Electric Speed, Intro - Steven Johnson, Interface Culture

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Electric Speed, Intro - Steven Johnson,
Interface Culture

• LA
• ASB
• Autumn 04

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What does Leonardo da Vinci have to do with the
interface?

• Johnson views the interface as a cultural
  phenomenon, but also as a technological one
• Science and Art
• Technology and Culture
• Why is that?

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The Renaissance

• Gutenberg 1456
• The number of books in Europe in 1456
• What to print??
• Leonardo da Vinci 1452 1519 scientist and
  artist

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James Joyce

• James Joyce and Ulysses in 1922
• Palimpsest
• Joyce tinkering with a book-machine a
  programmer writing code for the printing press
  platform (code for Gutenbergs hardware)
• 400 years of separation kept them from sharing
  views

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Mass-Media

• Speed Technology used to be slower than today
• The cave paintings
• The goose feather
• The book as mass media from 1456
• The newspaper - a few hundred years old
• The telegraph (Freuds heyday)
• The film late 1800s
• The radio
• The TV mid-1900
• The computer
• Internet available to all from 1995

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Artist - Engineers

• Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin) crosscuts
• ( http//www.suntimes.com/ebert/greatmovies/bat
  tle_potemkin.html )

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Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media The
Extensions of Man, Cambridge MIT Press, 1996, p.
353

• At no time in human culture have men understood
  the psychic mechanisms involved in invention and
  technology. Today it is the instant speed of
  electric information that, for the first time,
  permits easy recognition of the patterns and the
  formal contours of change and development. The
  entire world, past and present, now reveals
  itself to us like a growing plant in an
  enormously accelerated movie. Electric speed is
  synonymous with light and with the understanding
  of causes.

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Marx on technology

• An anarchy of permanent revolution
• He saw this as a force propelling us toward a
  working-class rising
• MacLuhan technological acceleration wouldnt
  necessarily bring us contentment, but it would
  bring understanding.
• That is the great legacy of electric speed.
• The medium is the medium

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Multimedia what does it mean?

• The popular term, "multimedia", was coined by the
  press in the early 1990's. It's used to describe
  a convergence of digital and analog technologies
  in the fields of entertainment, publishing,
  communications, marketing, advertising, and even
  commerce.
• The computer science term for the class of
  software applications that are interactive
  (non-linear) and that include digital assets like
  images and sound is "hypermedia". "Hyper" means
  "above" or "beyond".

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Medium what does it mean?

• An intervening substance through which something
  else is transmitted or carried on. ( The
  American Heritage Dictionary of the English
  Language Fourth Edition. 2000.)
• So, a medium is an entity through which something
  else passes. For example, a spirtual medium is a
  conduit from the dead to the living. An artistic
  medium (painting, sculpture) is a vehicle for the
  ideas of the artist. The "mass media" are
  channels of communication and information. Medium
  refers to something inbetween. The middle of the
  road is a median. To get in the middle of a
  dispute is to mediate. The Mediaeval Ages are
  also called the Middle Ages.
• So a medium is that thing in the middle!

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What is Multimedia?

• Some famous viewpoints to consider"Multimedia?
  As far as I'm concerned, it's reading with the
  radio on!" Rory Bremner"The medium is the
  message." Marshall MacLuhan
• Look here http//www.cs.sunysb.edu/tony/33
  4/whatismultimedia/multimedia.htm

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• What do YOU think multimedia is?

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Johnsons basic idea for the book

• On the most elemental level, I see it (IC) as a
  book of connections, a book of links one in
  which desktop metaphors cohabit with Gothic
  cathedrals, and hypertext links rub shoulders
  with Victorian novels.
• IC, p. 8

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Luddism

• Cultural change necessarily involves
  resistance to change. The term Luddite has been
  resurrected from a previous era to describe one
  who fears or distrusts the inevitable changes
  brought about by new technology.
• The original Luddite revolt occurred in
  1811, against the English Textile factories that
  displaced craftsmen in favour of machines.
  Todays Luddites continue to raise moral and
  ethical arguments against the excesses of modern
  technology to the extent that our inventions and
  technical systems have evolved to control us
  rather than to serve us and to the extent that
  such leviathans can threaten our essential
  humanity.
• By Martin Ryder,  University of Colorado at
  Denver School of Education
• http//carbon.cudenver.edu/mryder/itc_data/luddit
  e.html

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Information-space

• The modern interface
• The desktop
• Windows
• Links
• Text
• Agents
• - Seen in the perspective of the past as well as
  the future

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• The End