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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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"INTERFACE CULTURE" | BY STEVEN JOHNSON | HARPEREDGE, 264 PAGES

BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | Computer-science pioneer Alan Kay famously said that the first-generation Macintosh -- an underpowered, memory-scant little box that dazzled the world of 1984 with its pixel-happy folders and trash cans -- was the first personal-computer interface good enough to criticize.

Steven Johnson's sharp new "Interface Culture" argues that the entire enterprise of computer interface design has now crossed the threshold of criticizability. Today's graphic interface, according to Johnson, is not only good enough to criticize but too important not to criticize: "There are few creative acts in modern life more significant than this one, and few with such broad social consequences." For Johnson, interface designers are "a new fusion of artist and engineer ... charged with the epic task of representing our digital machines" -- and "information-space is the great symbolic accomplishment of our era."

One's first impulse is to say, "Whoa!" Can anyone load such cultural significance on a bunch of windows and icons? Can Johnson possibly pull it off?

Almost. Johnson -- co-founder and editor of the Web journal Feed -- makes plenty of grand pronouncements as to the future of interface design as "perhaps the art form of the next century." Yet such is the quality of his book's bristling insights and rhetorical stunts that you're swept along by its vigor even as you're taking issue with some of its arguments. "Interface Culture" bears the imperfections of its enthusiasms, but it is a rarity among today's tomes of techno-commentary. Like the Mac that provides so many of its examples, it, too, is good enough to criticize.

Part of its success lies in the nature of those enthusiasms. Johnson is passionate about criticism itself -- about using words to wrestle complex ideas to the ground, and using writing to generate new ways of understanding stuff we take for granted. Though he's modest enough to admit that his is only "a preliminary survey of the field," he aims, ambitiously, to develop a critical vocabulary of interface design that -- unlike so much of the writing on the subject -- is intelligible and enjoyable to a non-specialist audience.

It's hardly revolutionary to view interface design as an art; a fat 1990 anthology edited by Brenda Laurel was titled "The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design," and its essays prefigure many of the issues Johnson addresses. But to explain why the interface is an art form worth the general public's attention -- that's an achievement.

Johnson offers a two-pronged justification, half pragmatic, half historical. Interface decisions, he points out, are no longer the arcane province of research scientists but rather the locus for business wars and fierce lawsuits -- from Microsoft's controversial placement of the Microsoft Network icon on the Windows 95 desktop to the battle between the TotalNews Web site and major newspapers over the use of frames. The recent conflict between Microsoft and federal antitrust lawyers, Johnson pointed out in a New York Times op-ed piece, is merely the latest instance of interface innovation as corporate power struggle.

But the interface is not just a commercial arena. For all of us who work and play upon computer screens, choices about the nature of interfaces affect how we think about ourselves and how we connect with other people. ("Interface Culture's" blandly generic, but accurate, subtitle is "How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.")

Johnson -- correctly chiding digital-revolution boosters for having "a tin ear for history" -- looks to the past to try to trace the social scope of the interface designers' work. The business of making data visible and usable to us, he argues, is a creative undertaking that shapes our era no less than the building of cathedrals embodied the culture of the Middle Ages, or the discovery of perspective sparked the artistic revolution of the Renaissance, or the flourishing of the novel made sense of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the city to the Victorian reading public.

Johnson takes brash pleasure in yoking together unlikely pairs of examples. In one extended argument, for example, he jumps from the prehistory of the graphic interface as devised at Xerox's PARC lab in the late '60s to a discourse on the rise of "self-referential commentary shows" on TV.

Irony-ridden programs like "Talk Soup" and "Mystery Science Theater" aren't just parasites feeding on pop-culture carcasses, according to Johnson; they're serving as "information filters -- data making sense of other data," just as Dickens' novels and Shakespeare's plays made sense of their own worlds for their audiences. But before you even have the chance to think, "Wait a minute -- 'Talk Soup' ain't Shakespeare!" Johnson says it for you. Then he leapfrogs the discussion again to explain why these "commentary shows," for all the impoverishment of their content, are so popular: They are TV's vain effort to make sense of the "bewildering sensory overload of the contemporary mediasphere," but they don't really belong on TV at all and are cruelly bound by TV's limitations. In fact, they are "ghosts of technologies to come" that will flourish in the post-broadcast world of the Net.

You don't have to join Johnson on each of his logical jumps to appreciate the critical acrobatics involved. The larger, McLuhanesque import of "Interface Culture" is undeniable: We need to step back from the screen a few feet (and a few years or decades) to see how tools and designs that are practically invisible to us channel our behavior, in sometimes beneficial and sometimes distressing ways. Johnson offers a useful reminder of the contempt much of the technology press originally had for the graphic interface: The same basic idea that today bestrides the computer world in the form of the Windows colossus was scorned, upon its first appearance in the Mac, as a "toy" for artists. Serious computer users, it was widely agreed, would stick with the more "powerful" command-line interface -- what Johnson describes as a "real-men-don't-do-windows" complex.

Now that virtually everyone does windows, "Interface Culture" does us a service in pointing out the drawbacks of the desktop design. Too often designers today are replacing the "good faith of user-friendly metaphors" like the desktop with the "hysteria of total simulation" represented by nightmares like Microsoft Bob, with its condescendingly literal-minded pictures. In one of his most original arguments, Johnson maintains that today's designers undervalue text. Even though the desktop and its folders are imagined as "spaces" in which we can locate things by "feel" and visual memory, the fact is that we usually find things in our computers by remembering their text labels.

Like the movie critic who stubbornly and righteously maintains the right to ignore boring box-office blockbusters in favor of artistically daring flops, Johnson often turns his gaze to technologies that never made it in the marketplace -- sometimes to criticize them, as with the free-roaming "intelligent agents" of General Magic's Magic Cap, and sometimes to praise them, as with Apple's V-Twin prototype. Instead of organizing your files based simply on where you put them, V-Twin offers a variety of "views" of your data based on matching patterns of keywords in the texts. Johnson is infectiously enthusiastic about the intriguing possibilities of this "semantic file system": "Instead of space, why not organize around meaning?"