Neuro Web Design

The psychology of the Internet and social media is not something I'd really ever considered before, but after having read just these couple of chapters I've sort of come to see that creating online communities and successful social networking really is all about psychology. It's crazy to think about the history of the Internet and what it's initial design purpose was - communication, specifically workplace communication. And then sites like Classmates and Myspace happened, then later on Facebook. Social networking is still a form of communication, just social communication, not business communication. It makes me wonder, though, what's next? We've got email, we've got Facebook etc., we've got LinkedIn, we've got YouTube. We get television and radio over the Internet. We can do all of our shopping over the Internet. We can take classes over the Internet, and we can work exclusively from home thanks to the Internet. What else is there? We're studying and answering questions like 'what makes people click?' and 'why do some ideas stick?' But I think the real question is, Is there anything left? Are there any ideas that haven't already been thought of? It seems that every Internet market has been cornered, and every use for the Internet already exploited. At this point, it just seems like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel and recycling old ideas.

Videos

I'd be lying if I said that these three videos, taken together, did not blow my mind. There are two big things that I took away from the videos: 1, I still have a very low understanding of the technology of the Internet and the technical processes that go into creating web pages (i.e. HTML vs. XML); 2, the social impact of the Internet has been at sometime enlightening and devastating, but in either case it can be argued that no event in the 20th century has had a greater social impact than the Internet (yes, there were pretty significant military and political events that took place during the 20th century, but the Internet's impact is purely social). As much as I love the Internet, as much as I depend on the Internet, as much as I need the Internet, it cannot be denied that the Internet has taken over our lives. Can you imagine what would happen if the Internet was down worldwide, even if for only a day? The economy would stop; banks could not function, no business could work, the world would be virtually silent. We don't just simply use the Internet, the Internet is our lives - we've gone so far with Internet dependence that our society could not possibly live without the Internet, not even for a day. It's scary. Really scary.