You can see a clear division between commercial and aesthetic expressions, sometimes arbitrary. Modern mass communication media is poles apart relative to any aesthetic feeling: vulgarity and arrogance nullify any hypothesis of meaning. Aesthetics is the more powerful answer to violence of modern mass communication. Today’s mass communication media seems to elude every determination, exposing its message to all possible variants, it finishes to abolish it. Goal of mass communication is always the dissipation of any content, and the world wide web is no exception.

In best scenarios, technology always stays in the background: it creates the necessary conditions for spreading our own creativity through digital media. If we accept this position, no matter if a web site is made using HTML or Flash, what’s really important is the beauty it expresses. We must build aesthetics, starting from the perceptive and sensory world, not from the idea. Authentic advances in Web Art will be reached when we cease thinking of the Web as an expressive medium, and more of a cultural and social interface.

And to affirm that aesthetic forms possess a social and cultural value, it means to negate – at root – the modern social organization that comes to measure any expression, including artistic ones, on the basis of market value. Again, to affirm that a message, a form, a thought, has an intrinsic value before the commercial one seems banal, nevertheless is an aversive affirmation if compared to global capitalism. Diffusion of Web aesthetics is ultimately one of the few practicable ways to liberate the new media world from the slavery in which it has been condemned by commercial communication.

Most of the new internet workers seem to incarnate the ideal consumer model dreamed up by marketing gurus. They uncritically accept a lifestyle that other people have designed for them, rather than shaping their own. The picture of the situation could appear tragic, nevertheless, it’s amazing to look at the reactions that you can breed in them when you are able to uncover some conditioned thought processes of which they are victim. When it happens, you can clearly see how a growing interest rises in them, together with the determination to react (also in a creative way). The walk is quite long, therefore it’s important that none of us give up the responsibility to educate and make new generations aware.

The market still doesn’t know how to sell objects like websites, but if we erase the commercial layer, then Art returns to its natural function: to open windows where mankind can look at its own condition. The first decade of web design was focused on speculative thinking about the potentials of the medium, followed by “best practices” literature and the long silence after the dot-com boom crashed. Now we are at the Web 2.0 point, and this indicates an evolution of the way we look at this medium. Despite a lack of unanimity on what Web 2.0 should be, we certainly have made some steps forward – for example, we have dropped the useless antithesis between texts and images: now we consider them as modalities of reading and representing reality, and we believe that a rich media has to enhance them both, instead of contrasting them.

We have also dropped the ideas that the Web constitutes a return to the oral tradition or to the written word indeed, both statements have proven fallacious, and we now prefer to speak about a continuum of languages. These conceptual advances also find a hands-on application in web design, as interface designs are responding to narrative and orientation needs that are miles beyond the early desktop metaphor. As a consequence, the web designer’s role is no longer to draw, but rather to arrange environments for interaction (between users, between image and text, between books and TV, between the symbolic and the perceptive, between the active and the passive, etc.). We have overcome that stage of excitement over the potentials of the medium, and we are now focusing on the nature of the Web itself – its developments and the interactions between the Net and society.

Practical Aesthetics on the Web: If we look at the Net we can clearly see a lot of genres (mail art, ASCII art, generative art, hacker art, pixel art, and so on.), but we can also identify a style. A couple of the main elements of this style are; the remixing attitude and the D.I.Y. practice. New media force us to do a continuous cut and paste’ of the endless digital data surrounding us. Thus, we can assume that remixing is the composition method of our times.

At the same time, new media give us the potential to get our hands around this growing digital data sea, indeed, we can manage and shape it even if we don’t have particular expertise. So we draw data from an endless source and we recombine them using all kind of digital tools, in few words: we remix culture on our own.

With Internet culture the masses of users these days are so advanced. Theory and criticism have yet to discover blogs, Second Life, Wikipedia and all that. Having said that, it’s clear we no longer live in the 1980s and have to promote a serious study of popular (media) culture. But who’s discovering a new world like Second Life? Who’s populating our databases, our wikis and our blogs? Who’s testing our new digital tools? First, we need them to reach a critical mass. As a consequence all the communication is directed to them: try this new product for free’, trial period’, make a free tour’, open your own blog’, publish your photo album’, these and many others formulas witnessing that we need the masses of users in order to get feedback, to give basis to our theories, to shape our products.

We don’t need them just as audience (the TV age model), the Internet age postulates an active participation, thus, the masses are required to turn themselves into players. With all the digital media and contexts we are creating the masses have also produced an incredible amount of user-generated content. If that is actually what we define as popular culture’, then the questions are: what are we supposed to do with all this stuff? Is this cultural production significant? Should we spend our time in studying and analyzing it?

For sure we don’t have time to do that, so we limit ourselves to give a bit of our attention to the events that, pushed by mass media, bounce under our noses. For example, the most interesting thing for us is to observe how the top rated/most viewed videos on YouTube are all commercial TV like’ products; the usual Second Life public spaces are crowded with more advertising than Las Vegas (most of them are dedicated to sex); the stick memories of the average MP3 players are filled with the same music you can listen to on any commercial radio station, and shall we talk about the subjects of the photos stored in millions of digital cameras?

With new media we are repeating the stupidity and the uselessness of our TV formats, the advertising’s invasion of any public space, the boredom of the pop music scene, etc. Vulgarity and the dissipation of any significance are moving from old media to new media, and we don’t see any good reason to spend time with such popular culture’.

It’s also very interesting to observe how the old media are becoming more and more permeable to blogs and D.I.Y. information. This phenomenon is not due to a fascination in more democratic information sources. On the contrary – the pressure is rising due to the growth of the eyes’ (cameras and new digital devices) that are watching the same events that mainstream media are reporting to us: the possibility of being uncovered are too many and broadcast journalists are forced to tell the truth (or at least a plausible version of it). As a consequence, blogs have become the major source of news and information about many global affairs. We also have to consider that bloggers are often the only real journalists, as they (at their own risk) provide independent news in countries where the mainstream media is censored, biased or under control.

Towards this goal, no sophistication, we prefer minimalist approach to web design, with clear and linear interfaces that give intuitive access to sophisticated and very structured data. When you have to manage complex data sets or very rich multimedia contents, the best you can do is design a structure that is very minimal. Indeed, you don’t have to add meaning to the content you are representing, otherwise you make it useless and baroque. Nevertheless, minimalist doesn’t mean careless or dull, instead it means “not one sign more than necessary”, it means taking care of details, it means being moderate and objective.

We also have to consider that there are so many kinds of data that there can’t be one universal formula of access. In fact, some information, such as the structure of a network, need graphic expedients to be understood. Also, there are many realities that have no meaning if showed only in a textual format. In those cases we use graphs, charts, etc., and very often we obtain wonderful and unexpected forms.

Finally a right answer for creating a perfect new media asset (a website) should be discovered on a case-to-case basis, and the only line we can certainly detect is the one between the amount of complexity required by a representation (objective factor) and the self-satisfaction that pushes any web designer into going over what is required (subjective factor).

- Ref. networkcultures.org, and few other media journals/stories and online ad channels.
- Author is the Lead Web Interface Consultant with Solution Point, India