Flickr

From Flickr Uploads: documenting the process or procedure that one must do for a particular relationship with the site.

A user wants to use Flickr, or any participatory site for that matter.

Like a map, a site intends how a user uses the site.

Like a map, the intended use of a website is its constraint.

One doesn’t plan a walk through the park with a map of a hotel.

Actually, the similarities between following the computations of a website (or computers in general) and maps is startling.

As stated earlier, both firmly locate the user into a role; both’s success is contingent on the accuracy of realizing what is initially conveyed as the intention; both negotiate aesthetic with purpose.

The user goes through the process.

The button says, “click here,” a click there occurs.

With repetition the process of input is subsumed by the cognizant enjoyment of the output.

To the user the importance is not the input, the procedure, so much as the output, the content or result.

With repetition the process largely becomes habitual navigation.

Like a habit, the process is subsumed by stimuli.

It is not until that the habit itself is explicated and examined, which most likely comes from a dissatisfied realization of the outcome or alteration, does the habit become supplanted, suspended or changed.

In Flickr, while the content varies, i.e. the photos, the input process is repetitive, learned and forgotten to a point of automatization.

That is not to imply that he outcome is not expected as well.

The result in this case is seeing an uploaded image in your photostream.

With repetition, even as early as the first consecutiveness, one can determine most of the conventions (appearance, organization, etc.).

One can extrapolate that computing is a set of user expectations at the site of confined input/output commands.

And maybe there’s something to sharing, too