borders
Pushing
at that percussive gel filled screen in front of me, the screenıs skin ripples
slightly to my touch. This thin titanium box is a tree whose roots extend
over and within the planet and into outer space. Webcams mounted on the Mars
rover, SETI space blips link me to places I will never see with my own eyes.
I push
at my skin, and am a little thrilled and disturbed to note that it too ripples
slightly to my touch, having a similar timbre and viscosity as the screen.
The largest organ of the body, the great container, the esteemed purifier,
the separator between outside and inside, between smooth and ripply, between
liquid and the concoction of gasses that make up the air around me. Another
screen.
These
surfaces, these interfaces separating two phases of matter, form a common
boundary and help me to know where I am in the world. The surfaces of everyday
life amidst computational systems, however, make things less and less clear.
When I think about computing, I think about boundaries and boundary crossing,
translation: transforming the world around us into data, and from data back
into the world. This process seems more and more transparent, but the transitional
practice continues, and the interface remains. Like the interior transition
between thinking and speaking, thinking and typing or thinking and clicking
are shifts as well, and these everyday actions bring about a range of questions
about the borders between bodies and machines.
/*Sebastian
asks me, Are you writing fiction or is this an academic essay? Are interfaces
directions to something, or something in and of themselves?
*/
However
we see the progression of these physical ways of interacting with the computer,
interfaces play an important role in shaping the conceptual experience of
computational worlds, and, indeed, the real world around us. This essay is
a meditation on the everyday computational interfaces which surround us, offering
four conceptual sites for consideration. Each site marks a symbolic progression
in thinking about the way computers are integrated into our everyday lives.
This document enacts a conversation, an experiment which offers as many questions
as answers about the various ways we think about interfaces.
The links
between people and computers are only understandable through our interfaces:
both the site and the process of individuation between bodies, objects, tools,
and concepts. The first interfaces to explore, then, are the physical, material
interfaces of digital devices.
boxes
Is
the screen speaking back, redefining itself, redefining the box? It seems
as though non Western ideas about interfaces and boxes could bring unique
systems, where hardware and software could reflect alternate notions of time,
space, place. While our computers remain in boxes for the time being, they
become ever smaller and faster, and it is more difficult to distinguish thinking
from unthinking objects.
So
many computers in so many homes. In the suburbs my friends keep home offices
in spare bedrooms and basement annexes. In the small apartments of the city,
it is often the dining room or kitchen space that is refashioned for the computerıs
ever-presence. The tables hold more plastic boxes and power cables than lasagna
and sushi. Eating over his laptop, Sebastian looks over to me to ask if I
see any napkins. At night, friends gather around laptop screens, lovers bring
them to bed to watch movies, the box piled on pillows in an intimate agreement.
How many of us will have our computers tell us bedtime stories?
There
was no one "inventor" of the computer interface. In the history of computing,
dials and switches eventually gave way to keyboards based on typewriters and
teletype machines. These were used to record data on punchcards for machines
such as the behemoth ENIAC computer of 1946. Vannevar Bush, once director
of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the US, is counted
among early interface visionaries. In his 1945 article "As We May Think,"
Bush offered models for a variety of methods of input and output including
desk-based computer systems, speech interfaces, and even a walnut-sized camera
worn on oneıs forehead. Interesting and still experimental-seeming devices
such as the light gun interface were later developed for use in air defense
control systems. A plethora of working interface technologies were developed
during the 20th Century The light gun was followed by the light
pen in the early 1960s. Xerox PARC researchers led in both software and hardware
interfaces, and went on to originate many of our graphical user interfaces,
including the mouse.
While
designers and engineers work to erase mechanical portals between users and
machines and science fiction writers fantasize about direct mental connections
to computing systems, it seems the opportune moment to shift ourselves out
of our perception of current, everyday computing experiences. We need to examine
the interfaces to our virtual selves, these layers of skins, through the beige
box and trailing puck--these still offer, for the most part, the common interface
over the last 25 mass-produced years. If we think in Mandarin, the box, keyboard,
and the mouse are our guo yu, our common, everyday language.
While the box becomes smaller and more stylish, the box is still a box.
