mark Chignell) at the reception, the Hypertext conference officially starts today. Andrew Dillon is the keynote speaker talking about As We May Have Thought. Andrew is talking about how the trend in Hypertext is declining while web and web science are increasing. Is there a need for a new discipline? Web Science attempts to take an interdisciplinary approach, just like HCI does as well, but should we do that?
Information and computer science has started and it keeps going. Hypertext, hypermedia, no matter what your area of focus, it is one more point in the timeline in the sharing of information. Andrew says that according to Steve Jobs of Apple, "nobody reads anymore". Civilization is shifting as information explodes, computing is moving from calculation to augmentation. We are at a moment of profound change in the ecology of information. Are we going backward?
From Jakob Nielsen (usability expert), we haven't changed that much for usability. Nielsen has usability guidelines for web sites, even though his web site is not that usable. In fact Nielsen came out of Hypertext into HCI. The best way to understand in the world now is that technology is used is the natural human condition. There was this 500 year period during Gutenberg where oral culture was shifted to written culture. Is the web a return to pre-Gutenberg era?
According to Andrew, the human is the key, there is too much emphasis on search, location and retrieval and too little emphasis on longitudinal outcomes.
Andrew ended with the quote from Vannevar Bush: "A record if it is to be useful..must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted." (Bush, 1945)
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