What Makes People Click: The Future

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What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web
The following was prepared as part of a Demonstration held at TESOL 2003, Baltimore, MD, USA, in April. Go to the Main page to see the rest or take a look at work that has already been done for previous presentations:
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Looking into the Future

Changes have come so rapidly in this field that as of today, January 18, 2003, I am still afraid to say anything that will most certainly be outdated tomorrow. But I'll try. Go ahead world, turn me into a dinosaur...the future has been scary for some time now, and, fortunately, I'm still part of it.

Some of the bigger trends include the following. First, these days almost everyone is using the web, not just the certain limited crowd of innovative geeks that used to travel around it. So it's only a matter of time before the web matures and becomes better studied, better traveled, more sophisticated than it is now. Pages that you put up today will become ancient history but will also be trailblazers for a future of design, patterns of which could go anywhere. The web isn't going away; it's becoming the directory of choice. Design patterns, copyright awareness, and adjustment to usage patterns will evolve rapidly as people get adjusted to the new world.

Some other innovations that should be discussed are the arrival of broadband, the integration of the wireless web and iMovie into the web as we now know it in the US, and the increasing importance of interactivity as a component of programs and media that attract the young.

Broadband

As I write, not everyone can even get broadband, for geographical reasons, and a national recession makes it out of reach financially for a large group of people for whom it could otherwise be gotten. The universities have installed it, for the most part, in most places except perhaps ESL/EFL programs and maybe the History Department. Movies are flying across the web and dorms are getting sensitive about the constant pirating of music. The question remains: What will happen to the web as we know it? Our pages can have music and a movie, or both, and they can start up when the page opens.....but is that good? Not necessarily. My sense is that for the time being, there will still be a major part of the web that simply delivers information...that is used for links, to get places, find out things, and come back home. Somebody who puts a movie in your face as you're going to the store to get a newspaper, is not likely to get your attention, unless that movie is pretty dramatic. And I'm sure there will be some of that too, but, for the most part, I think that the basic nature of the web as we know it will still be there, though it may be a smaller percent of the total web than it is now. Even if people are using the web to get music, talk to their parents, watch a movie AND see a concert, what counts is that when they want to find an ESL program, they are using it for basic information. And that will still be true, as long as that same web doesn't make the concept of an ESL program obsolete.

Wireless

What about wireless? Wireless makes it necessary to have a stark, simple page, much like a basic entry in your phone book, because people use wireless to get quick information, often when they are in a cab or away from home. It's hard for us to imagine, here, why we would need a wireless page at all....who would be shopping for an ESL program while in a cab? But wireless is used in a variety of ways in a variety of countries....people who use it well here would definitely have a niche in the market, being one of the only programs that have it.

Interactivity

I believe that the integration of interactivity (see Ch. 3) in general, into the web and into life as we know it, will be a profound change in the way people think and act and find things in the future. I have a sense that what started out as a small movement, a fascination with pinball machines and video games, has turned into a cultural steamroller. In order to understand the future and the thinking of the coming generation, we are going to have to get behind the latest video games, and make games and systems that allow people to interact in the process of their virtual visit with us. Remember, young people are looking at your pages and saying, not "What is this?" but "What can I DO with this?" It's a different world. I can only imagine where this general trend will take our pages.

But, let me try. Imagine opening up a page for a program and being met by a virtual tourguide who offers to take you, not only to the classrooms, but also to more interesting places, like the cafe, the dorm where you would live, and maybe the mall in the town. At each place, he's very much the host: would you like to sit for a minute? Look at that statue over there. Or, this is where the founder of the university lived, many years ago. The user visits your campus much as he would at home on his Playstation (now connected to the internet) and has fun somehow, even though he's not shooting snipers or terrorists. Does this sound unbelievable? Someone is working on it already, I'm sure.

One could argue that with the increasing ease of being able to see any particular place, for example, Harvard Yard or Oxford, the value of actually being at the real version of the place would go down. But one might also argue that the increasing familiarity of various places will make the value of actually being in such a place go up; that travel will increase, not decrease, and the inborn uniqueness of certain places will not only survive, but be strengthened, perhaps as a result of more and more constant interaction with the outside world.

Video and iMovie

One of the most immediate results of the new video explosion is that there will be more and better home-made movies worldwide; people will increasingly use the web and the new technology to make good and original movies about their areas (their campus, for example) and people will want to just go around and look at some of these. The better ones will be downloaded and compared. Hollywood will no longer have a stranglehold on the best film; self-editing of little and clever things will thrive. People will get in the habit of advertising these things carefully on the entryway page so that you won't be hit with a movie unsuspectingly as you go from place to place; this will be an improvement.

Footnotes:

Sources:

Chen, J. and Ringel, M. (2002). Can advergaming be the future of interactive advertising? Whitepapers.

Internet.com (2002). US Broadband Growth Steady, Nov. 20. http://cyberatlas.internet.com/markets/broadband/article/0,1323,10099_1545711,00.html.

Copyright Thomas Leverett, 2003

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Thomas Leverett, CESL, SIUC
Photo above (Spider Web) by Jim Leverett.

What Makes People Click:Marketing an IEP Program on the Web

Looking into the Future

What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web