1994
The last illustration of the The UNIX-HATERS Handbook, p.316

“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)

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.

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:

“However, what strikes me most about the Wired app is how amazingly similar it is to a multimedia CD-ROM from the 1990′s. This is not a compliment and actually turns out to be a fairly large problem […]
The only real differentiation between the Wired application and a multimedia CD-ROM is the delivery mechanism: you download it via the App Store versus buying a CD-ROM at the now defunct Egg Head store at your local strip mall. And I really mean that comparison. For all of the interactivity that was touted in the Flash prototype, what we’ve really ended up with is a glorified slide show. Instead of the “Next” and “Previous” buttons you might have been used to on those old CD-ROMs of yore, you instead swipe left and right to change pages (well *cough* images of pages).”

Earlier this year, reviewing iPad version of the Daily newspaper Scott Rosenberg noticed:

“The Daily’s designers are eager to show off sparkling graphics, integrated video, and the swipe-ability that the iPad allows. Unfortunately, they are defining “interactivity” the way the lost pioneers of the 1994-era CD-ROM “multimedia revolution” defined it. They have built a gleaming but limited set of interfaces for users to interact with static, prepackaged content. “

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.