“She looked up at me between a mass of tangled arms, knotted browns and apathetic expressions of uncomfortable misery.” - Stephen Ledger-Lomas on Highbury & Islington tube platform, Islington (London, England)
while hitotoki 2.0 was a bit of a misfire for me (i found it rather overwhelming), it’s hard not to appreciate the beauty that classic hitotoki offers.
just look at the snippet above (taken from classic hitotoki). an everyday moment is captured and documented by an observer. however, the minute you click on a phrase, you’re led not only to a simple narrative but to an experience as well.
“then our eyes flicked back together again, and a tear was gathering on her cheek...
‘...are you okay?’
‘yes, i’m fine.’
she was lying.
i left.”
- Stephen Ledger-Lomas on Highbury & Islington tube platform, Islington (London, England)
classic hitotoki, i think, presents us with a more shared experience; that it’s not just about capturing and documenting a particular moment but also about the responses these images incite - the influx of senses that arise and the associations we make in relation to these observations.
and to think, the discovery of classic hitotoki was only a click away...
while hitotoki 2.0 was a bit of a misfire for me (i found it rather overwhelming), it’s hard not to appreciate the beauty that classic hitotoki offers.
just look at the snippet above (taken from classic hitotoki). an everyday moment is captured and documented by an observer. however, the minute you click on a phrase, you’re led not only to a simple narrative but to an experience as well.
“then our eyes flicked back together again, and a tear was gathering on her cheek...
‘...are you okay?’
‘yes, i’m fine.’
she was lying.
i left.”
- Stephen Ledger-Lomas on Highbury & Islington tube platform, Islington (London, England)
classic hitotoki, i think, presents us with a more shared experience; that it’s not just about capturing and documenting a particular moment but also about the responses these images incite - the influx of senses that arise and the associations we make in relation to these observations.
and to think, the discovery of classic hitotoki was only a click away...
I couldn't agree more! Classic Hitotoki is beautiful. I ended up spending hours there yesterday. I think where the new Hitotoki went wrong was in taking its namesake too literally: "a moment" is really all a 140-character tweet can capture, and like you said, what gives classic Hitotoki its power is its ability to capture an entire experience. Longer stories of 500+ words can embed a simple phrase in a larger narrative -- a person's memories, thoughts, emotions, sensory experiences, etc. -- which gives it much more weight and meaning. Which is not to say that the "moment" isn't still an entry point into all of these things: I remember most of the Hitotoki stories by the short quotations that stand in as their titles.
ReplyDeleteYour characterization of Hitotoki 2.0 as "overwhelming" gets at one of the key problems facing crowd-sourced projects: how should a site display thousands of unique ideas while maintaining simplicity? And maybe even harder: how can the best content become easily accessible?
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with you about classic hitotoki, it was for sure my favorite map we looked at last week. I really like how you said "an everyday moment is captured and documented by an observer". I think the reason we find these small documentations so intriguing is because we all experience them. Everyone has been sitting on the bus, with the sun shining, listening to a certain song and had a good feeling come over them. Classic hitotoki puts these small moments into words or images that some (if not alot) of people may not be able to express. Whether the moment is a positive one or not it does evoke a feeling that this site is able to capture and maintain.
ReplyDelete