Disclaimer: I gave my potential video project a lot of thought, but didn’t end up going with it due to some constraints. I wanted to do a montage representing my college experience. However, when storyboarding what it would look like, I realized I would need many different actors/actresses involved. Not in the sense that they need to use a script and move a plot forward, but I would have needed many “characters,” even if they didn’t say anything. For example, dance was a large part of my college experience, and I wouldn’t be able to convey anything dance related unless I had an large enough group that could dance. This was a major problem since given that it’s the end of the semester, all of my friends who I asked to be in my video didn’t have enough time. I realized that without enough “characters,” my video wouldn’t really make much sense since I would be extremely limited in what I can convey. This is why I eventually decided to scratch the video and ended up doing a map related project.
This website is live here.
I designed and implemented this page. The source code is available on my GitHub. I used a third party asset for the background image, found on Subtle Patterns. I made use of the Google Maps Javascript API to integrate the Google map and markers into my website. I also used another open source library for reasons which I will explain below.
Where Is Nicky?
To understand why I created this website, you will need this bit of context — I have a friend whose name is Nicky. He is always traveling. And the way in which he does it is very erratic. He jumps around from city to city, country to country as if he didn’t have the barrier of physical distance or time. It felt like he could just teleport there. For example, within just one week, he hopped between Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver two times each. All in just one week! He also studied abroad in Hong Kong, during which he made many trips out to different countries. That’s actually relatively normal for being an exchange student in Hong Kong, I was on the same boat too. But speaking of boats, Nicky also did a Semester at Sea the following semester. He took classes on a boat as it sailed around the world.
While the rest of us repeatedly shared mostly uninteresting pictures of our mundane lives, Nicky would never fail to introduce novelty to the mix. So much to the extent that I decided to dedicate my final project to his erratic travel patterns. And lo and behold, we have Where Is Nicky?
The website is fairly simple. I intentionally wanted to make it minimalistic, so you could focus on just what’s there. The main part of the website is the map. Every time you click the “Where Is He?” button, it drops a new marker somewhere else in the world. The most common question I faced when I shared this with our friends was “Wait, is Nicky actually over here?” This is an attestment to how believable it may be that Nicky was legitimately at the location it displayed. I told them to click the button a few times, and then it clicked for them. It’s actually just random coordinates each time. And that’s precisely the point.
The randomness of the marker coordinates and the relative quickness of changing the location represents how erratic we view Nicky’s traveling to be.
Taking A Step Back
Okay so… you explained an inside joke. What’s the point?
Glad you asked.
The fact that I made a website for this speaks larger than just its ability to poke fun at my friend’s travel patterns. It shows how entire websites can be used as a new modality to communicate in 2018. Nowadays, it’s very common to send pictures or videos in addition to text as a method of communication. I wanted to show that websites can also be included as a mode of communication. Not just as a resource for getting information, but solely as the thing being communicated itself.
Of course, most people probably won’t bother to spend as much time to code a webpage to make a point on a relatively silly matter. But in my case, I see it in the context that websites provide me the affordance to be much more creative than other modes of communication. I am able to introduce interactive elements and have a lot of creative freedom on what it looks like. The ability to introduce interactive elements to the page affords you with something a typical visual modality doesn’t really offer.
With a picture or video, you would typically be representing the physical world around you. Of course you can augment it with filters that may transform your reality into a modified representation of it, but there is still a notion of the senses being involved.
However, the modality of websites aren’t limited to capturing the senses. It is a canvas for you to create any representation of any abstract concept you wish to share. And because of that, it transcends some of the limitations and constraints of the other modes of communication.
Let’s Have Some Fun With This
To further delve into the idea of how the modality of websites can offer a lot more power for communication, I added an easter egg to the website. If you type in the Konami Code, it’ll do something fun. Or at least I thought it was fun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
But aside from the ability to drop easter eggs simply because I can, I think it serves to show how powerful of a modality a website can be. Of course, despite how common websites are and how readily accessible the internet is, the main downside to this mode of communication is that relatively few people currently have the knowledge on how to create and manipulate their own websites, especially beyond a simple static webpage.
But who knows, just like there exist many services like Wix or Squarespace to create static webpages, perhaps there will be more tools available in the future that allow people to create more interactive content. And perhaps that can fundamentally shift the way in which people incorporate the use of websites as not simply a means of receiving information and communication on the website, but also as a means of communication through the website.
