Interface Culture: How the Digital Medium--from Windows to the Web--Changes the way We Write, Speak [Hardcover]

Stephen Johnson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 8, 1997

Interfaces -- the visual icons, buttons, and text of a computer screen link us to the technical language within It organize how the world works and thinks. Omnipresent in software, television, video games, ATMs, and telephones, interfaces filter information and thus direct our lives. Steven Johnson, one of the most influential new voices on cyberspace and founder of the on-line magazine Feed (praised by the Economist as "cyberspace for grownups"), launches a radical argument that the ubiquitous interface is in fact a cultural force that, like fiction or painting, both expresses and controls the world's sense of itself in the digital age.

Controversial, clear-sighted, and challenging, Interface Culture argues that interfaces fill a vital role for the wired world. Just as the great novels of Melville, Dickens, and Zola explained a rapidly industrializing society to itself, Web sites, Microsoft Bob, flying toasters, and the creatures and landscapes of video games tell the digital society how to imagine itself and how to get around in the unfamiliar territory of cyberspace.

To put high technology in a historical perspective, Johnson looks back at the cultural forebears of the interface from the maps and travelogues of the Age of Exploration, to the satiric plays and novels of the eighteenth century, to the sitcoms of television. Regarding the future of the interface, Johnson has some predictions as well from what your PC screen will look like in ten years (nothing like it does today) to how new interfaces will alter the style of our conversation, prose, and thoughts. Witty and controversial, fluently written and insightful, Interface Culture is an essential contribution to the debate onhow technology has transformed society.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Steven Johnson turns the tables on the way we consider our computer interfaces. While many discussions focus on how interfaces help us work by adapting to our ways of thinking and our real-world metaphors, Johnson jumps from there to look at how our thinking and world view are altered by our computer interfaces.

He begins with the simple: The mouse improved the spatial nature of our computers by letting us move, by the proxy of our pointers, within the screen. The windows metaphor made cyberspace a 3-D space. And while we tend to think about the graphical nature of interfaces, Johnson also explores the textual side and how it has changed the way we work with the written word.

Interface Culture then goes on to show how, with each advance in technology, the interface shapes our perceptions in new ways. Where mice and windows turned the computing world into cyberspace, agents have created a perception of software as personality. On the larger scale, Johnson sees these tools, originally built on noncyber metaphors, as creating, in their turn, a new set of metaphors for looking at the rest of the world. And while he finds it exciting, he spends considerable time on such shortcomings in our approach to interfacing: what he considers the excessive emphasis on graphics elements at the cost of anything textual. Johnson, who is the editor of the cerebral Feed Web site and whom Newsweek called one of the most influential people in cyberspace, has written an intelligent book about interface design, its relationship to the real world, and how it affects our perception of worlds both cyber and physical.

Review

"...Interface Culture blends familiar cultural studies paradigms, a history of interface design, and sharp criticism of the state of the Web...this is one of the most cogent and accessible samples of Net theory around." -- Village Voice

"In Interface Culture, Steven Johnson deftly paddles against this zeitgeist by examining the machine, software, and network interfaces of the past half century in light of more archaic developments...He combines his insight and his engaging prose to achieve what so many writers fail to: make the reader feel smart by providing new tools with which to understand technology...Johnson's sitting pretty on a mountain of visions, and, luck for us, her shares the wealth." -- Wired

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1st edition (October 8, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062514822
• ISBN-13: 978-0062514820
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #941,474 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Connecting today to the past, April 20, 2000

By 

Andrew Proehl (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Interface Culture (Paperback)

What do Beavis & Butthead, Talk Soup, and Entertainment Tonight all have in common? The answer is that they are all TV about TV. All of these shows, rather than being concerned with original content, comment on other TV shows. Beavis & Butthead comment on music videos, Talk Soup is a talk show roundup of what's happening on other Talk Shows, etc.

