Car Metaphors
Watching Analogies in the World of Computers
X for X-Files
I read a new article by Jacob Nielsen on overloaded commands and wondered how can it be that in 2012, at least two decades after Interface Design started to be considered a profession, one should write about incorrectness of using the same command (button, icon) to “achieve different (but similar) results” and can provide examples from the world’s leading IT companies.
And then I saw the tweet
I looked over the shoulder of the nearest facebook user …
… indeed, X for archiving. It is not different (but similar), not even just different, but exactly the opposite. I think Jacob Nielsen can fire himself, because in 2012 as in 1993, the WWW is still made by X-Files fans.
Wheels are Good and Right!
Cory Doctorow gave a talk on the ideals of General Purpose Computing and attacks on them, at the 28C3, the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin.
Transcript by Joshua Wise.
Among other statements, Doctorow explains that you can’t regulate the internet and computers the same way you add and remove features from cars or smart phones.
He introduces a nice (even inspiring) analogy, by suggesting to see Information technology as a wheel, not as a car. He compares absurd, but more and more mainstream ideas to “fix the Internet so that it doesn’t run BitTorrent” with a fictional attempt to create a wheel that can have reduce uses.
“If I wanted Congress to […] to regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up and said “well, everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery? Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would of course be “no”. Because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys.”
We know of course, that the Internet is not a wheel, or better to say can stop being one with some lines of code, but it is so right to think this way and imagining it like this.
A Mystery
Why would an artist who “uses the internet as his canvas” and who has “internet” tattooed in his mouth, need this oil/acryl reference to explain what he feels?
Circle of UI
I recommend reading Don Norman’s article “Gesture Wars“. It is a great review of scrolling and panning history from somebody who remembers.
He writes about confusion and chaos provoked by gesture innovations of Apple, Microsoft and Google and other vendors who feel that they have to implement their own design philosophy, especially when it comes to scrolling.
Norman claims:
“Not only is there incompatibility among the vendors, but given the lack of any cues on the devices, it is very difficult to remember the gestures. We are back to the days of command-line interfaces where everything had to be memorized, or looked up in a manual.”
That’s bitter! We think they do NUI (N for natural), but in fact it is CLI (with C for confusion this time).
Books
2011
1994
The last illustration of the The UNIX-HATERS Handbook, p.316
Full of Tabs
“Epic Win for Anonymous” is a nice book, written by a well informed author, namely Cole Stryker. Through almost 300 pages he keeps a very comfortable relation of obscurity and obviousness. As a result, his book contains valuable facts and observations for those who never sticked their noses out of Facebook and /b/tards themselves. It would be of interest for BBS sysops, their daughters and their boyfriens, to us and the rest of us.
It is absolutely actual — may be even too actual. Being very descriptive, it belongs to the circle of books that have to be read the same month or at least the same year they were published. Like the user’s guide “The Whole Internet” published and read in 1994. Like “Creating GeoCities Websites”, that costed $39.99 in 1999 and $0.01 in 2011.
Anyway, I like the way Stryker narrates. He is very calm and in a very casual manner brings attention to the vital issues, like:
“While much of 4chan’s content is pure wankery, there’s something special at work there. 4chan allows its users to be jerks, but more importantly it provides a platform of social networking that focuses on what one is saying rather that who is saying it.” (p.277)
The author doesn’t explain things by analogies but uses them from time to time to bring some lyricism to the text. For example on the last page, comparing the high turnover rate for /b/tards with “hanging out down by the railroad tracks is only interesting for a summer or two”.
Stryker is much older than an average /b/tard, but still young enough to write with sentences that would look idiomatic for, lets say, my generation; though they are just statement of facts, no subtext.
I especially enjoyed this one:
“By the time I’ve fully explored the information, my browser is full of tabs.” (p.29)
The Last Nail in the Coffin of Car Analogies
In 2007, I started this blog with a quote from Turkle’s introduction to the second edition of The Second Self (2004). She wrote:
It takes as a given that people once knew how their cars, televisions, or telephones worked and don’t know this any more, but that in the case of mechanical technology, such losses are acceptable. It insists however, that ignorance about the fundamentals of computation comes at too high a price.
Computers are not cars, computer users are not drivers, the paperless office is not to be compared with the paperless toilet, and a computer interface is more complex than a door, with or without a knob. In the end of 2011 many still don’t care about it, but there is more and more said on differences in between artifacts of mechanical world and digital age phenomena. There is more awareness of distinctions.
I like how Douglas Rushkoff brought a new retrospective perspective to car analogies. In the last chapter of his book Program or be Programmed not only he denounces the analogy, but states that in fact it was a fatal mistake to give up knowledge about how cars work.
Multimedia CD-ROM
Profound Review of App Art, drawing Dragan Espenschied, 2011
Though Dragan insists that there is nothing to add to his “Profound Review of App Art”,
I’ll elaborate a bit. Fortunately we are not the only nor the first ones to notice that all this interactive entertainment that comes in the form of Apps is so much the same crap that we (net artists) fought 15 years ago.
Here is a quote from the Interfacelab.com review of the Wired Magazine App:
Earlier this year, reviewing iPad version of the Daily newspaper Scott Rosenberg noticed:
As a person who watches metaphors and idioms, I’d like to add that I enjoy the fact that in the new Millennium term Multimedia CD ROM came back as a curse.
Back to the AppArt exhibition at ZKM we happened to visit last week. It was odd to see dozens of Ipads tightly tied to the walls and podests with the on and off button sealed. And though Ipads are not PCs and should be perfect for the exhibition situation, many projects were just not working, showing new times of error messages — requests to register. Not to mention the condition of the screens. In the afternoon they were really dirty.
Paradoxically the only truly working and thats why exciting to play app was the Small Fish by interactivity masters Kiyoshi Furukawa, Masaki Fujihata und Wolfgang Münch, the work that is now 12 yers old. It was a multimedia CDROM once, then a big projection on a wall of ZKM and now an app.
Internet and Vacuum Cleaner
This week I was supposed to take part in the Digital Culture podium discussion organized by the cultural wing of SPD, but I failed to make it to Berlin and I really regret it. Because I missed Geert Lovink — founding Director of Institute of Network Cultures and a lot of important stuff — comparing Internet with Vacuum cleaner.
“‘It (the vacuum cleaner) is just there, and we use it instead of discussing its meaning and structure.’ Lovink wishes that we adapt this attitude towards the Internet as well. ” — a journalist reports. I’ve asked Geert by email if this journalist has maybe misinterpreted his analogy. But Geert confirmed and elaborated:
One day the internet will be pushed in the background. It will do important work, like the vacuum cleaner. But we are not constantly discussing the politics and architecture of vacuum cleaners.
Honestly, I’m not sure if it is right not to discuss vacuum cleaners constantly. Maybe if we did they would work better and cost less. But there is no way to agree that we should stop to talk about how the Internet works and what architecture is underlaying it. What will happen to the Network of the Networks and what it will be used for, is decided right now. And if not to demand that its architecture stays neutral and the intelligence is on the edges of the network, there will be no network cultures, but only networks of vacuum cleaners.
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