I can't talk about that now. I'm in the middle of a sentence.
-Anne Tyler
Remember back in '95 I built my first personal homepage by using a free web authoring program, "Netscape Composer", which is a by-product of the Netscape browser. It made it so easy that almost every bit of operational interface is exact the same as word processing program. There I started constructing my first creation of webpage without reading any program manual or instruction. It was a pretty new concept of learning programming then, and it has also become almost the main paradigm of commercial programming learning design, if not at least in its entry level.
Fist day I was able to type in some paragraphs, set the font and alignment properly, also insert a few my favorite pictures (jpg). Then I spend rest of the day wanting to find a cool animated gif of "Under Construction" sign. It was so important to me that without it I didn't want to publish my first page. It's almost the same fear that if I'm digging a hole on the center of a road, without a proper warning sign, people may just fall and get hurt accidentally. I never came across to find one I like, and there I spend another 5 hours to learn to make one (animated gif.) It was almost twice the time I actually spent on writing the web content itself. And I thought I was just being responsible for putting up the sign.
Time changes, technology changes, philosophy of generating contents starts to do too. It has become redundant to put a U.C. (under construction) sign on any page. It comes to a point that if a page is not yet readable, then it's no reason to publish and put a UC sign. But the thin threshold of "when" it's ready for public browsing is definitely facing new challenging to a new level. What could be the major impact of the philosophy to read and write web contents following?
In the old days, a tape with recorded converstaion or so-call on-the-record statements, you may have quite a stand even in court. Then what is it now if the web content is changing every hour, does the screen-shot of no-longer-existing page count for something? It is less true to what's been said on the web, or it's more true and closer to the reality of a human mind (or desire)?
Maybe this is the answer of this always-in-progress philosophy to the world nowadays. New things evolve so fast that by the time you familize it, it's already been fading away. Humanity strives for improvement all the time, and now we are marching into the era that the speed of the changing we might not be keeping up with. Or maybe not, we just need an updated philosophy to exam all these phenomena and our reflection to the impacts.
And again, this is my thinking "in progress" too. I published this because I think it's reasonably readable, it's reflecting my current (at the very moment at least) real thoughts, although I know it's not up to my past stand of a real finalized statement. However if not with this "in progress" philosophy, I would not have publised this, and you may not get the chance to read it.
Aren't most of the events in our lives simply "in progress" too?
