Jon Ward offers a key observation here about the Obama White House website.
As is always the case with Jon’s reporting, it probes to raise the important questions, presents multiple perspectives on the issue, and leaves the reader to decide the relevance.
He asks why the Obama website has yet to cohere, and leaves with this important question for us to consider.
One question that is still unanswered, and I’m not sure how you answer it, is whether old information is hard to find on the Obama website because they intentionally want to make it difficult or because it is designed by a younger generation of communicators whose thinking is less linear and more visually-oriented.
Fresh off my time at the Media Ecology Association conference, I offered my commentary at the bottom of the post, which I restate here:
This is a very important article. You are touching on something that I have been tracking for sometime…the multi-generational challenges associated with the move to the Internet as primary tool citizens use to get political information.
As I recently presented at the Media Ecology Association, 2006 was when Pew defined the change to where a majority of Americans used the web as their primary source of political info.
And the biggest validation of this is President Obama himself. The Internet candidate beat the presumed favorite, the TV candidate (Hillary Clinton), to the surprise of, well, the TV-driven media establishment. This as part of a larger generational-media trend.
This is a good example of that trend. A young site developer choosing a visually trendy style of display. This is an important, multi-layered choice, probably more important than one knows if one is narrowly focused on the presentation aspects.
If one chooses not to emphasize relevance and accessibility of information for the citizens, but instead to accent visual appeal, that is not just a stylistic choice. It is a political choice.
Media Ecology explores the nature of a medium as a medium. This medium needs to be seen in at least two ways, which you very effectively highlight: as a website, and as a portal to information citizens need to understand their President.
You touch on the implications of this when you raise the conspiracy question. Though I would not dismiss that, it is a relatively easy question to address, even if one is truly trying to obfuscate older data. But with an understanding of media ecology, one sees the special responsibility of these media choices in the context of political decision-making.
This is not a production contest. The President’s web design team have a duty to the people as representative in a system based on “consent of the governed.” That is why this is so important, and without taking that into account, the web site design cannot cohere.
So, I would ask Obama’s design folks: which is more important, a visually appealing website as website or a citizen-centric information retrieval service as portal? You cannot make both the most important thing.
And if they chose the visual–as trendy as they may want to be, and as beneficial as that may be politically–that choice may be irresponsible in light of what the medium needs to provide as information portal to the citizens.
It is a reflection on our culture’s lack of media ecology awareness that we are where we are. Check Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Walter Ong, and Jacques Ellul for crucial insights.
To be aware of the nature of the medium you are dealing with, and how it will be perceived and used takes careful thought. I would submit you probably want both generations working together—the younger, more visual conscious designer who knows what the breadth of his peers in the social network are accustomed to; and the older, more issues conscious guide who knows that public accessibility of information and ease of navigation are of more lasting social significance than swanky design.
Old school meets new school.