Car Metaphors

Some time ago Google’s product manager in Russia and Eastern Europe was writing about Google’s unlimited functions in the Google.ru blog and quoted Marissa Mayer’s words: Google is like a Swiss Army Knife.

Looking for the source I was not precise enough with my search query and found many many pages where developers of applications, operating systems, frameworks are comparing their products with Offiziersmesser, meaning that they can do so many things so good without occupying a lot of space. I don’t know if Marissa Mayer was the first one in IT business who came up with this comparison, but for sure only she, as Google’s product manager, has the right to bring this analogy to the ultimate level, saying “like the Swiss Army knife closed”, meaning Google’s distinct minimalistic interface.

I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere. When you need a certain tool, you can pull these lovely doodads out of it and get what you want. So on Google, rather than showing you upfront that we can do all these things, we give you tips to encourage you to do things these ways. We get you to put your query in the search field, rather than have all these links up front. That’s worked well for us. Like when you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you’re terrified. That’s how other sites are - you’re scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed.

She said it in 2002. In 2007 it is not true anymore. iGoogle looks not any different from many other services. You can switch back to Google classic. But you are encouraged not to. Even classic is not as “closed” as it was. And it’s a pity. Because, I’m sure that already now for us (people with connected computers) Google is a more familiar tool than a swiss army knife. It would be already time for Google to become a metaphor itself, to be the the first analogy that comes to mind when describing something simple and multi functional. But it won’t happen without the “closed” look.

I need digital culture heroes, Internet symbols and software metaphors. Why Google is not serious about its appearance anymore? For how long knifes and spoons will be metaphors for digital matters?

Being trained as a journalist at Moscow State University I went through hundreds of hours analyzing the comparisons and figures of speech used in contemporary journalistic practice. Usually before the class we had to buy the newest issue of the newspaper “Soviet Sport.” It was a safe shot for our teachers, because sport observers dealing over and over again with monotonous body movements are really shameless in introducing metaphors and packing their texts with loads of them.

But i think computer scientist are much better than sport reporters.

David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, describes something to replace the WWW. It will be called “Worldbeam.” To justify the name, stimulate our imagination and evoke positive feelings he writes:

Many sorts of information are blended together in the Worldbeam, just as many colors are combined into a beam of white light.

Another computer, John Maeda, recalls in his book The Laws of Simplicity that computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte advised to him

to become a light bulb instead of a laser beam […] His point was that you can either brighten a single point with laser precision, or else use the same light to illuminate everything around you. (p.53)

He took Negroponte’s advice seriously and, as the book shows, is indeed very skillful in illuminating not only things around him, but the obscure corners of his memory as well, finding there more and more unexpected evidence for the greatness of the iPod’s design.

Maeda’s text is an interesting case of talking about interface design, usability and information architecture while avoiding these terms. Instead he makes connections to raising and educating kids, learning to swim and to drive a car, cooking and serving food, being young and getting older.

On one hand, It is a noble task to make people see their relations with computers in a row of non-binary experiences.

On another, light beams and light bulbs and everything that has to do with light (except glow sticks) usually serve to produce positive, overly sweet allusions, and some of the most opaque and daft systems have been characterized with words like transparency (translucency) and light.

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This light bulb person was found in a Navy Hazardous Substance Management System Newsletter from 1999:

Trying to follow everything written on amateur culture, I’ve ordered a book by Andrew Keen The Cult of the Amateur.

It is a text, written by a person who hates amateurs and loves mainstream media. He uses the word amateur as a synonym for uneducated, lazy anonymous, internet addicted persons, monkeys with typewriters, who are mostly “sexual predators and pedophiles”. Mainstream media means just culture (in all fairness, he talks only about American culture, but again, for some reason, he sees American culture as a model).

He ridicules Kevin Kelly, Chris Anderson, Jimmy Wales, Tim O’Reilly, Sergey Brin and other web 2.0 magnates — however not for their exploitation of the amateur workforce, but to sully amateurs, deprecate their role and contrast them with real experts (Britannica consultants, Times’ reporters, Bob Dylan — this stronghold of culture is especially dear to the author.)