Donald
Norman, in his writings on user-centric interface design, insists that makers
of objects and of virtual worlds create a conceptual model that users can
understandmodels that become a part of the user's intuitive knowledge as
much as gravity or the properties of water. Designers work to provide "intuitive
exchanges" with systems-- any type of system that requires interaction. Examples
include user-friendly escalators, doorways in buildings, shifting controls
inside an automobile, or computer application interfaces. The argument for
intuitive systems is culturally based, of course; for what constitutes an
intuitive signal to one person in Taiwan tapping the table to communicate
that a tea cup is full, or knowing the shoe cabinet should be near or outside
the front dooris distinctly different than an understanding of the same social
practices in another culture. Interfaces are the means through which we take
clues and signals in a given culture. Learning new interface systems changes
our behavior and is one thing that makes travel so invigorating.
As a social
practice, interfaces should be highly contested and constantly reforming sites
of social negotiation. Yet the computer box paradigm is pervasive and its
design colonialist in nature. Asian manufacturers and suppliers follow design
trends that have been, for the most part, established by the West. Keyboards
internationally follow the English language model of input and define how
language is translated from hand to machine. Computer literacy around the
world has meant that citizens adopt retrofitted beige or black boxes into
their homes and community centers and pursue a Western style of work and leisure.
Somehow, a mouse in one hand has become a naturalized method of geographical
and conceptual navigation.
I encounter
challenges in articulating the boundaries among computer worlds, systems,
and the physical world all of the time. The most recent reminder of pervasiveness
of "the box" occurred a few months ago on a recent project working with middle
school children and an assessment team. We are designing a complex online
system that appeals to underrepresented groups. Visiting the Computer Clubhouse
in Brooklyn NY for a design session, I asked a group of 11-13 year old girls
to draw a computer game world I had just described: a world in which characters
would want to care for others, and do things together socially. Every one
of the 11 girls sat down and drew the box, the keyboard, and mouse instead
of sketching the fantasy world I described. The dominance of the box has infused
the cultural imaginary to a point where it cannot be conceptually separated
from stories and ideas.
<image
1: BARANıS NET>
The worlds
we so seamlessly drift in and out of are interfaced through boxes and wires
and graphic templates, which categorize our work and play. I, for one, have
to constantly remind myself of this. Perhaps it is some kind of dreamworld
I enter when I wake up in the morning, but I no longer notice the device itself,
its color and shape, how my hands reach for the mouse. Like signing, I speak
with my hands. I do not remember that I communicate through typing or that
I use a mouse or touchpad; in the same way, it is difficult to remind onesı
self of framing and the limitations of oneıs native language.
In the
daily quest to transfer ideas from head to document, I often take these interfaces
for granted. Already ensconced inside the realm of possibility the computer
represents, I function inside its unique conceptual framework. In other words,
the technology has become as invisible to me as anyone else working with the
machines, as invisible as pen and paper may have been 50 years ago. But I
remind myself that we must constantly examine the kinds of ink we use, the
shape of the pen, the economic systems which produce these pens, how the pen
shapes thinking, and the reasons we use pens in the first place over other
recording devices. In the real world, pens and pencils donıt necessarily represent
cultural systems and values, but I believe that computers do. Computers run
by relying upon zeros and ones, ons and offs, hard drives gridded out in block
parcels, software constructed in distinct hierarchies. Computers contain nested
structures within structures, each drawing from a different discipline: engineering
to design, architecture to literature. Once inside a paradigm, the underlying
assumptions on which it is built become invisible. However, as Thomas Kuhn
suggests, paradigms can also be very useful, gaining their status primarily
as they are more successful approaches than their competitors; they allow
inquiry and work to advance faster than beginning the learning process all
over again. Users pick up the appropriate conventions depending on the task
at hand. Paradigms can speed up research, scholarship, and other forms of
work, but at the expense of taking the underlying system for granted. Though
computing has been in the mainstream imaginary for a relatively short time--
the internet for just a decade-- the priorities and use of the system seem
to go by unquestioned. Thus there is a tension between our current desire
to challenge dominant systems and our need to make use of the efficiencies
they provide.
Invisible
interfaces may make computing, coffee making, and navigating tollways easier,
but such invisibility may also mean that many of the US public will be unable
to participate in authoring culture. Computer literacy courses at many high
schools across the US are fundamentally typing classes in graphically organized
software packages. Computing as an ideological system is not yet a topic of
the humanities, and students are not taught to question and delve into conceptual
systems the computer represents. It is no coincidence that the mystical and
renegade role of the computer hacker surfaced in the 1980s as automobiles,
phone systems, banks, and national security reached cohesive automation--the
hacker mythos came at a time when the gaps which could undermine power relations
seemed to vanish, where everday tinkerers lost access to the mechanical aspects
of daily life and the hacker, someone able to control a system -- work in
and around it -- became the outlaw or artist crusader, a mythological hero/devil
figure in the popular imaginary.
