If you’re interested in writing, then the place to go for both the good and the bad is the web. There is so much of both ends of the spectrum and everything in between that it’s an amazing place to study. Now the study of the web has been launched as a formal area of study by a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton. In November 2006 they launched the Web Science Research Initiative to study the web and how it works.

Scientific American Oct 2008

The article in October’s Scientific American ( “Web Science Emerges”, Scientific American, October 2008, pp76-81) is an interesting overview of this new science, the insights already gained and some of the interesting questions up for study in the future. So what does this have to do with writing? A lot actually.

If you’re going to communicate something, you need to understand the medium and how it’s used. That goes for any medium. Most importantly, you need to understand the people who use it and how best to communicate with them. I expect that this new science will help us put the whole phenomenon of the web into a better perspective so we can use it better.

Web Science is a multi-disciplinary activity involving many areas of science. Insights from Biology, Brain Science, Population Dynamics, Ecology, Sociology, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Socio-Cultural Systems, and in fact nearly every area of knowledge will be important. If we start to understand the evolution of the web in all its complexity and how messages are best structured and delivered, it will have a major impact on how we communicate. Blogging, Audio-Blogging, Video-Blogging, Social Networking, and many other innovations on the web have introduced new ways to communicate. If we understand them better, we can use them better.

For example, I believe that poor writing style & grammar will hurt a communication, even on blogs. Many people disagree with me, believing in turn that writing without prior thought makes it somehow more real and more believable. But who is right? Maybe we’re all partly right and what truly matters is the specific audience or the topic or the intention or some other factor or combination of factors. It will be many years before we can get answers to questions like this, but as we start to learn, we’ll do better on ‘Getting Out Point Across’.

Categories: Web & Internet Communications