In short, as he says on the last page of the book:

(p.214)

Lawrence Lessig commented to this statement:

Here’s a book — Keen’s — that has passed through all the rigor of modern American publishing, yet which is perhaps as reliable as your average blog post: No doubt interesting, sometimes well written, lots of times ridiculously over the top — but also riddled with errors.

In fact, the book is not only ideologically ridiculous, but also full of mistakes and misinterpretations of web 2.0, web in general and cultural phenomena of the last centuries. To write “I can’t scarcely conceive of […] Mozart letting his listeners rewrite his operas and concertos” means to ignore that Mozart himself was “remixing” works of other composers (for example, by adapting them for the piano, a new instrument at that time) and was “remixed” by other composers, as they re-arranged his work. This was a part of high music culture, long before recorded music existed.

So, why was I reading this bad book till the end? Because i thought: the book is so bad, there must be a lot of car metaphors inside. But the book is so so bad, that there was only one. Keen’s reaction to Kelly’s proposal to have all texts for free because there is no longer a way to protect copyright. Keen writes:

It is a bit like saying that because our car might get stolen, we should leave it unlocked with the keys in the ignition and the driver’s-side door open, to usher would-be thieves on their way. (p. 116)

Thank you very much, South Carolina.

In 2000 Stanford University Press published a book by Thierry Bardini — Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. I really regret that I read it only now, because it is a proper book for the fans of the Mother Of All Demos and admirers of Engelbart.

Bardini writes about the augmentation “crusade”, he documents in detail processes and arguments that preceded the birth of NLS and what happened after, the work and life in the Augmentation Research Center, ARC and its relations with other institutions, Engelbart’s correspondence with SRI and ARPA bosses and his colleagues, fights for mouse buttons, the Chord Keyset — though I knew the facts, I devoured the book like a thriller.

But before you hurry to order the book, you should know that I also cried in the end of each part of the NLS presentation film. It can be seen on youtube and on the Stanford Mouse site.

Anyway, in the beginning of the book Bardini states:

The history of how the computer and its relationship to its human users was imagined is a dance of metaphors.
(p.34)

That’s clear. What i didn’t know is that Engelbart himself was a good dancer. And as it seems a pioneer in thinking about computers in terms of vehicles.

On page 18 you can find a quote by Engelbart from the very beginning of the 60’s on his advanced metaphor:

The man-machine interface that most people talk about is the equivalent of the locomotive-cab controls (giving a man better means to contribute to the big system’s mission), but I want to see more thought on the equivalent of the bulldozer’s cab (giving the man maximum facility for directing all that power to his individual tasks).

In the end of the book his words from 1986 appear, they make the first comparison look especially weird and the work of his life really dramatic.

After 1976 […] the AUGMENT system stayed alive in a sort of funny dumb way, often like taking a bulldozer in to help people work in their back yards.
(p. 214)

Thinking about the ways to augment the human body, Engelbart observed a man in his automobile and came to conclusion that

the human foot was a pretty sensitive controller of the gas pedal in cars
(p. 113)

This observation led him to work on the Knee Control (see the picture below), an input device with great erotic potential. How would our offices look today, how we would look and dress, and move, and communicate, if knee control and not the mouse would have been developed further?

Another device that was left behind in the world of personal computers was the Chord Keyset. It allows the user to enter characters or form commands by pressing several keys at the same time.

In the beginning of his research Engelbart had to fight for the idea to work on it, because his colleagues and bosses saw it as an inappropriate comeback to outdated telegraph technology.

In 1962 Harold Wooster, chief of the information sciences division of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, wrote a letter to Engelbart in which he expresses his frustration. To make the point more heavy, he resorted to the help of sarcastic comparison:

I have no objection to antiquarianism as a hobby — restoring and learning to ride a high-wheel bicycle could be fun — but reinventing the highweel bycycle with government funds is something else again.
(p. 63)

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In Alan Kay’s metaphor the failure of augmentation project was:

Engelbart, for better or for worse, was trying to make a violin, most people don’t want to learn the violin.
(p. 215)

This sounds like a fitting comparison, but there is a small stylistic dissonance if you know how desperately Engelbart was fighting for “knowledge workers” to accept the advantages of the Chord Keyset, a device that is operated like a grand piano.