/*Sebastian
asks me, What exactly is inaccessible about a computer? They just follow human
commands.
*/
Perhaps
it is not so much the material that is inaccessible but the culture of computing
itself, the guild-like feeling with its other language and presumed skill
set from which everyday computer users feel alienated. While theoretically
my mother, for example, could rework her operating system hierarchy to elevate
the game of solitaire as the metaphor for her operating system, the perceived
elite status and the specialized knowledge of those able to program computers
affects an individualıs perceived agency with their computers, especially
in underrepresented groups. According to the National Science Foundation,
the number of women earning bachelorıs degrees in computer science in 1984
was 37 percent of the total, but by 1996 fell to 28 percent of the total number
of graduates. Women, as one category among many not represented in computer
science, are not increasingly attracted to a discipline that guides much of
the fabric of everyday life in technologically influenced (determined?) nations.
Currently
there is growing research addressing such questions at the socio-cognitive
and cultural borders of technological innovation. Implicit Association Task
tests and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging studies continue to demonstrate
that people have inherent biases down to physiological response in their recognition
of images and words. Categorical tests on impressions of race and age consistently
show that whites have a strong same-race identification than persons of minority
groups in the US. Other studies show that for a significant percentage of
the population, men are associated with science, women with humanities; violent
and negative language with African Americans; Asians with ability in mathematics.
Stereotypes, produced by culture, have been shown to become encoded into bodily
responses to images. This means that at the very least, stereotypes are inadvertently
encoded into our computational boxes and our everyday experiences, in icons,
tools, and data structures.
Now that
over half of US households contain computers with Internet connections, the
daily lives of many citizen-consumers are bound to the computer. Every day
computer users sit down, check their email, search for a movie trailer, read
the news, balance a budget, or download digital camera images. The interface
to the operating system of a computer sets the stage for the understanding
and prioritization of data. After all, it is merely a representational tactic
that "My Documents" are somehow different than Adobe Photoshop's
"Read Me" files. While data for the two sets of information may
be stored in neighboring blocks on the physical hard drive, within the operating
systemıs interface paradigm they are stowed worlds apart. We continue to believe
our documents are special, our words and codes are somehow fundamentally different
than all of the other material filling the blocks of the hard drive. These
constructed conceptual models are not neutral--interfaces (representing hierarchies
and data structures) and the boxes carry meaning. For one, operating system
structures emphasize an individualıs separateness. Indeed, they emphasize
individuality in general. Group authored documents such as collaborative projects
are not reflected in the structure of the system or in its iconography. Functions
are separate from data; the network is conceptually demarcated as different
than the local device.
How the
box is shaped is of paramount importance. So it what it contains. The space
of computational systems, and how these spaces are represented to users, is
the second place to examine interfaces.
Maps
The man climbed onto
the fifth rung of the ladder, grabbed his hammer, and knocked a hole in my
wall, plaster spinning everywhere in the air and across my shiny floors. He
knocked a second hole next to the first, and dug his hand around the recess.
A third hole was needed. One by one, the holes took over, my rooms effortlessly
disappearing into the rubble of the moonthe walls a web of chalky river delta,
a map held together with hair and dust. He promised that another would come
by to fix it all up, to make sure that no evidence was ever seen, but of course,
I would always know. It was already past.
This
is one of the lessons of Einstein's theory of relativitylooking inevitably
means looking back, for light travels at a finite speed If our center, our
universe, is everywhere or nowhere, we do know that such a center could only
be the present. We race from present to past at 186,284 miles per second.
This text, that laughter, is perhaps a nanosecond away; the moon, almost two
seconds lost. The present can only mean the lack of distance-- a flash, the
recognition of presence, found at the touch of an insectıs wing on the top
of the ear as it flitters off in a mid-June breeze, or the mutual exhalation
between interlocked bodies as the sun breaks to sear the dripping grass after
a fresh-green shower.
Can
I ever map such experiences to interfaces? Or are the interfaces maps to begin
with, laying out the terrain before me? And what terrain do these interfaces
describe, exactly?
The
screen glows before me. I reach out to it. Am I touching another map, a mobile
map in time, fleeing backwards? If so, what was just here? What did I miss?
