After reading the 2012 Pew Research
Report "Future of the Internet, Millennials" and looking at The Internet
Archive: Wayback Machine (http://archive.org/web/), I showed my
10 year old son yahoo.com today (https://www.yahoo.com/) and what it
looked like in 1996. He said the 1996
version did not have very much information, it was boring because it had
no pictures, and that it looked unreliable to him. He said he would
be much more likely to use the 2016 version because it showed
news, had more information, and he felt like it would be more reliable because
of the ads. He said ads mean the website is making money, and it would have to
be reliable for people to pay to put the ads there.
Like the report discusses, my son has grown up on
the internet. (He learned his abc’s from an online game when he was 18 months
old- the website is still up and surprisingly still the same http://www.fisher-price.com/en_US/GamesandActivities/onlinegames/the-abcs-zoo-learning-game).
I thought it was really interesting that he said the 1996 Yahoo did not seem to
have much information. In 1996, that was a huge amount of information on one page,
but as the report discusses, people who are “hyperconnected” have vastly
different expectations about how much information should be available to them.
I was not surprised that he said it looked boring. (Like
the article says, people who grew up on the internet want to be constantly
entertained.) However, I was surprised that he used advertisements as a way to
make judgments about whether a website is reliable or not. The fact that he is
trying to evaluate the reliability of a website shows some sophistication of
thought about the internet. He already knows you can’t trust everything you
read on the internet.
In fact, Yahoo has undergone tremendous changes, so as other sites. All those old sites look vibrant and more appealing. Thanks to the dynamism of social media and the changing trends of how companies are competing to gain traction of consumers. The sites have become so many, that if yours is not catchy would be abandoned by surfers, who have numerous choices to choose from.
ReplyDeleteYour son's remark about advertising is fascinating. I see the same thing, don't you? If a site has no ads, it often looks really old, dated, and not well maintained, and therefore unreliable. Like a GeoCities website that's still up from 1999. But then there are different layouts of ads on sites. If the ads are neat and clean and organized, I think "Ah, a good site," but if they are popping up and flashing everywhere, I think it is also unreliable.
ReplyDelete