In 1961 Columbia University Press published a bitter book by Mortimer Taube, librarian and pioneer of information retrieval systems development: Computers and Common Sense, the Myth of Thinking Machines. It is supposed to be the first anti AI text, but as my cursory research shows it never received much attention — probably due to criticizing MIT, RAND, Harvard University and Rockefeller Foundation for spending millions on inventing chess playing machines.

Taube claims that proper man-machine relations are augmentation and complementation, not simulation. At that time a distinction between simulation of the brain’s structure and simulation of its functions was already made by Turing and Minsky, but, Taube writes, there is no discussion or attempt to specify the functions which are to be simulated.

It certainly does not make much sense to say that the function of the brain is to play chess or translate languages and that chess playing machines and translation machines are thereby successful simulations of the human brain. (p. 74)

In the last paragraph of the book he calls those who promise that within ten years “computers will dethrone the current world chess champion” to be latter-day soothsayers.

Not 10, but 35 years later computers learned to play chess and win. Strange as it may seem, knowing this fact does not make Taube’s reasons against the obsession with AI funny or outdated. Instead it brings more weight to his words.

Computers and Common Sense could be a very good reading for those who talk about computer and digital networks as a brain and explain the processes of one by looking at the other: “because the wire networks of electronic computers analog to the nerve networks of living organisms that seem to be electrical in character.” (p. 74) Taube is very convincing in dethroning bad analogies.

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In the Bootstraping book (I’m going to write about next), Thierry Bardini quotes Robert W. Taylor, psychologist, head of a research program on computing at NASA in the beginning of 60’s and one of IPTO at ARPA directors in the late 60’s. In 1989 he confessed why ARPA was giving money to AI:

I was supporting it because of its influence on the rest of the field, not because I believed that they would indeed be able to make a ping-pong-playing machine in the next three years, but because it was an important stimulus to the rest of the field. There was no reason for me to tell them that, of course.

In his book Deep Time of The Media on page 72, in chapter about early cryptography experiments, Siegfried Zielinski describes the way messages were delivered long long time ago:

“As a rule, messengers were slaves, with their bodies to undertake the journey, their minds to understand the message, and mouths to repeat it accurately to the recipient. In our world of networked machines and programs, the problem of keeping communications secret has still not been solved. In anthropomorphic metaphor that refer to those ancient slaves’ bodies, we still refer to the header and body of a message.”

That is of course a big exaggeration. Нead and body metaphors did not come to email from our memory about slaves who were delivering their masters’ correspondence. Head and body of the message are not referring at all to heads and bodies of slaves. Their meaning is actually almost the opposite. In English head and body in their meaning of upper part and main part are used in paper layouts, and in programming and scripting languages. And from there they came to email.

For example, on a printed page the head is the part might contain the name of the newspaper and page numbers, the body is the actual content. In programming languages, header-files contain defintions about the code that is stored in another file.

However, these are just associations and metaphors. What really worries me is that slave labor is still used in digital interfaces, in particular for cursor moving.

In an 1998 interview to W3J, Tim Berners-Lee formulated his attitude to private home pages:

They may call it a home page, but it’s more like the gnome in somebody’s front yard than the home itself.*

Pages of amateurs were always an easy target. Usability experts, content providers and especially professional designers never miss a chance to kick those who were writing “Welcome to my Home Page” on their page. For example in 2005, the Dutch interaction designer Hayo Wagenaar, with whom I shared a panel at Decade of Webdesign conference, flung a remark:

The question is, what do we think of amateurs getting involved in web design? It feels like getting stuck on the highway behind a caravan.

Obviously Tim Berners-Lee was irritated by the activities and aesthetics popping up in the medium he invented and was in my opinion unjustly underestimating processes happening in minds and on pages of web amateurs. I could not share his arrogance until 20th of March 2007 when Google announced their themes for iGoogle: Seasonal Scape, Tea House, Bus Stop and others:

On that day, Jessica Ewing, Google Product Manager wrote in the official Google blog:

… you can choose between the classic theme and the six new themes we’ve designed. We hope this feature makes the Google homepage feel a little more like, well, home.

