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Reviews
Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate by Steven Johnson
nickfourtimes's review
3.0
1) ''Here, of course, we come up against the issue of aesthetic taste and distinction, and the criteria we use to evaluate these programs. Even if you accept the analogy between the industrial-era novel and the metaforms of the information age, surely there remains a qualitative distinction to be drawn between Great Expectations and Mystery Science Theater, between Germinal and Talk Soup. Both forms arise out of the turbulence of their respective periods, and both offer a symbolic corrective or solution to that turbulence, a sort of cognitive Dramamine.''
2) ''The other problem with Microsoft's Bob is that the imagined space is a profoundly antisocial one. It conceptualizes the infosphere as a private home, sequestered from the outside world. The only contact with other 'people' comes in the form of those ridiculous cartoon characters, those agents and info-butlers. There's a strange sense of agoraphobia hovering over this world, as if the happy-go-lucky, Disneyfied interior was just a roundabout way of blocking out the shocks and turmoil of public life. This might have been reasonable in the old days of stand-alone desktop computers, but in the age of the Internet, using an interface that doesn't offer some vision of public life can seem less like a cutting-edge exploration through information-space and more like a visit to Miss Havisham's.
This gets to the heart of the desktop metaphor and its broader implications. Organized space implies not just a personal value system---as in the religious order of the Gothic cathedrals---but also a type of community. This is true of architecture and urban planning, and it is also true of interface design. The cramped and crooked side streets of Paris up until the late nineteenth century (still visible in parts of the Latin Quarter and the Marais) invoked a human scale of neighborhoods and face-to-face contact, more like village life than that of a great metropolis. (The crowded conditions also created public health problems, of course, as in the 1832 cholera epidemic.) The city had an improvised, organic quality to it: streets wrapped haphazardly around each other, neighborhoods evolved unpredictably. There were a few regal execptions to this rule, buildings or public environs laid out by princes or priests, but for the most part the city was a great celebration of self-organization, a design etched out by millions of small-scale, local decisions, with no master planner in sight.''
3) ''What, then, are the blind spots of our own age? We have already encountered a few: the tyranny of image over text, the limitations of the desktop metaphor, the potential chaos of intelligent agents. But there is a more fundamental---and for that reason more difficult to perceive---blind spot in the high-tech imagination, and it has to do with the general region of experience that the interface is felt to occupy. Until very recently, interface design belonged squarely to the geeks and computer hobbyists---a niche market at best. The rise of Mac and Windows introduced a mass audience to desktops and icons, while the Web's popularity endowed browsers and hypertext with a certain subcultural sexiness. All these developments suggest a widening of the interface audience, but the medium itself still belongs to the world of functionality and increased convenience. We're subjected to endless advertisements promising us a miraculous digital future, and yet the scenarios they deliver tend to be remarkably mundane: ordering concert tickets, reviewing X-rays from a remote location, sending photos to relatives by email.''
4) ''The most fertile historical analogy for this process is the invention of perspective in painting. When Brunelleschi and Alberti hit upon a way to create the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface in the early fifteenth century, you could see their techniques---the vanishing point, the picture plane---as just another clever trompe de l'oeil, a curiosity piece. Certainly, it was an improvement on the muddled visual space of medieval art, but artists were always coming up with new techniques to advance their craft: chiaroscuro, the camera obscura, pointillism. Perspective, however, turned out to be more than just a minor enhancement to the painter's repertoire. The mathematical studies of Alberti and Leonardo transformed not just the spatial language of European painting but also the role of the artist itself, elevating painting to a higher cognitive stature---closer to science or philosophy than to popular entertainment, and in doing so helped create the whole notion of the artist as an intellectual. Perhaps more important, perspective centered the visual field on the human point of view, instead of a disembodied or divine locus, a shift that was imitated in countless disciplines throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as scholars and artists and scientists grounded their work in the physical, lived reality of the human body. Perspective began as a technical innovation, but it eventually helped produce what we now call the Renaissance.''
