This piece contains no handy tips for website development as we know it. Here I provide no information on how, effectively, to panhandle for internet wisdom amongst your colleagues, schmooze with the network guy, beg the department for more computing power, negotiate content, locate model websites, download the right guide to the web, work with an HTML editor, hack code, create links, make forms, use ftp, beta test, write an ΓΌ, or keep the access and referral log files in order to angle for advertising down the line. I will not talk about work reduction strategies after a site is ‘finished’ for the first time, as ‘if you’d like your announcement to be on the site right this minute, no problem; just give it to me in HTML’. There is nothing in here about my internet behavior (or yours), and the word netiquette will not appear again.
This piece, contrary to the endless how-we-do-it guides, is about what websites are not - up till now. As far as I’ve seen, there is plenty of social science and STS on the web, to which the modest EASST site and the contents of the links attest. There’s also some social scientific analysis of the web, as in the field of internet studies advertised in the Sage mailings. There is, however, very little social scientific thinking embedded in website design.
It’s as if every webmaster-social scientist stows his methodological baggage and takes on the mantles of an eclectic librarian and specimen collector, this ‘creator’ included. Despite tremendous growth, the world wide web remains an elaborate show-and-tell session, with connections to other one room schoolhouses doing the same, but with different acorns. Webmasters are currently locked into the ‘promotional flyer’, ‘merchanise catalogue’, ‘resource guide’ or ‘spatial metaphor’ design paradigms, all of which (technology studies anyhow predict) have nothing to do with the inherent limitations of HTML. As Buckminster Fuller used to say, ‘it’s a design problem’.
The web is meant to afford the opportunity for the server advantaged to be his/her own publisher and communicator, so why do we upload only publications, commentaries, publication lists and CVs, and list our favorite links? And why do the sites, on the whole, look and feel like cabinets of contemporary curiosities, however fascinating? There are perhaps other ways of proceeding with website development and experimentation, in and for STS. I will discuss four preliminary ideas, which I’ve yet to see.
Evolving Discourse Sites
Most every website is created and maintained by single organisations peddling themselves. Whether it’s Pepsi’s, Greenpeace’s, CERN’s, your university department’s or EASST’s, it contains information about the organisation’s services and products, and often provides links to like-minded parties and their productions. A website, contrariwise, could just as easily be created to depict positions on an issue and to chart an evolving discourse across organisations.
Here’s one way. Take your favorite schematisation of a debate, and render it into a graphic or image map. You can upload your own materials on the positions taken by the relevant actors or organisations in the debate, linking your internal pages (the material) to the respective actors depicted on your graphic. An elementary example would be to select an issue, draw a ‘political spectrum’ image map and link the position statements made by political parties and interest groups to the proper areas on your spectrum.
Your site becomes ‘dynamic’ once you find and link points on your spectrum to the actual political party or interest group websites. With some insight into URLs, you can link the spectrum points to the pages on the issue within the parties’ or interest groups’ sites. You can ‘capture’ (or save) the parties’ positions at various points in time, and eventually have your site portray the evolution of the debate, as it appears on the web. I could imagine, say, a SCOT or an ANT perspective similarly rendered with a combination of external and internal links. For now, thick descriptons probably belong in books or on CD-ROMs. [1]
The parties involved in the site may be asked to check it for fairness and accuracy. Contributions could be solicited, and email links set up. The site eventually may become a resource for one or more actors or social groups, whereby you could think through the implications of your representations as well as your role as ‘debate webmaster’. To wit, you also hold the access codes to ‘close’ the debate - literally. Then you can watch whether you set the boundaries to the web debate (and whether the site became indispensible), if and when a new site is made without you.
Activist Loop Sites
Web activism is rampant. Celebrated calls for spamming and flaming people and organisations are reported in the popular press. Another form of web activism lies in the blue ribbons pinned mainly to American sites, expressing support for free web expression. [For those interested, one of the American origins of this practice of pinning ribbons to indicate solidarity lies not in the Red Cross or the Gay Pride movement, but in a ’70s American pop song, ‘Tie a yellow ribbon ‘round the old oak tree’.] There are still more examples, as net canvassing and electronic petitions emerging from spatially dispersed virtual communities and/or mailing lists. For instance, if you’re on the list, you may receive a request to email Wal-Mart to protest drug store development on American Indian burial grounds in upstate New York.
