Interface Culture – Bittmapping

I started reading Interface Culture (How new technology transforms the way we create and communicate) by Steven Johnson. The central topic of this book is about the fusion of art and technology that Johnson calls interface design. In his introduction, he flaters every engineer’s ego by coupling them with artists:

Was the original cave painter an artist or an engineer? She was both, of course, like most artists and engineers since. But we have a habit – long cultivated – of imagining them as seperate, the two great tributaries rolling steadily to the sea of modernity, and dividing everyone in their path into two camps: those that dwell on the shores of technology and those that dwell on the shores of culture. The opposition colors much of modern thought. (Even the human grain is now seen as having a lobe for artists and a lob for engineers.). But it is false as the genetic separation between human and ape.

I have been thinking the same since I got my degree

My favourite quote so fare: “In the cultural sphere, the hybrids are stronger, more innovative, more robust than the pure breeds“.

A few notes from the first chapter “Bittmapping” where Johnson discusses the origins of information-space (Doug Engelbart’s implementation of the Memex which enabled a user to “thread through” massive repositories of data) and take a look at the way recent television programming anticipates the data filters of the present
day (televised parasits – a mix of metaphor, footnote, translation and parody – metamedia/metaform (information filters) which are digital forms trapped in an analog medium (i.e. TV)):

The idea of information-space has been around for thousands of years. “Memory palaces” build by the Greeks (Simonides) where stories where stories turned into architecture, abstract concepts transformed into expansive imaginary houses.

Our visual memory is much more durable than our textual memory. That’s why we’re much more likely to forget a name than a face, and why we remember months later that a certain quote appeared on the upper-left-hand corner of a page, even if we’ve forgotten the wording of the quote itself.

The crucial technological breakthrough lies with the idea of the computer as a symbolic system, a machine that traffics in represenations or signs rather than in the mechanical cause-and-effect of the cotton gin or the automobile.

It becomes more and more difficult to imagine the dataspace at our fingertips, to picture all that complexity in our mind’s eye, to “cognitively map” (Kevin Lynch) their real-world environs.

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. [...] How we choose to imagine these new online communities is obviously a matter of great social and political significance.

That informationspace (Engelbart’s integration of bitmapped information, direct manipulation, and a mouse) was both a technological advance and a work of profound creativity. It changed the way we use our machines, but is also changed the way we imagine them. For centuries, Western culture had fantasized about its technology in prosthetic terms, as a supplement to the body.

Cultural change receives a powerful boost from the amalgamation and anastomosis of different traditions. In the cultural sphere, the hybrids are stronger, more innovative, more robust than the pure breeds.