Interface Culture by Steven Johnson
Posted on January 5th, 2006
This was a tough one to get through. The book bills itself as "an extended attempt to think about the object world of technology as though it belonged to the word of culture, or as though those two worlds were united." Which is great and all, don't get me wrong. But it's out-there sort of material, the kind of thing that might give you flashbacks to college lectures that make you question why you took that class, why you deserve such punishment, and why time has suddenly slowed down so dramatically leaving you little other recourse for survival except to take a waking nap.
I'm not saying there's no validity behind the conclusions that can be drawn from comparing the social "links" within a Dickens novel to the links that connect one web page to the next. I'm just saying it's a stretch. Things like this pop up throughout the course of the book; you have to resign yourself to grinning and bearing them. In between there are some really interesting ideas. Vannevar Bush and the Memex show up, a nice correlation for me at least with some of the videos I've recently seen surrounding the MyLifeBits Project. I'll quote a passage below that struck me as a great reason why social bookmarking services aren't all that, and why there's a sore need for a tool that can capture the succession of pages you look through when you're searching for information:
p. 121
Anyone who has spent any time roaming across the Internet will immediately recognize the difference here. Bush's Memex owner builds that "trail of interest" as he explores the information-space on his desk. Surfers, as a rule, follow trails of interest, through links that have been assembled in advance by other followers: designers, writers, editors, and so on. The Web surfer depends on the charity of others for his associative links; the "trailblazer" rolls his own. And most important, the trails endure. They remain part of the Memex's documentary record; the connection between the bow and the principles of elasticity isn't simply strung together momentarily, only to be discarded hours later. The connection remains permanently etched onto the Memex's file system. Five years after this initial research, a return to the material on elastics might send our Memexer off to the bow-and-arrows article, or deliver up his long-forgotten notes on the subject. That accumulated record of past trails means that the device grows smarter-- or at least more associative-- the more you use it, as the file system is laced together by thousands of associative trails.
Your average Nethead can create bookmarks, of course, but these are just momentary excerpts from a longer train of thought, like snapshots or postcards mailed home from an overseas vacation. The journey itself-- the movement from thought to thought, document to document-- is the key here. Bookmarking a single page barely scratches the surface. Most of us carry around bookmark files littered with random sightings, recommendations, favorite locales, secret hideaways, and so on. It's a remarkably personal, idiosyncratic list. (Trading bookmark files-- one of the first rituals to develop in Web culture-- has a wonderfully confessional quality to it, like letting someone eavesdrop on your therapy sessions.) But despite their personalized texture, those bookmarks have no connection to one another. They're isolate unites, monads. You can create a master list of all your favorite resources, but there's no way to describe the relationships between them, the links of association that make that personal web intelligible to you.
The Memex was designed to organize information in the most intuitive way possible, based not on file cabinets or superhighways but on our usual habits of thinking-- following leads, making connections, building trails of thought. Bush wanted the Memex to respond to the user's worldview; the trails would wind their way through documents in varied, idiosyncratic ways, threading through the information-space at the user's discretion. The Web has realized much of Bush's vision, but the core insight-- the need for a trail-building device-- remains unfilled, at least on the Internet.
Here's another idea bomb that makes this book worth reading:
p. 156
Words cycle through our daily vocabulary at different rhythms. Certain words stick with us for life, and remain immediately accessible to us at any moment: the names of loved ones, the building-block grammar of our native tongue, the primary colors and cardinal numbers, and so on. Other words wax and wane, in sync with forces larger than the individual speaking them: the fashionable vagaries of slang, the geek-speak of technological innovation, the "ethnic" idiom derived from broader demographic trends... Most words, however, lie somewhere in between: drifting in and out of our regular vocabulary, like a band of itinerants cursed with a hankering to settle down.
And finally:
p. 67
Software like The Palace makes me think that the whole "Web surfing" metaphor may prove inadequate for the social meanderings of most netizens. Real-world surfing, after all, is an exceedingly solitary activity; in its traditional usage, the Web surfer is seen battling the ceaseless waves of information flow, without much regard for the other surfers out there navigating the same channels... The Palace, on the other hand, suggests a much more pedestrian metaphor: Baudelaire's flaneur, the "man of the crowd" drawn to the tumult of the nineteenth-century boulevard, drawn to the "kaleidoscope of consciousness" found among the teeming masses prowling those metropolitan streets. The chance encounters of The Palace interface are a sign of things to come: social interfaces that approximate the thrill, and the unpredictability, of casual encounters in a more textured space, shaped by the physical presence of those around you and the possibility of interaction that goes beyond a few polite epithets.
I can't say that I'm especially struck by the thesis of this book, or even that I'll be able to remember much of what it's about by next week beyond the stuff I've captured above. On one hand, I walk away from this book not really feeling as if I've internalized any of it. But on the other hand, the bits and pieces that do stand out do so really really prominently, and could be the stuff that some very interesting projects are made of. So overall it's a win!