Old Cognitive Dissonance

Don and I were talking today about how we want to explain RSS next month in Orlando.

Being the geek that I am, I started dissecting the RSS protocol and explaining what it does in the computer.

Don, being the human, asked the critical question, “So what?”

“Duh!” on me.

How do I explain the engine in my car?
“It makes the car go. I can use the car to drive anywhere I want to go, mostly.”

With that perspective, what’s RSS?
“It’s a way of telling me when a website has changed so I can tell if I want to visit it again.”

The question of “Why do I want to know?” is really the key one here.

Let’s go back to the automobile analogy. When autos were Model A’s and the roads were wagon paths, you needed to be a mechanic and navigator to drive any distance. You needed to know a lot more about how the equipment worked, what it could do, and how to do it. Only the geekiest were able to make it work with any degree of success at all.

That’s what web was before the templated solutions called blogs showed up.

What’s a blog?
“It’s a simple website with content usually arranged by date.”

Blogs are to old style web publishing what today’s cars and the Interstate are to the Model A and wagon paths. You don’t need to know how the gasoline is mixed with air and compressed with a spark to drive from Chicago to Atlanta. You don’t need to know which cart path to follow to get there. You get in your car, you get on the interstate and you head South and East. Follow your nose and the road signs. You will get there. If you know that even numbers go East-West and odd numbers go North-South, you already have a mental model predicting which highways you need to follow and a more efficient way to make the trip. If you know how to read a simple map, you know to take I-57 south to I-24, follow I-24 east to Chattanooga, and then I-75 south into Atlanta. The more you know about the system — auto and road — the more effective you’ll be in making the trip.

In this case, knowing that your car’s gas mileage factor is most efficient at speeds very close to 55 mph and when the speed stays relatively constant will allow you to manage the cost of gasoline over time to be more or less efficient depending on whether money or time is more important to you. Knowing which interstate highways to take, and where the main branch points are, means you won’t waste time driving East to New York and then South to Atlanta — unless you want to.

At each level of improved knowledge, you are more effective or efficient (or both) in making use of this transportation system.

The web is the same way now.

In the Model A web, you edited your pages with a text editor and used a separate program to transfer them from your local machine to a server out there somewhere. You had to be a geek to get it to work. We got more sophisticated with tools that let us edit more easily using graphics tools — drag the picture onto the page, highlight some text and make it bold, make a list or table using the appropriate buttons — and then the software would manage the process to move the content from here to there automagically. Now, in the modern web, we have templated editing web services that allow us to type our messages in place on the server, save, and go. No muss, no fuss, no bother. We don’t need any special software installed on our computers any more — just a web browser. With a little more knowledge we can add sound and graphics to our messages and publish a magazine without knowing anything about how the text is coded or what style sheet codes place the navigation tools at the top of the page. We just pick the model we want and go with it.

Again, with each level of knowledge — basic html, basic styling, basic scripting — we can do more and do it more effectively/efficiently than is possible at the lower level. But just as you can — eventually — drive from Chicago to Atlanta without knowing anything more than Chicago and Atlanta are both cities on the interstate highway system, you can quite effectively publish your content on the web without knowing any more than how to fill out a web form.

The interstate highway opened up vast areas of the country to development by making it accessible to people who would otherwise not be able even to find it. Likewise, this new mode of web publishing is making it possible for people to have a voice in a worldwide discourse without having to master anything more than complicated than typing the text that contains their messages.

You don’t need to know — or use — RSS. You can make a set of bookmarks and periodically run thru the list to see if there’s anything new. But that takes time. If you know about RSS, you can be very efficient in harvesting those messages of interest/import to you. RSS lets you tell your computer to look for you and let you know what, if anything is new, and you can make up your mind about whether or not you want to go look at it.

It’s like having a map of the interstate.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2005 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Wanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.