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T A B L E__T A L K

Whatever happened to customer service? Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture discussion area and talk about Internet Service Providers from hell.

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R E C E N T L Y

Are we ready for the library of the future?By Cate Corcoran
Librarians have become the public's last-resort help desk
(12/02/97)

Pornutopia lost
By Andrew Leonard
The X-rated Web is building a bold and bewildering new world of sleazy techno-tricks
(12/01/97)

Apache's free-software warriors
By Andrew Leonard
Developers collaborate online -- and shake Microsoft and Netscape
(11/20/97)

A giant sucking sound
By Scott Rosenberg
Suck, the Web's "longest-running daily column," bellyflops into print
(11/13/97)

Riven rapt
How Myst and its new sequel won our hearts and minds. By Laura Miller
(11/06/97)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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"Interface Culture" is in part a book about the power of metaphors, and Johnson reserves some of his best prose for a rant against the "terrible injustice" in the concept of "Web surfing." The term took off from TV's couch-bound "channel surfer," and when the label got pasted on Web users, it carried all of the old medium's baggage: passivity, superficiality, boredom. But in truth, following a link is deeply different from changing the channel, Johnson succinctly points out: "A channel surfer hops back and forth between different channels because she's bored. A Web surfer clicks on a link because she's interested."

Following the arcs of "Interface Culture's" cross-disciplinary trajectories and metaphor explorations is an absorbing ride. It's only after you put the book down that its occasional stumbles come into view.

For one thing, Johnson tends to ignore the economic forces and technical strictures that often lie behind developments he explains in purely cultural terms. He's got a sharp eye for how readily and ruthlessly marketers will make use of interface innovations for their own ends. But he's much more interested in how interfaces shape us than in how money and technology shape interfaces. For instance, those "Talk Soup"-like meta-commentary shows may be "information filters," but they also help fill the hungry maw of cable-era networks that need to produce tons of programming on tight budgets. Windows aren't just a smart way of organizing computer-desktop space; they are a visual manifestation of the personal computer's requirement that each "task" be performed in a strictly delimited space in its memory.

"Interface Culture" also sticks closely to the familiar world of screen-keyboard-and-mouse computing and the software design associated with it. That self-imposed limit rescues the book from the kind of wild-eyed utopian prognostication that gave "virtual reality" a bad name -- and from the instant obsolescence afflicting books that huff to keep up with the further edges of fast-moving technology. But it also prevents Johnson from exploring changes in our physical interface with our data -- whether through the speech-recognition software that's just beginning to be usable, or through more exotic and distant developments in "wearable computing" and the like. For an interface revolution that will dwarf the Macintosh's achievement, we await the designer who figures out how to untether us from our keyboards while still allowing us to express ourselves deeply.

On a broader level, Johnson's whole argument hangs on the view that interface design will continue to evolve and proliferate in ever more diverse ways -- otherwise, it ain't much of an art form. Certainly the rise of the Web as a cheap, easily accessible lab has allowed thousands of interface experiments to bloom. The digital revolution spits out new technologies so fast today that it's difficult to remember a less frantic time.

But there's always the possibility that today's era of rapid-fire innovation is an anomaly, and that at some point the interface will cease to be a focus for creativity. The "interface" of the book experienced some radical transformations from the Middle Ages through Gutenberg's day -- and occasioned some stunning later experiments from the likes of William Blake and William Morris -- but the essential format has remained stable for centuries. Movies don't have to be 100 minutes long and viewed in public theaters, but for the decades between the rise of talkies and the arrival of home video, that "interface" stayed pretty much the same.

Of all the conventional arts to which Johnson compares interface design, it resembles architecture most closely: Both are complex bundlings of aesthetics and engineering; both are often semi-invisible to us; yet both shape our lives. Some of architecture's design principles remain in constant flux, but many of its most basic notions have settled into fixed form: floors, for instance, are universally level; rooms require some form of entrance. As the art of interface design evolves, it's likely to develop a growing list of rules that are disobeyed only by the malicious or the would-be avant-garde. Johnson tries to argue the aesthetic value of deliberately confusing interfaces, but the historical comparisons he makes -- to 12-tone music and abstract expressionist painting -- hardly inspire confidence.

Finally, in its insistence on the primacy of interface design among the new digital arts, "Interface Culture" gets a little confusing itself. The word "interface" is part of the problem -- its boundaries are fluid, its meaning ambiguous. Sometimes Johnson describes the interface itself as a medium; at other times, it's "a strange new zone hovering between medium and message." Is interface design a medium in which different artists express themselves -- or is each new interface a different medium, a new space or platform for others to use?

Yes, interface design -- for all its dedication to efficiency and productivity and "usability" -- is also an art. No one who has looked at the subject closely could seriously deny that. But Johnson wants to make a case for the interface as the art of our era, "a medium as complex and vital as the novel or the cathedral or the cinema." That case is unconvincing, or at least incomplete. For one thing, there aren't a whole lot of examples yet that live up to these comparisons, as Johnson readily admits. Even if that changes, though -- even if coming decades bring us a profusion of wonderful new interface designs that transform our lives -- interfaces will still remain enabling creations, schemes for allowing other people and artists to flourish.

The artisans who devised the 16th century theater's two-level stage and the poets and actors who devised the form of iambic pentameter all contributed to the design of the Elizabethan theater's magnificent "interface." Without them, Shakespeare could not have written "Hamlet" -- but it took a playwright working inside the existing medium, pushing it in new directions, to do so. And it is "Hamlet" that survives, even though we experience it today on proscenium stages, or at the movies, or on videotape, all radically different interfaces than the one for which it was created.

These quarrels with "Interface Culture" are the kind only a successful work of criticism can generate; the book's flaws don't cause you to dismiss its insights but rather prod you to think further and deeper. Johnson is able to open such avenues of inquiry because, as he declares at the outset, he opts out of the stale dichotomies that shape today's techno-culture debates, the tiresome "Firing Line"-style lineup of Clifford Stoll vs. Nicholas Negroponte, Sven Birkerts vs. Sherry Turkle -- talking heads racing to the extremes of denouncing, or idealizing, technology.

At one point, "Interface Culture" praises "As We May Think," the groundbreaking essay by technocrat Vannevar Bush that foresaw many aspects of today's digital revolution, for its tone: "sober, reflective, exploratory, intent neither on burying the past nor on renouncing the future." Johnson adopts the same tone for his book, making it a good model for the kind of technology criticism we badly need -- and a pleasure to argue with.
SALON | Dec. 3, 1997