Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

what i'm reading now: interface culture

I’ve been doing a lot more reading since I started taking the Metro to work every day. In my mind, this can only be a good thing.

Right now, I’m reading Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, by Steven Johnson (he of the Ghost Map):

[T]he interface makes the teeming, invisible world of zeros and ones sensible to us. There are few creative acts in modern life more significant than this one, and few with such broad social consequences…

How should we understand the cultural import of interface design in today’s world? Put simply, the importance of interface design revolves around this apparent paradox: we live in a society that is increasingly shaped by events in cyberspace, and yet cyberspace remains, for all practical purposes, invisible, outside our perceptual grasp. Our only access to this parallel universe of zeros and ones runs through the conduit of the computer interface, which means that the most dynamic and innovative region of the modern world reveals itself to us only through the anonymous middlemen of interface design.

Interface Culture was written back in 1997, so reading the book through that prism — remembering what technology was like nine years ago and how much it’s changed (not to mention the increasing visibility and understanding of interface / experience design) — has been an interesting experience in itself, on top of what Johnson’s actually saying in his book.