from Steven Johnson's Interface Culture

How should we understand the cultural import of interface design in today's world? Put simply, the importance of interface design revolves around this apparent paradox: 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. Our only access to this parallel universe of zeroes and ones runs through the conduit of the computer interface, which means that the most dynamic and innovative region of the modern world reveals itself to us only through the anonymous middlemen of interface design. How we choose to to imagine these new online communities is oviously a matter of great social and political significance. The Victorians had writers like Dickens to ease them through the technological revolutions of the industrial age, writers who build novelistic maps of the threatening new territory and the social relations it produced. Our guides to the virtual cities of the twenty-first century will perform a comparable service, only this time the interface --and not the novel-- will be their medium. (pp 19-20)
The bitmapping revolution had introduced the concept of dataspace, but it was still mostly a tabula rasa, an empty lot waiting to be filled. What were the new information achitects going to build on that real estate? A strange mix of open-endedness and limitation was contained in the question. Because the computer was by definition so malleable, capable of shape-shifting from one visual metaphor to another, it was theoretically possible for the interface to look like practically anything: a house, a factory, a movie, a diary. But the limitations of seventies technology --minuscule storage devices, sluggish microprocessors, grainy monitors-- meant that flights of fancy would quickly bump up against the ceiling of hardware shortcomings. You could build anything you wanted in that new information space --but it had to be simple, and easy to represent.

The solution that those original designers came up with still dominates the way we imagine our computers and the information buried deep within them. You can make the argument that it was the single most important design decision of the past half-century, altering not only our perception of dataspace, but also our perception of real-world environments. In an ange of information, the metaphors we use to comprehend all those zeroes and ones are as central, and as meaningful, as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. The social life of that time revolved around the spires and buttresses of "infinity imagined." Our own lives now revolve around a more prosaic text: the computer desktop. Understanding the implications of that metaphor --its genius and limitations-- is the key to understanding the contemporary interface. (pp 44-45)

Every major technological age attracts a certain dominant artistic form: the mathematical and optical innovations of the Renaissance were best realized in the geometry of perspective painting; the industrial age worked through its social crises in the triple-decker novel. This digital age belongs to the graphical interface, and it is time for us to recognize the imaginative work that went into that creation, and prepare ourselves for the imaginative breakthroughs to come. Infomation-space is the great symbolic accomplishment of our era. We will spend the next few decades coming to terms with it. (pg 215)

At the threshold points near the birth of a new technology, all types of distortions and misunderstandings are bound to appear --misunderstandings not only of how the machines actually work but also of more subtle matters: what realm of experience the new technologies belong to, what values they perpetuate, where their more indirect effects will take place.

Twenty years ago, the graphic interface seemed like a toy, virtual training wheels for computer novices. Now we readily accept it as a necessity for serious computing: functional and easy to use; an essential tool for power users and neophytes alike. But to go beyond that efficiency model and see the graphic interface as a medium as complex and vital as the novel or the cathedral or the cinema --that's an assumption that still requires getting used to... (pp 211-212)

We're reminded a dozen times each day that the digital revolution will change everything, and yet when we probe deeper to find out exactly what will change under this new regime, all we get are banal reveries of sending faxes from the beach.

The most profound change ushered in by the digital revolution will not involve bells and whistles or new programming tricks. It will not come in the form of a 3-D Web browser or voice recognition or artificial intelligence. The most profound change will lie in our generic expectations about the interface itself. We will come to think of interface design as a kind of art form --perhaps the art form of the next century. And with that broader shift will come hundreds of corollary effects, effects that trickle down into a broad cross section of everyday life, altering our storytelling appetites, our sense of physical space, our taste in music, the design of our cities. Many of these changes will be too subtle or gradual for most people to notice --or rather, we'll notice the changes but we won't perceive their relationship to the interface, because the various elements will appear to belong to different categories, like so many aisles in a grocery store. But the history of technoculture is the history of such interminglings, the unlikely secondary effects of new machines rippling out to transform the society that surrounds them. (pp 213-214)