Other maps. Menus pulling down laundry lists, texts, buttons, the colorful
boxes and bubbles we press for their wiggle of acknowledgement. Icons, little
actors on the desktop, waiting for stage directions. Operating systems do
not only impose order but behavior: the desktop includes animated icons that
catch a userıs attention through scripted behaviors. This is a symbolic world,
interfaces filled with metaphors, functioning much like signs in other media.
Interfaces are sets of maps? Green for valleys, brown for mountains, and icons
for roadside attractions... Maps are the original medium to use shorthand
systems like icons to abstract space and time. Interfaces are certainly maps,
graphic visualizations of the computer world, of the net something that depicts
something to do with: space, landscape, topology, topography.
The internet
as a topology is a dynamic and fluid terrain. Following work in the early
1960s, electrical engineer Paul Baran distributed a series of influential
papers entitled "On Distributed Communications" in 1964 while working at the
RAND research corporation. These papers proposed detailed networked communications
models that would protect the US Government systems from enemy attack. Baran
suggested that distributed networks, as seen in Figure 2, are less vulnerable
to attack than other network structures. Baranıs ideas were especially powerful
and continue to influence the structure of the Internet we have today. When
introduced, the distributed network design countered paradigms of the day,
suggesting that unreliable links in the network system could be almost as
effective within the network as reliable links if there were enough of them
webbed together. The density distribution of the unreliable links could counteract
node or link failures.
<image:baranıs
net>
Baranıs
simple diagram of how the distributed communications systems might function
not only as a diagram or map of the structure of networked communications,
but the proper interface to understand them. Current interfaces use "back"
and "forward," "pages" and "bookmarks"-- metaphors still firmly rooted to
the centuries old technology of the book. Strangely, Internet browsers rarely
show users how data gets from point A to point B, as though the structure
of the system has nothing to do with its content. Rather, to see our maps
form through alternate kinds of geographies might help demystify the topology
of the Internet and of an individual computer.
/*Sebastian
asks me, What is not a map? So many things can be called a map.
*/
Currently,
interfaces are abstractions that could be said to describe an underlying topology
of the self. Interfaces become maps for our personal geographies with the
computer, a user-centric geography instead of a spatially-oriented one. What
if we integrate these with other maps of the net? Would differences between
an individual computer and the network blur? This ever-present, fuzzy quality
of networked computer culture is the third site at which to investigate interfaces.
The
Network
The
men had come back to my apartment. There had been a very slight high pitched
buzz ringing throughout the building for two days, and they believed the source
of the problem could be found within my apartment walls. They entered once
again and began opening the holes they had covered last week, beginning a
new kind of map, onr of wires and strings, colors and connections. Then they
went to my neighborsı, an elderly man from Hong Kong, living in the other
rear-facing apartment. His walls were covered in brown pegboard rimmed with
s-hooks to hold cups and cooking implements. They started digging a hole from
his side, pulling off his pegboard coordinates to connect our spaces, starting
first with screwdrivers, then sledgehammers. Gradually our two spaces became
one, as the wall broke down. The buzz remained. How had the wall held itself
together? Our two apartments were distinct only in décor and the shadow where
the wall had once been, the little buzz echoing across the wood. My neighbor
sat calmly at his kitchen table, directly across from me as I typed, mirroring
a part of me that must be tranquil, and I, perhaps reflecting his interior
agitation. I liked that we were a part of each otherıs lives today, and might
not be tomorrow. For once, looking at the stranger, I was not nostalgic or
filled with longing, but perfectly in love with precarious balance. I smiled
at him across our respective shiny kitchen tables.
The nature of instability
is woven into the fabric of the world. As the universe expands, we chase behind
it, part of the Copernican flock. We take our plaster smashed piles and boxes
of papers and favorite mug along. My velocity of recession is directly equal
to your distance. Could my body swell, until I only feel my teeth and your
nimble fingers? The penetrating quality of the wind depends on its ceaselessness--this
is what makes the wind so powerful. And, time is its instrument, as it is
in Hubbleıs formula. Is the outcome of all things disintegration and dispersion,
or does a new beautiful order emerge from trajectories, breezes of attraction
and repulsion, spinning magnificence for the while until the equation no longer
works? I feel relief when my wireless network finds a signal. Somehow in the
chaos around me I am connectedand this may be even more true once we move
from a fixed network model to an ad hoc network model, where connections occur
as needed.
You
are connected to me, I am connected my neighbor, electronically. Somewhere.
