Form Equals Function

The internet has fostered a world wide community of people via a monitor screen. From blogs and chat rooms, to daily news and celebrity updates, a whole life can be spent at the computer. To begin a mock day in a novelist’s life, he wakes up and accesses his email to receive any updates before work. Since he works at home, he researches a topic. His internet research takes a minimal half hour because the conventions of the websites he visits have become second nature to him. He know exactly how the sites display the information he needs and where to go for the next step. The internet may be unfathomably large but it has a generic web format and a new writing style that stabalizes the system.

Every website on the internet has a similar format and conventions with each other. The popular website www.youtube.com, for example, contains the expected title and home page icon on the tip left corner of the site. What this site also has in common with other sites are a search bar to type in a topic to look up, and tabs for searching by different classifications. Like other websites, a personal account can be established where a username and password must be provided. All members or prospective members can get help for their account or on the site by the links on the top right of the screen. The message or purpose of the site is usually very obvious and grabs the onlooker’s attention. In this particular website, You Tube introduces itself by displaying a product of the site, member’s personal videos. Most websites have pictures, and You Tube is no exception. However, its pictures are especially useful since they are just still photographs of the videos. These videos can be accessed by one of the most common conventions of websites, the blue, underlined hyperlink. No unconventional items exist on this website which makes it easy to navigate and similar to other website’s formats, yet it has an inviting quality.

The internet form of writing also leads to less formal writing. Having someone’s writing published into a book or magazine requires a lot of work, talent and connections. Even when the work is published it is possible not many will read it. But with the internet, anyone can publish their writing no matter how bad it is, and possibly have a lot of people read it. This can be done in the form of a blog. Any thought, feeling, note or announcement can be posted for friends, family, and total strangers to see. This even differs from other websites in that websites generally have one theme and blogs can be totally random. Game scores and poetry could be on the same post. This structured writing format has morphed into informal, unpredictable blogs by way of the internet.

Millions around the world have attached themselves to these new styles of communication whether by websites, blogs or even just email. It has given humans a way of contacting others who were impossible before the internet. The way websites and writing have been tools to broaden people’s minds. But as to making life easier, that could be questioned, unless you want to spend a whole day in front of a screen.