Choose from one of these texts by Frank Chimero for our typesetting exercises:
2C Traditional Grids, Columnar Layouts
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Choose either “Refragmentation” or “There Go The Grown Ups”
Refragmentation
Frank Chimero [1]
Aug 28, 2014
Sometimes it’s worth reading the comments. For instance, take this comment on the web’s consolidation from Mike Caulfield [2].
You look in 1993 and see Guido Van Rossum and Berners-Lee arguing that instead of an IMG tag there should be a general “include”, that would allow you to pull together pieces of multiple sites together from multiple MIME types. Twenty years later, there’s still no include.
You see Shirky and Weinberger talking in 2003 about how the web was designed to connect pages, not people, and the groups forming were essentially hacks on top of that. But that power to connect people doesn’t get built into the protocols, or the browser, or HTML. It gets built on servers.
It’s almost like the web’s inability to connect people, places, and things was the ultimate carve-out for corporations. [I]f the connections have to live on a single server (or server cluster) then the company who controls that server wins.
The lack of an <include> tag led to Pinterest. No method to connect people created Facebook. RSS’s confusing interfaces contributed to Twitter’s success. Any guargantuan web company’s core value is a response to limitations of the protocol (connection), markup spec (description), or browsers (interface). Without proper connective tissue, consolidation becomes necessary to address these unmet needs. That, of course, leads to too much power in too few places. The door opens to potential exploitation, invasive surveillance, and a fragility that undermines the entire ethos of the internet.
[Edit: APIs were at first a patchwork to resolve the shortcomings of protocols. They let data flow from place to place, but ultimately APIs are an allowed opening to a private dataset—a privatized protocol. The halcyon days of Web 2.0 were a short lived window of benevolence that eventually closed.]
If a fifth of the planet signs on to Facebook each month, why shouldn’t a neutral version of it’s functionality be built into the protocol, markup spec, and browsers that drive the distributed web? (An argument could be made that Facebook is already trying to do the inverse—turning the internet into Facebook—with its internet.org [3] campaign.) We should view the size and success of these companies as clear calls to recreate their products’ core functionality and weave it into the fabric of the web.
What if tech companies were field research for the protocol? This may be a dream, but it’s our only hope to refragment the web.
note to designers: the following footnotes / side notes (designer to determine based on their layout):
[1] Frank Chimero is a professional designer, amateur human, and intelligent idiot.
frankchimero.com
[2] Mike Caulfield is currently the director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver. Before that he was employed by Keene State College as an instructional designer, and by MIT as director of community outreach for the OpenCourseWare Consortium.
[3] Internet.org is a global partnership dedicated to making affordable internet access available to the two thirds of the world not yet connected.
OR
There Go The Grown Ups
Frank Chimero [1]
Sep 28, 2014
R,
Funny you would bring this up. Last weekend, M and I had a really nice chat about all of these articles on adulthood. Everyone wants to talk about it, because things are changing, aren’t they? It’s temping to label it as generational fighting, but I think it’s a simple communication breakdown. The rules are changing, and everybody knows it.
I mentioned that I don’t feel any particular social pressure to take on the trappings of “grown-uppiness.” I’ll draw a line between being a “grown-up”—which comes with all the expected obligations like marriage, children, home-ownership, etc—and being an adult—living well within a dignified role in society, educating yourself so you can contribute, honoring responsibilities, having empathy, being a citizen, defining and living the life you want, and the other good stuff that makes the world get along a little better than it would otherwise. I am an adult, but I am not a grown-up. There are many, many more like me.
After thinking about it for a few days, it seems to me that the bad articles are looking for grown-ups instead of adults. Grown-up is a flavor of adulthood that’s been the dominant version for the last century or so. Grown-up is the 20th century adult. Here in the 21st century, the changes that sprung up at the end of the last are finally taking root—choices about how to live a life, educate yourself, participate in a community, and rear a family (whether that’s with a partner and kids, a network of close friends, or some combination of all that). There’s greater variety in adults, so if you have a narrow criteria, you’ll leave worrying that the world is stuck in arrested development. You might even go off and write an opinion piece for the Times.
The bad articles mistake choices as requirements and requirements as choices. A few common examples I’ve seen:
- Most articles cite children as a requirement for adulthood. But between women’s reproductive rights, the pill, and a larger scientific and socially-acceptable window for child rearing, the grown-up requirement of having children is now a choice—not just of timing, but whether to have kids at all.
- Home-ownership is a “requirement” that is less and less likely as my generation becomes increasingly urban and property costs soar. Home-ownership is a very North American ideal, however. For example, most Germans don’t own their homes—they rent. [2]
- The older generations participate in a double speak when it comes to education: faulting my generation for not launching into careers and stable income by their 20s, while helping to produce a world that necessitates more and more formalized education for roles of diminishing consequence.
- The social pressures around becoming a “grown-up” are lessening. This doesn’t mean people aren’t becoming adults. I’m actually glad the grown-up is dying—we need the space to have versions of adulthood for people who don’t happen to be straight, white, and cis-gendered [3]. I look forward to fewer noun-based versions of adulthood (spouse, house, kids) and more verb-based visions of adulthood. The future is a lot less scary if you believe an adult is someone who wields autonomy, empathy, and responsibility with an even hand. I’ve been looking around, and come to realize that there’s just as much of that—and maybe even more—than ever before.
Yours,
F
note to designers: the following footnotes / side notes (designer to determine based on their layout):
[1] Frank Chimero is a professional designer, amateur human, and intelligent idiot. frankchimero.com
[2] Germany’s homeownership rate ranks among the lowest in the developed world, and nearly dead last in Europe, though the Swiss rent even more. Comparative data exists from 2004, the last time the OECD updated its numbers. And though those data are old, we know Germany’s homeownership rate remains quite low. It was 43% in 2013.
qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-homeownership-rates
[3] Cisgender and cissexual (often abbreviated to simply cis) describe related types of gender identity where individuals’ experiences of their own gender match the sex they were assigned at birth. Sociologists Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook define cisgender as a label for “individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity” as a complement to transgender.
Frank Chimero
Frank Chimero