Our banks, our leases, our Amazon purchases, friendster and blog pages connecting
us together along the speed of subscription. Reach. There is little there
to see, but the social fabrics which look as if they are intangible are in
fact made of study threads, carrying weight in the semblance of tinted text
and elusive images. How do we get from here to there in a space that needs
no x, y, z coordinates to exist, when we cannot easily define the structures
upon which our content rests?
The
overlap of the physical world and the virtual is a permeable and indistinct
site of exchange, with certain non-miscible elements keeping separate -- for
the time being: the sky, coffee, touching. This line, unlike the chemical
properties of oil and water, shifts through time, changes with the latest
buzz words, technologies, home grown wikis and party e-vite sites. And obviously
there is cause for concern as all of this data can and will be monitored by
disciplines of power: state and corporate interests.
The rapid
spread of Internet accessibility and everyday use closely mirrors other patterns
in the spread of 20th Century domestic technologies. For the first
time since the advent of the telephone, the space of the house has been dramatically
redefined. A useful study by Carolyn Marvin details how the telephone was
the first electric medium to enter the home and challenge traditional boundaries
between public and private space. Likewise, the growing numbers of computers
in the home means that many households are connected; it also signifies a
shift in the way domestic space is understood. The internet is a primary communication
paradigm for the majority of people in the United States. It is no wonder
that the physical world and its associated tools are changing to reflect the
way we think inside the network. From contact lists on telephones and chat
tools to multi-user online games, computational thinking has infused our everyday
interactions.
The software
packages and operating systems surround us, and we crave more and more connectivity.
Browser specific tools such as search engines, for example, offer one of many
conceptual frameworks for desire. Yet for the majority of computer users,
the hidden mechanics of systems are a satisfactory, even expected, given.
Like Leonardo Da Vinciıs encoded notebooks, we live in a culture in which
we create machines keep our secrets from us. Users must like secrets, for
more and more we desire ease of use and effacement of the technical workings
of daily life.
We can map these connections
through games as one type of frameworkmaps have grids, construction sites
have scaffolding, spiders have webs. Examining ubiquity according to geography
is only one way to glimpse how everyday computing has changed us.
/*Sebastian
asks me, Where does the map end?
*/
Mapping
ubiquity. Interfaces are maps, graphic visualizations of the net, depicting
how software and hardware creators structure the terrain. The real and Baudrillardıs
hyperreal images have contaminated each other, or rather, merged, enacting
a self where reflection and physical identity are one and cultural forms and
selves are reproduced endlessly. This site of blur happens most with an individualıs
use of the computer. Images are never fixed, texts deleted and updated, leaving
no trace of origin or time. The blurring of space, location, and time leaves
no sense of near or far, past or present. As Foucault noted, ubiquitous disciplines
of power control society through surveillance and control how the body is
constituted. Many cybertheorists have argued that the network now extends
the body through connections on the net. And this body is itself extended,
ballooning like a slippery tent through the world and even to such distant
places as Mars. Skin is ubiquitous; it becomes a schematic of abstract spaces,
Moscow and Berlin and La Paz and Caracas and Atlantis. Skin is a living record
of time and dislocated place: a living, wrinkling map. We live through this
skin and this map.
The equivalent
to skin and its markings lies in code, in programming. Computer programming
provides the ultimate map, for it is both a language with its symbolic representations,
and itself a body, a place where language transcends representation and becomes
action.
Objects
If
interfaces and systems are written in code, are they ultimately linguistic
maps? Must a map a non-linguistic representation of a space? If not, code,
programming, provides the ultimate map. Looking at surfaces, or looking inside,
maps contain the mapmakers and their values, the viewpoint of the mapmaker
makes the map. And when programming languages, the only human-designed/created
languages, are used, do they shape the map by the thoughts and biases of the
makers and implementers of the programs?
Jef Raskin,
the inventor behind the Macintosh computer, notes that we need systems that
better reflect the way humans work. He argues that software packages with
separate types of interfaces do not meet userıs needs first, and yet they
structure how we conceptually think of tasks. The metaphors we usedesktops,
navigation, "going here," "searching," are the models behind many software
interfaces, molding how users understand digital experiences.
Computer
programming is the heart of the creation of software, and it too is influenced
by metaphorsin fact, metaphors in programming have a strong affect on how
digital tools are made and used. Therefore, a look at the structures informing
the programming process specifically at they way objects are created in object-
oriented programmingis essential in the exploration of the way in which everyday
digital experiences are also structured. I also look to mathematics, because
some of programming though not all is grounded in the mathematics of doing:
numbers, functions, and algorithms that one can conceivably construct.
