Interface Culture – Text

A few quotes from the chapter about Text in Interface Culture:

“[...] the mind naturally resists the dull glare of the screen, feels ill at ease with it, unnatural. And then something in the user experience changes – the “direct manipulation” of the mouse, perhaps, or the resolution of the display – and suddenly you find yourself at home in front of the machine, so acclimated to the environment that you’re no longer fighting the software”.

“The fundamental units of my writing had mutated under the spell of the word processor: I had begun by working with blocks of complete sentences, but by the end I was thinking smaller blocks, in units of discrete phrases. This, of course, had an enormous effect on the types of sentences I ended up writing [...] The computer had not only made it eas?ier for me to write; it had also changed the very substance of what I was writing, and in that sense, I suspect, it had an enormous effect on my thinking as well”.

“The Street find its own uses for things – uses the manufacturer never imagined” (Willioam Gibson in Neuromancer)

“The graphic interface revolution has changed all that: we now intuitively understand that visual metaphors – all those blinking icons and desktop patterns and pull-down menus – have an important, and increasingly indispensable, cognitive function.”

“Words, in this lopsided paradigm, are always inferior to images. Anyone who knows anything about the history of writing systems – specifically the shift form hieroglyphic-style pictograms to phontic spelling – will sense something bizarre in this hierarchy”.

“Why not organize the desktop according to another illusions? Instead of space, why not organize around meaning”.

“A semantic file system would give the computer much more control over the organization of your data”

“The question of whether this newfound authority should be seen as an interface advance or a major step backward extends well beyond the field of text-driven interfaces.