Mapping, following and depicting desktop activism (in close to real time) takes a bit of work, but unlike street marches or meetings you don’t have to be physically present to be in the loop. You could start small, sending ‘subscribe’ messages to the leading web activist lists, and eventually build up a healthy base. [2] The webmaster then has to filter the incoming messages (maybe once a day), and upload the calls to action on the site, arranging them by date and by topic, perhaps with an overlay on a geographical map indicating physical origins and destinations of the activities. Email links could be set up to the originator and the intended recipient, allowing for two-way protest and/or information exchange.
The site is stationary and controlled but the contents are ever-changing, which would make it suitable for science and technology museums and (STS) classroom internet labs. If the senders and/or recipients of the protests cooperate and provide some data, one can begin to have students explore aspects of NIMBY theses in the context of computer-mediated communication, among other didactic opportunities.
Reflexive Webometric Sites
Academic societies (not to mention other publishers) could upload the full contents of their journals, but many don’t because they feel the hard copy may become redundant and their sources of income vanish. The same holds for the EASST Review, with its one issue electronic lag time. There is some reason to put all academic journals on the web, in full, right now. Here’s why.
There are subdisciplines of STS and elsewhere beginning to work with log files, i.e., records of which servers have hit which website and web pages, and how much time a user has spent there (if he/she keeps clicking on your site). Log files only contain server names (and/or IP numbers), not the names of the user of that server, at that time. For our purposes, the server name is enough. We usually know what it means.
In the case of the EASST Review, I could design the site so that every article is its own separate page, and chart how many hits each page (i.e., each article) receives. You’re not measuring something like citation patterns, but awareness. The next step is to put ‘download’ and ‘print’ buttons on each article (and ask the visitor to use those buttons, and not netscape’s, for saving or printing). You similarly measure saves and print-outs, i.e., readership. So just as the number of times your articles have been cited is counted and weighted, so are the number of times your electronic articles are hit, downloaded and/or printed. To wit, the one with the most hits and readers from the most prestigious servers (e.g., mit.edu) gets tenure.
After a short time, you tell the visitor to your site what you’re doing, and how the data could be used, with a flashing warning message. [Please be advised that article hits, downloads and print-outs are being counted, and that the data are fed into reputational and funding structures of academia.] Next to the title of each article would be visible ‘counters’, with the number of times it’s been hit, downloaded and printed. Self-hitting will register (but the self-hitter may wish to rotate servers as randomly as a human can muster, or write a bot). The rest I’ll leave up to the reader.
Virtual Presence Only Sites
The question is whether an organisation or person must exist outside the web for the actor to be relevant in debates on the web. We’d ask whether and how someone or an organisation can establish a reputation on the web, without having a reputation (or anything else) in real life. Just how ‘flat’ are social hierarchies on the web?
Make, for example, an evolving discourse site, and restrain yourself from uploading information about your organisation or from presenting your findings at a conference or wherever else. If you can, find yourself a generic domain name which doesn’t readily identify your server. Because the discourse site (or whatever kind of site you design) will be packed with key words and names of people and organisations, web foragers searching the net for themselves, their organisations and/or their subject matters probably will find it.
Watch your access and referral logs to chart the impact and relevance of your site. You could make the site similar to a webometric site (and count the hits, downloads and prints), but, for the relevance index, you should also check the referral logs, i.e., the records of the sites which have linked yours to theirs. (For example, the EASST referral log of the first two weeks indicates that sites in Latvia [latnet] and Bielefeld [4S/EASST conference] have linked EASST. It also gives us a list of queries which led the internet searcher to the EASST site.) Do not interfere by announcing your site.
Now vary the originator. To ascertain the weight attached to server names, ask prestigious server administrators to mirror your site (then upload a ‘we’ve moved’ message on your site, deleting everything else). Of course, you also can pull a Latourian ‘Jim Johnson’ or a similar useable precedent. You may wish to follow up some time later with a questionnaire, among others to the webmasters who’ve linked you.
With some additional social engineering, you may be able to start in motion a shift in website design, which you also can follow. The resulting ‘book’ is an umbrella website, with links to all your web experiments and results.
NOTES
Though every footnote or picture reference could be clickable. But remember, the more clickable words, the quicker the user will leave the main event.
See the Loka Institute’s (www.amherst.edu/~loka) and Durham’s Technothings (www.dur.ac.uk/~dss8zz2/tec.htm) sites to begin snowballing mailing lists related to science and technology issues.