The effect of the Internet on news serves as an example. Expectations for the technology have gone from what Argentine essayist Jorge Luis Borges (1962) would call “extravagant happiness” to “excessive depression” in about a decade. Some communication scholars might lament what appears to be the successful grand theft of almost all the field’s key variables by engineering, computer science, and hybrid IT projects. But despite those groups’ successful foray into communication science, they still haven’t come to grips with what Langdon Winner (1977) calls the “Frankenstein Problem.” They still have a blind spot for content and meaning. The emergent field of human-computer interface research has made significant strides in shifting the focus away from the machine and back to the human user (for example, see Shneiderman, 2002).

Employing the theory and methods of cognitive psychology, usability testing worries about access at the information interface, but it stops short of dealing with the issue of “access to what?” The answer, of course, is “access to meaning” (See Newhagen and Bucy, 2004).