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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
theoretically brilliant: the practice falls short, 29 April 1999
By A Customer
Johnson's book, Interface Culture, is about the growing culture of the interface, the way we interact with the world around us. It is based on the nearly invisible premise that we interface with much of the world, and have been for most of our time on this planet. I found this immediately intriguing because some f the hardest things to observe are the interfaces that we sue to connect and interact with the world. Johnson frames his discussion of interface with the elements of computer interface; the desktop, windows, links, text, and agents, all common to those people coming from a computer literate society.Where Johnson really shines (and I admit a personal bias for the topic) is in his discussion about hypertext and the poor job that silicon valley has done in really pushing it to the limits of it possibility. He presents a picture of an industry that continues to try to bring television to the web (real video, real audio, flash) all attempts to bring movement and animation to a naturally solid state-dynamic environment. The real power of the web is in the link, in the ability of authors and users to "create their own story" - to navigate through the content as they wish, not necessarily how the author intended. Johnson uses Dicken's stories as examples of thinking that incorporates the sense of disparate ideas - all connected into one story - the kind of thinking that Johnson thinks needs to be used to harness the power of the link. Johnson also takes time to explore the differences between "surfing the web" and "channel surfing", arguing that the two are fundamentally different. He argues that the passive, almost lazy activity of channel surfing actually works against our ability to conceive of the web differently. People who have this mentality will not be able to clearly see other possibilities for the web. Johnson spends quite some time bitterly complaining about the lack of real innovation in hypertext environments, and in the end suggests that his own online magazine "FEED" is at the forefront of hypertext theory, pushing the limits of use. I was less impressed that I though I would be. Johnson is so very eloquent and keenly aware of the need to use hypertext as storytelling environment, to really push out lazy use of it, and to exploit the full potential of this tool. I feel that Johnson fails to acheive the goal that he so clearly lays out in his book. While FEED does use hypertext in new ways, it didn't strike me as particularly clean. By this I mean that the *interface* was clogged with too many links, the user while given many options was not given any clear or clean sense of direction. Burrowing into the site, the linking grew in scope and complexity, but instead of making my interaction more pleasant, I found I was more confused, and really had to try to find order. Perhaps this is just a natural reflexive response to the new use of a familiar thing, but I didn't to stay at FEED. I can see what FEED is trying to do, and I agree with the goal - to provide a dynamic interactive hypertext environment... but the interface was too hard to use. From a design perspective it is always easier to add a bunch of bells and whistles, the hard part is to take away everything that distracts from the message, that interferes with the usability. It seems like the producers of feed became excited about the possibilities of hyperlinking and no one ever stopped to ask when was a good time to stop. While all links are relevant to the content, the sheer volume of linking distracts the user - taking away from their ability to smoothly interact with the environment.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the most intelligent and graceful of the cyberbooks, 5 Jun 1998
By A Customer
I've read a lot of these books about cyberculture recently, and Johnson's is one of the best. Positioning itself in neither the camps of "technoboosterism" nor "neo-Luddism," the book is an insightful, informed, and gracefully written history/meditation/prophecy about the evolving nature of "interfaces" as our primary means of inhabiting information society as a culture. Two things about the book stand out for me. One is Johnson's ability to pierce to the core of the notion of "interface" by thinking at a fundamental level about the experience of using such components as "windows," "links," "desktop metaphor," etc. His discussion of these topics is aided by a very judicious, selective look at recent software examples or online paradigms (e.g., his nice discussion of the nature of link discourse on the Suck site). In general, Johnson made me think about these seemingly mundane elements of the "interface" in new, broad ways--technical, social, cultural, and artistic. Secondly, Johnson's penetrating sense of the continuities between current information society and past literary, artistic, and technological societies is a wonder to behold (I enjoyed particularly his comparison of information space to such architectures of the past as the Gothic cathedral or city, and also his excellent comparison/contrast of information space to the 19th-century "connective" novel). He never overdoes the comparisons; I see them as the ballast that accounts for the steadiness of his middle tone between "technoboosterism" and "neo-Luddism." He is not Luddite because he has a strong sense of the evolving, slowly accreting momentum of technical changes and their (sometimes surprising) social reception. (The book thus moves toward an optmistic guess about what a revised text or "meaning"-based interface might look like.) Even the best of the "neo-Luddites" by contrast--for example, Cliffo! rd Stoll's wonderfully droll and insightful Silicon Snake Oil--gives one the impression of being stuck in a little time warp: they came, they saw the limited state of the technology in 1989, or whenever, and they conquered. But on the other hand, Johnson is not boosterish either precisely because his strong sense of history discounts the inflated millennium-mongering of those who claim that every new technological development is revolutionary. A very thoughtful piece of work. I'd recommend it in particular to anyone whose background or current training (e.g., in the humanities, arts, etc.) leaves them grasping for a meaningful way to understand the interface between what they know and love in the past and what the engineers and programmers aspire to in the future.--Alan Liu
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
review of steven johnson's interface culture-by nataliemann, 30 April 1999
By A Customer
In Interface Culture, Steven Johnson brilliantly brings together technology and the arts to create a work that shows how both effect and reflect on one another. He uses references of Gothic Cathedrals and Leonardo Da Vinci to tout that the role of the interface designer is similar to that of a more traditional artist. Johnson¹s dismantling of the superficially erected barrier between art and technology is quite successful. His book is filled with references to the fine arts and popular culture. He does this by carefully portraying how technology has been used and/or depicted in literature, film and other forms of visual art. By tying together different cultural periods in his analysis of technology, he reveals that the technical types are not always nerds that are solely concerned with cracking computer codes or developing websites. Using the modernist notion of the avant-garde, Johnson calls for the interface designers to step away from the old and into the new. He makes reference to the influence of the camera on modern art. Since the camera depicted reality as it was, there was no longer a reason for art to perform the role of documentation. This appears to be the same rationale that Johnson uses to challenge the role of the interface metaphors on today¹s personal computer. While Johnson does acknowledge that some of the user- friendliness that today¹s interface has to offer will dissipate as it takes on a more artistically and philosophically aesthetic approach, he fails to acknowledge (until the very last sentence of the conclusion) that our own perception of what is and is not user-friendly will change as the years go on. As we have seen in other forms of art, tastes and ways of looking at visual surfaces change and fluctuate as time goes on. What isn¹t user friendly today will be user friendly tomorrow. After reading Interface Culture and listening to Johnson¹s plea for interface designers to become more artistic, non-traditional and innovative in their designs, I was rather disappointed in his ezine, ³Feed.² ³Feed² hardly represents anything more than another ³fancy² website. It doesn¹t reflect his own vision of technology becoming more than just another user-friendly tool. His cyber-mag appeared to be nothing more than just another ezine full of hyperlinks to transport you too and from various articles pertaining to today¹s cultural climate. This seems hypocritical for someone who seeks to revolutionize the face of the interface, but it does go along with his attempt to synthesize technology and art. His ezine combines articles on culture, art, and society and places them in the realm of cyberspace. I would highly recommend Johnson¹s Interface Culture. His attempt to transform the way in which art and technology are viewed is successful. This book is interesting for both the computer nerd and humanities nerd. There is something that both of these types of people can get out of it. Johnson¹s book is one way of looking at ways to challenge the paradigms and dichotomization of the arts and technological sciences.
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