This is just one of many clear and insightful observations Steven Johnson makes in his book, Interface Culture. The book is a broad review of the growing role interface design plays in society. In describing the role of interface design, Johnson begins by putting it into historical perspective.

According to Johnson, the development of meta-media, like, "Talk Soup" happens whenever a medium becomes mature. It also develops when the content or subject matter begin to overwhelm the people who are dealing with it. He gives several historical examples of this including, Cave paintings, where artists painted what they saw in the natural world as a way of understanding it or to symbolically master it. Medieval cathedrals, where the sacred and profane worlds were modeled physically in stone and in stained glass in a way that an illiterate society could understand. Victorian novels. The industrial revolution brought about great changes to urban life in the 1800's Novels, such as those written by Charles Dickens helped an emerging middle class come to terms with the physical and cultural changes that were happening around them.

Interface design is just the latest mixture of art and science that develops, as it is needed, to help people deal with the massive cultural change of computers, data and the internet. The first sign of this change was the development of the desktop metaphor. The desktop helped non-engineers deal with the concept of computing by giving them a familiar metaphor and the ability of "direct manipulation" of their data through the mouse and pointer.

The book is a quick read that can be enjoyed by web designers and the general public. It is a wonderful exploration of the historical context of today's emerging careers in the hi-tech world.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most intelligent and graceful of the cyberbooks, June 4, 1998

By 

Alan Liu ([e-mail]) (Altadena/Santa Barbara, Calif.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Interface Culture: How the Digital Medium--from Windows to the Web--Changes the way We Write, Speak (Hardcover)

I've read a lot of these books about cyberculture recently, and Johnson's is one of the best. Positioning itself in neither the camps of "technoboosterism" nor "neo-Luddism," the book is an insightful, informed, and gracefully written history/meditation/prophecy about the evolving nature of "interfaces" as our primary means of inhabiting information society as a culture. Two things about the book stand out for me. One is Johnson's ability to pierce to the core of the notion of "interface" by thinking at a fundamental level about the experience of using such components as "windows," "links," "desktop metaphor," etc. His discussion of these topics is aided by a very judicious, selective look at recent software examples or online paradigms (e.g., his nice discussion of the nature of link discourse on the Suck site). In general, Johnson made me think about these seemingly mundane elements of the "interface" in new, broad ways--technical, social, cultural, and artistic. Secondly, Johnson's penetrating sense of the continuities between current information society and past literary, artistic, and technological societies is a wonder to behold (I enjoyed particularly his comparison of information space to such architectures of the past as the Gothic cathedral or city, and also his excellent comparison/contrast of information space to the 19th-century "connective" novel). He never overdoes the comparisons; I see them as the ballast that accounts for the steadiness of his middle tone between "technoboosterism" and "neo-Luddism." He is not Luddite because he has a strong sense of the evolving, slowly accreting momentum of technical changes and their (sometimes surprising) social reception. (The book thus moves toward an optmistic guess about what a revised text or "meaning"-based interface might look like.) Even the best of the "neo-Luddites" by contrast--for example, Cliffo! rd Stoll's wonderfully droll and insightful Silicon Snake Oil--gives one the impression of being stuck in a little time warp: they came, they saw the limited state of the technology in 1989, or whenever, and they conquered. But on the other hand, Johnson is not boosterish either precisely because his strong sense of history discounts the inflated millennium-mongering of those who claim that every new technological development is revolutionary. A very thoughtful piece of work. I'd recommend it in particular to anyone whose background or current training (e.g., in the humanities, arts, etc.) leaves them grasping for a meaningful way to understand the interface between what they know and love in the past and what the engineers and programmers aspire to in the future.

