NMS2014

Apple.com, 1996-2014

The design layout of the page is cosmetically very different from contemporary design practices. The use of color and typography isn't precise or functional in the way that it would speak to the brand's ideology of today's Apple. The landing page is more of a "news" page with hyperlinks to stories of Apple's news. The site is no doubt limited by the web's capabilities but is also a very straight forward, engineered approach; an extension of the culture of Apple at the time; a company of engineers, inventors, and tinkerers, rather than artists and designers. Much more emphasis was placed on the function of the website, rather than the form. By comparison the news section still exists on the landing page, only it has been relegated to a 6pt size link on the bottom right of the landing page. Apple now features products on the landing page, rather than news about events. Although, I do know the keynote speeches are featured on the landing page once a year. From 1996, up until the 1998, the layout was a menu of links on the left side of the page, a cluttered and unfocused aesthetic. In 1998 the iMac is first introduced along with an entirely clean aesthetic throughout the website. Only the necessary information is readily available; shifting the viewer's focus to the product, rather than the company itself. In the year 2000, the top-centered navigation bar is introduced, an design decision still used today on the Apple website. The aesthetic itself is relying heavily on skeuomorphism, with harsh drop shadows and faux buttons abound. Unfortunately, most of the links do not work, limiting me to a view of the landing page throughout time. Interestingly, most of the design layouts remain similar to the established aesthetic in the early 2000's, up until 2013 when Apple began to move away from skeuomorphic design and into a flattened out, more streamlined appearance.

Thanks for these observations on the development and dramatic shifts in the late 90s arrival of the 'clean' or seamless Apple look. Tucking away the old culture of the company, as you say--- the long-haired homebrew computer hacking gets a haircut! Thanks also for comments on the 'skeuomorphic' --- a tie in with processes of remediation.

I started my media archeological dig in hopes of finding out when the icons of social media sites (tumblr, facebook, etc) started appearing on websites of official news sites. I chose Salon.com somewhat arbitrarily. Surprisingly, I discovered that salon.com was not always the property of today's news and entertainment magazine. As it turned out, the URL originally belonged to "Salon dot Com a Cyber Community," a hub of salon and beauty professionals, and was established as such in 1997. The oldness of this site is prominently paraded in the design --- brightly and variously colored text against a black background, words underlined to denote hyperlinks, lines of text centered to (presumably) maintain order-- while avoiding the headache of working with framesets and tables in web design of this era. No images. There is a broken link up top, a 'counter', based on surrounding information. The use of the term "cyber" to characterize this community is another bit of faded jargon linking the site to the 1990s. During that decade, the 'cyber' prefix was affixed to many people, places and things to signal 'new media' status. Some versions of this site also link to an "E-Zine," another trope of remediation, aimed at association with 'e-mail', most likely. It seems that some point in early 1999, salon.com shifted to the Salon Media Group, and the early versions of the web magazine that persists to this day appeared (tables and css in effect!)

Marshall Mcluhan's assertion that "we shape our tools and then our tools shape us" mentioned in class, echoed again in the Nicolas Carr reading this week. Here's a handy web version of Mcluhan's influential text from 1964. Mcluhan's quips, probes and puns were quite popular in the 1960s, resonant then with a youth culture immersed in 'new media' and the social-political intersections thereof. In the 1990s, as the so-called 'digital revolution' ramped up, Mcluhanisms were prominently re-surfaced. There are not chapter titles provided in this rendition of the book, so you might want to cross-reverence a table of contents elsewhere. On the other hand, you can use the 'find' function of your browser to seek out sections on a variety of media from the spoken word to the printing press, money, roads, clothing, comics, telephones, television and much more! First part is theory, second part case studies. "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Marshall Mcluhan (1964)" Accessed January 30, 2014. http://www.lab404.com/242/understanding_media.html

Here's a clip from the World's Fair of the late 1930s, demonstrating the "voder." This speech synthesizer is one of the inventions referenced in Vannevar Bush's essay this week. He was envisioning ways that it could be combined with other contemporaneous devices to make a sort of auto-stenography possible. The name is peculiar, a variation on the more familiar 'vocoder'. Operationally, it consisted of an elaborate mix of buzzing and hissing blasts of air and electrical vibrations, producing vocal formations by way of pedals and keys! It's voices are familiar, even iconic, but mostly by way of electronic pop music from the 1970s and 80s,bands like Kraftwerk amplifying the connotations of the robotic, and generally, the future. "VODER (1939) Early Speech Synthesizer. Youtube Video. 00:44. Posted by VintageCG on April 4, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAyrmm7vv0

This is an excellent resource for researching a variety of primary source documents. Digitized films, rare books, zines, audio recordings from many diverse historical and contemporary sources. Of particular use to New Media Studies are the copious amounts of documents from the so-called "digital revolution" of the 1990s. This includes television programs like "Computer Chroncicles" (1983-2002) chock full of artists and technologists and the ideas that inspired them. The artifacts in this series including the various motion graphics, fashion and even jargon that permeated the computer cultures at this time! There are also fairly recent additions, including the cyberpunk zines "Reality Hackers" and "High Frontiers." These present a 'street-level' pulse on the countercultural charge of new media in the 80s and 90s. Finally, I want to point out a free service offered here that is called the Wayback Machine --- a searchable history of the Internet, billions of websites archived continuously since the Internet went commercial in the mid 1990s! The Internet Archive. "The Wayback Machine" https://archive.org/web/. (Accessed January 24, 2014)