/*Sebastian
asks me, Are you interested in semantics or in language structures, ways of
saying or ways of thinking?
*/
When
we study programming languages, we distinguish between semantics and syntax.
While one can program in an object-oriented style in a particular programming
language (C++ or Java, for example), the design of object oriented style is
a separate entity. The words we use to create an object, say, a chair, are
one thing; the way we call a chair or multiple chairs into being, instantiating
them, is another aspect. It is all rather Platonic the class is the idea,
the actual chairs we sit on, instances.
In technical
circles, object oriented programming is the most commonly applied programming
approach, used for programming things from databases to games. Object oriented
programming is both a procedure and a metaphor. When writing object-oriented
software, programmers define the world in terms of a set of objects. A crowd
would be, for example, 100 instances of person objects, with various property
changes (size, shape, color). Object oriented programs are typically structured
in a hierarchy of objects, with sets of objects or individuals having particular
behaviors. In object-thinking, an object is a Boolean shape, like the human
body: inside of an object is true, outside an object is false, the surface,
the skin, must be defined if it is to be recognized as another object. Objects
are distinct, malleable, and controllable. They can be programmed to make
choices and to behave in particular ways. They have their own properties and
can encounter the properties of other objects at various hierarchical levels.
Whatever
form oneıs conception of mathematical reality might take, it cannot escape
its cultural background. Acknowledging that truth, objectivity, scope, and
scale in mathematics are concepts based on a particular culture at a particular
time, mathematician Raymond Wilder argues that disciplines affected by mathematics
are just as influenced by the culture at large as any other discipline, whether
it be art, music, or scientific fields such as medicine.
Mathematical
logic diffuses from mathematics to the natural sciences and technology, infusing
these related disciplines with methods and concepts. Object-thinking has certainly
infused both the culture of computing and the technologies developed by the
industry. Contemporary interfaces, for example, map not so much spatial geographies
but objects. Functions are broken down into one-word commands, and applications
that may complete many kinds of related activities are represented under one
icon. One product per icon, one icon per site on the map. Like scenic spots
or roadside rest areas, icons invoke spatial phenomenon through the differentiation
of a place as an object. The distinctions and delineations between documents
and programs, even the desktop metaphor with its objects in hierarchies seems
to follow the separateness of OOP. What object oriented programming fails
to deal with well is the fuzziness of boundaries and borders, when something
needs to cross-different kinds of object models, or when things operating
in a given system are contradictory.
Advocates
of object oriented design argue that it represents a "natural" way to think
about the world, even when programmers new to object oriented design have
difficulty identifying classes, or groups/types of objects, and in forming
hierarchical relationships among objects. The object-oriented paradigm assumes
that the world is made of objects and relationships, and that people think
about the world accordingly. I would argue that object-thinking is not necessarily
a "natural" way to think, but rather one of several kinds of epistemological
practices which are not consciously recognized by program designers and programming
practitioners. The object model, for one, reinforces a rationalistic and deterministic
view of problems and solutions; this could be because of computer programming/system
designıs disciplinary place as a science (like mathematics) rather than, for
example, a creative field.
Gilles
Deleuze, in his investigation of the creativity and "nomad art", remarks that
one must be immersed in the material of creativity and collapse the visual
aspect of observation in favor of losing oneself into "the landscape" at close
range. In an era that is characterized by the use of computers for a multitude
of functions--one tool has reached so many in so many fields-- this material
or medium of everyday work and play is the computer. "The haptic function
and close vision presuppose the smooth, which has no background, plane, or
contour, but rather changes in direction and local linkages between parts"
(p. 169). Here, not only does Deleuzeıs description sound like the internet
as a structure, but also recognizes the idea of the interface, some kind of
haptic function, providing for close vision. To imagine this act with a computer
means losing oneself to the inherent properties of code and the possibilities
of code: another kind of interface, not graphic, not linguistic, but metaphoric
and structural. From the box to maps to networks to programming, we should
continuously invent new metaphors and structures to sample how they affect
thinking and computer artifacts. New metaphors will arise from an infusion
of new thinkingand new authorsin computer system and programming design.
This means to recognize the importance of code and the structures of computational
and algorithmic thinking, to pay attention to the things that pass between
organisms and systems, creating new maps, structures, and new computing paradigms
along the way.
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