2) ''The other problem with Microsoft's Bob is that the imagined space is a profoundly antisocial one. It conceptualizes the infosphere as a private home, sequestered from the outside world. The only contact with other 'people' comes in the form of those ridiculous cartoon characters, those agents and info-butlers. There's a strange sense of agoraphobia hovering over this world, as if the happy-go-lucky, Disneyfied interior was just a roundabout way of blocking out the shocks and turmoil of public life. This might have been reasonable in the old days of stand-alone desktop computers, but in the age of the Internet, using an interface that doesn't offer some vision of public life can seem less like a cutting-edge exploration through information-space and more like a visit to Miss Havisham's.
This gets to the heart of the desktop metaphor and its broader implications. Organized space implies not just a personal value system---as in the religious order of the Gothic cathedrals---but also a type of community. This is true of architecture and urban planning, and it is also true of interface design. The cramped and crooked side streets of Paris up until the late nineteenth century (still visible in parts of the Latin Quarter and the Marais) invoked a human scale of neighborhoods and face-to-face contact, more like village life than that of a great metropolis. (The crowded conditions also created public health problems, of course, as in the 1832 cholera epidemic.) The city had an improvised, organic quality to it: streets wrapped haphazardly around each other, neighborhoods evolved unpredictably. There were a few regal execptions to this rule, buildings or public environs laid out by princes or priests, but for the most part the city was a great celebration of self-organization, a design etched out by millions of small-scale, local decisions, with no master planner in sight.''
3) ''What, then, are the blind spots of our own age? We have already encountered a few: the tyranny of image over text, the limitations of the desktop metaphor, the potential chaos of intelligent agents. But there is a more fundamental---and for that reason more difficult to perceive---blind spot in the high-tech imagination, and it has to do with the general region of experience that the interface is felt to occupy. Until very recently, interface design belonged squarely to the geeks and computer hobbyists---a niche market at best. The rise of Mac and Windows introduced a mass audience to desktops and icons, while the Web's popularity endowed browsers and hypertext with a certain subcultural sexiness. All these developments suggest a widening of the interface audience, but the medium itself still belongs to the world of functionality and increased convenience. We're subjected to endless advertisements promising us a miraculous digital future, and yet the scenarios they deliver tend to be remarkably mundane: ordering concert tickets, reviewing X-rays from a remote location, sending photos to relatives by email.''
4) ''The most fertile historical analogy for this process is the invention of perspective in painting. When Brunelleschi and Alberti hit upon a way to create the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface in the early fifteenth century, you could see their techniques---the vanishing point, the picture plane---as just another clever trompe de l'oeil, a curiosity piece. Certainly, it was an improvement on the muddled visual space of medieval art, but artists were always coming up with new techniques to advance their craft: chiaroscuro, the camera obscura, pointillism. Perspective, however, turned out to be more than just a minor enhancement to the painter's repertoire. The mathematical studies of Alberti and Leonardo transformed not just the spatial language of European painting but also the role of the artist itself, elevating painting to a higher cognitive stature---closer to science or philosophy than to popular entertainment, and in doing so helped create the whole notion of the artist as an intellectual. Perhaps more important, perspective centered the visual field on the human point of view, instead of a disembodied or divine locus, a shift that was imitated in countless disciplines throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as scholars and artists and scientists grounded their work in the physical, lived reality of the human body. Perspective began as a technical innovation, but it eventually helped produce what we now call the Renaissance.''
esquetee's review against another edition
5.0
I am loving this book and have fantasies about teaching a class using this as a textbook. It's like opening a time capsule from 1997 with wonderful surprises inside, such as the very first computer mouse and the views of computers in the 1940s, 1980s, and 1997. To put this book in some context - google.com and "blog" didn't even appear until a few months after this book was published, which makes his points about visual metaphor in the modern interface even more interesting, i think. Awesome little trip through interface history with several asides to Victorian literature and MTV thrown in along the way.
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