--Alan Liu

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Metaphors for Interaction, April 9, 2000

By 

Theresa M. Flynn, Doctoral Student, Pepperdin... (Westlake Village, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Interface Culture (Paperback)

Steven Johnson, in his provocative book, Interface Culture, defines interface as "software that shapes the interaction between user and computer." (p. 14) Fond of literary and artistic allusion, he suggests that interface design is the fusion of art and technology. (p.6) Johnson gives numerous examples of interface designs that have been successful due to their intuitive appeal to the end-user, e.g. desktop iconography, as well as less successful designs that have failed to inspire the end-user, e.g. Microsoft's "Bob."

Interface Culture traces the evolution of interface design from the introduction of the first GUI, through the Mac desktop, Microsoft Windows, Internet linkage, semantic interface, computer agents, and on to speculation of what may come.

Johnson proposes that computers think in ones and zeroes, while people think in words, concepts, sounds, and images. (p. 14) Thus, in order for an interface design to attract users, the ones and zeroes must tell a story; they must represent a virtual metaphor. (p.15) Apple's desktop iconography, although derided at introduction, translated binary syntax into concepts that the average person could understand: files, folders, trash, etc... The desktop metaphor further evolved into digital environments: town squares, shopping malls, and personal assistants, interface environments that are familiar and easily understood. (p. 18)

Having established the interface-as-metaphor concept in the first chapter, Johnson presents a number of interesting claims throughout Interface Culture. He asserts that the Internet is the first technology that brings people closer together rather than pushing them apart, via web communities (p. 64) This is a plausible argument, though the quality of web-based relationships is certainly open to question.

There can be no question, however, that the Internet allows for communal sharing and vast dissemination of information, art, music, and any other data that can be digitized and transmitted through the world wide web. This raises a significant dilemma: how do we determine and protect intellectual property rights on the Internet? The answer is not as straightforward as it may seem. Johnson queries: "if I show you a copy of Newsweek through my personal (website), is that like selling a tape of the World Series without...consent of Major League Baseball? Or is it like inviting friends over to watch a ball game from an apartment that happens to overlook Comiskey Park?" (p. 96) Clearly there is no easy answer, as the advent of webpage frames has created a whole new interface environment that falls outside traditional property rights jurisdiction. Thus, the new Internet interface provides freedoms to the public to harvest, share, and display virtually anything that is published on the web. This transference of power will need to be negotiated between the content providers and their consumers.

A different transference of power is an issue in the development of text-based semantic interfaces. Such interfaces rely on text pattern recognition software that empowers computers to organize files by meaning rather than by iconographic space. Thus, the user must relinquish his reliance on desktop metaphors, and grant the computer "control over the organization of...data." (p. 172) Relinquishing control may very well be the wave of the interface future, according to Johnson. Given the proliferation of computer agents, programs that perform tasks on the user's behalf, it may be just a matter of time before intelligent traveling agents not only report back to user with lowest airfare, desired stock prices, and movie showtimes, but actually purchases them based on user preferences. This may seem desirable, but Johnson warns of Madison Avenue's manipulation of traveling agents in order to attract them to specified sites. (p. 186)

Johnson concludes Interface Culture by identifying the "blind spots" of modern interface design, while foretelling what may be its future. These blind spots include: "the tyranny of image over text, the limitation of the desktop metaphor, the potential chaos of intelligent agents," and the confinement of interface design to the "world of functionality and increased convenience." (p. 212-213) Johnson prophesizes a "profound change ( that lies) with our generic expectation about...interface itself." (p. 213) He believes that "the interface came into the world under the cloak of efficiency, and it is now emerging-chrysalis-style as a genuine art form." (p. 242)

Johnson may be proven right, though it might be wishful thinking to argue that interface design will become "the art form of the next century." (p. 213) Nonetheless, Interface Culture is compelling reading that does indeed provoke the reader to elevate interface design from the ranks of generic utilitarian programming and at least to consider the discipline as a craft if not an art form. At times Johnson's frequent literary and historical allusions are inspired; at other times they seem affected. Despite this, Johnson's Weltanschauung is infectious, and leaves the reader with anticipation of what may come in the field of interface design.