Thursday, September 19, 2019
Core post 1: computer culture & physical reality
A small side note grounded in personal experience to Parikka’s discussion of Job’s business strategy and software pedagogy as “psychotechnical drilling and training in the emerging computer culture,” as literally “tapping into the bios and zoe of living bodies.” I first became self-conscious of the fact that my own perception of physical reality has changed by Apple when I was reading a paper book and, when found the font too small to read, I – without thinking, automatically – touched the paper page with three fingers and spread them apart – the movement we make to zoom in on touchpad. Wondering if other people ever had the same or similar experience.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Definitely — and I think your point also has a close connection with Bolter & Grusin's concept of immediacy and hypermediacy, as well as this week's reading by Galloway when he claims that "any mediating technology is obliged to erase itself to the highest degree possible... but in so doing it proves its own virtuosic presence as technology, thereby undoing the original erasure" (320). Your point is interesting because it is a demonstration of Galloway's paradox: while the process of movement is natural and unconscious, effacing the medium and the machine, it also makes us hyperaware of the machine when we duplicate that movement elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteYup, I've had similar experiences, to my embarrassment though. There were these smart screens on display at Best Buy, and I presumed that they had the interface features of a smart phone. So I tried to scroll up, down, sideways--with 1 finger, 2 fingers, 1 hand, 2 hands-- and it wouldn't work; it only recognized "push" actions. One thing that's interesting, and something that Jennifer noted in the comment above, is the tacit knowledge that we accumulate through our continual uses and interactions with technology. But I think we are also addressing how interface design and the physical design seems to presumes certain interactions. Something that comes to mind is the QWERTY keyboard as a default keyboard setting on many device interfaces. On a side note, the PS4 store, until recently, used this vertical scrolling interface to input letters or numbers for each "space". So if I wanted to type in "Anthony", I would have to one-by-one scroll from A-9 until I spell out Anthony. They recently changed it so that users are given a virtual QWERTY keyboard to search with instead.
ReplyDelete