Multipurpose Room

Interface Culture Introduction and McLuhan

Started reading Interface Culture by Steven Johnson. While reading I wondered how many people know the tv shows? He talked in the recent interview with Jesse James Garrett that he had shopped the proposal for the book in 1994 and it was published nine years ago. The references to modern culture did seem a bit dated, but not the ideas.

The introduction builds on McLuhan’s analysis of extensions of man which is still relevant. Johnson cites McLuhan’s Understanding Media when talking about how the pace of new technologies (extensions) being introduced helps us understand the impact of new technologies. I have been puzzling about this a lot lately in light of the McLuhanisms that “the content of new media is old media” and “does this fish know there’s water?” In other words, does the speedup only help us understand the old media, the new content, and not really help us understand the new media? I think the answer is in McLuhan’s Laws of Media.

The other point that really stood out for me in the introduction was bitmap as a new medium. I work with it everyday and did not really think about it. For me the computer really has two distinct paths from the bits of 0’s and 1’s. The first was the grouping bits into groups of 8 and later 16 to create the code that makes these letters on the screen. ASCII is probably the best known and there are others. This is keyboard computer. The bits are also used to digitize the analog. This is where the bitmap is used to create images and take analog mouse (or pad) input. This also includes sounds and combinations with images or multimedia. This is the bitmap computer. The laptop that most of us use is the hybrid of both. And the web is becoming the storehouse of both characters and these digitization.

I’m not certain how much of Interface Culture I’ll get to in the next few weeks, but I’ll probably go right to the chapter on Links. Beyond the characters and digitization of the analog, I think links are the new technology of the web that is changing our reality. I few years ago I read Albert-Laslo Barabasi’s Linked and found it enlightening. So I’m interested to see what Johnson has to say about Links since he wrote it five years earlier.

posted by Ray @ Tuesday, July 25, 2006