Friday, September 11, 2009

Impress Your Professor: The Web and Us

The first edition of this semester's Impress Your Professor series comes from the 2009 August/September issue of the ASIST bulletin. As many of you have noticed,  information is becoming more social. By social, I mean we are interacting more and more with each other through  networking, commenting, tagging, etc. Not all social websites are successful (Re: the ongoing Facebook v. MySpace debate, among others). In his article, "The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets)," Christian Crumlish attempts to lay out a successful plan for drafting a successful social website.

While Crumlish lays out a structured list of dos, donts, and shoulds, I was struck most by the philosophical tone of parts of the article. Social media is not just an application, people use it discover concepts of self-identity. On the web, we can personalize anything and everything. The web is no longer a "thing" we visit. It's become a place where we create extensions of our personal selves. We form new communities that reflect back on our lives outside of the social web.

Crumlish's article is chock-full of good stuff - take a look!

1 comment:

xian said...

Thanks for the shout-out. Interesting that you noted the "philosophical" bent of my article. I majored in philosophy in college and I think much of that training has followed me through life.