Well, may be it is style of the graphics itself that makes me think about gnomes and front yard kitsch. May be the matter is Google’s vision of the users as little plaster figures that feel good when the the lawn looks neat. Finally, 9 years later, Berners-Lee’s analogy makes sense for me.

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* Was published in the 3rd issue of W3 Journal, but only only Frans and archive.org kept a copy of it.

Two years ago the sarcastic author of Stoge.org wrote:

Blogging is a form of vanity publishing: you can dress it up in fancy terms, call it “paradigm shifting” or a disruptive technology”, the truth is that blogs consist of senseless teenage waffle. Adopting the blogger lifestyle is the literary equivalent of attaching tinselly-sprinkles to the handelbars of your bicycle…*

My western friends say to me that tinselly-sprinkles should look like on the photo below, not necessary pink though. And I’d better not waste time interpreting it, the comparison is only offensive, without implication.

Five years ago Henry Jenkins came up with a more positive analogy in the article “Blog It!” written for Technology Review:

Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution.**

This game with words is exiting. But did not really work for communication design students in the south of Germany, where snowboarding is sport exercised every weekend and surfing would be a matter of extreme excitement, risk and being cool.

Myself, I’m not sure what sport I find more thrilling: surfing or snowboarding (or bicycling). And what is more cool, blogging or not blogging. And five years later it is not possible to talk about bloggers and “the rest of us.” But what I think is specially curious about the analogy of Jenkins is that in fact, if not bloggers and blogging, surfing as an online activity would already vanish.

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*Found in introduction to Geert Lovink’s new book “0 Comments” (2007).
**Quoted from Henry Jenkins compilation of articles “Fans, Bloggers, And Gamers” (2006). The Technology Review site does not keep a copy of it.

I’ve just finished to read Siegfried Zielinski’s “Deep Time of the Media“. It is an inspiring book. You’ll wish you were an inventor or a scientist after you read it, not an artist or blogger. In the end of the book the author gives you hope, because in his eyes media artists are very similar to medieval scientists. Zielinski is a master of metaphors. In the nearest future I’d like to elaborate more on his vision of media artists as alchemists, and to debunk an anthropomorphic metaphor on page 73.

But for now I scanned an illustration from page 252: a not very known work of Fritz Kahn (1888-1968), one of the principal creators of the 20th century conceptual medical illustration. You probably know his Man as Industrial Palace visualisation of 1926.

Kahn’s comparative analysis of ear and car results in a very powerful graphic. When you look at it you understand what a significance the automobile had a century ago. What a power. What a temptation to see it in everything. “AUTO und OHR” is a masterpiece of infographics: clear, imaginative and deceitful. While I was contemplating about it, a former student of mine sent me a picture of a computer case he just seen at CEBIT.

What an awakening.

To cheer up the Open Source Software crowd, an equity research analyst came up with this slide (page 40) in his presentation on Open Source Software business models, stating that open source can be turbo expensive as well.

I guess if I had to bring this thought to venture capital money-bags, I’d use the same example. If I’d have to convince housewives on the same topic, I’d put together Chanel vs. second hand Mark&Spencer (sold this week for 4 £ on eBay):

If my audience would be preschool kids, I’d avoid prices, but still would find an example of different implementation levels. Like this:

But the author of the Open Source Lamborghini Dream did not talk in front of kids or housewives, or venture capitalists. His talked to open source developers and specialists.

I would find it alarming, but as it seems the audience loved it, which is even more alarming, because it proves that there are no convincing examples from the world of software.

But, I should confess, it is very rare that somebody is giving a Powerpoint presentation in my presence, so maybe car pictures are sort of part of the presentation culture, a power point gag, a way to grasp attention.

Coming back to Lamborghini: By itself is not an example of high level implementation standards. It is an example of a prestigious, luxurious toy, mostly seen in rap videos and in news reports on Russian oligarchs. To see it in the context of Open Source Software is frustrating. As well as to read in the previous slide (39), that the OSS Market “exhibits aspects of a branded consumer luxury good. Strong brand preference – like perfume.” Paradoxically he compares software and perfume while at the same time suggesting that software has no smell.