MX: Response to section one of the language of new media

I really appreciate the way that the author has set this essay up through hollywood metaphor, and enjoy drawing connections to other concepts we have been focusing on this semester and in the past few years here.

First I would like to note the parallels the author draws between philosophical movements and how GUI's either have grown out of or help to facilitate user interaction. The mention of Marx's ideal citizen doing completely "separate" activities throughout the day and the convergence of work and play in comparison to how we interact with computers and the internet. Doing similar tasks producing both work and play (for example, research/inputting data for work as well as searching/streaming music from the internet and so on.) I also enjoyed the theory of the emergence of Hyperlinks and postmodern spatialization and deconstruction ideas brought forth during the portion about the evolution of pages from stone tablets all the way up to separate windows on a computer screen. I feel like this idea of giving cultural context and thought to an essay on "cultural interfaces" is a very smart one.

In the first portion of this excerpt when the author is discussing content/medium v content/interface, I thought back to a lot of things we learned Junior year when we made communication models-theories such as cultural context(aka noise) and how it relates to the author mentioned Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (different cultures, different perceptions of the world) that was popular mid 20th century and how this model relates now to humans trying to talk to computers, vice-versa. The author makes points about how the GUI negotiates the robot talk into "meat-speak" that validate the WS hypothesis as acceptable in this context, which is where i began to understand the basis of another theory he calls "non-transparency of the code" (basically a technologically revamped Whorf-Sapir hypothesis).

In the portion titled "The language of cultural interfaces," I began to think about the discussion we had last week about transparency vs reflectivity and graphic metaphor prompted by the wooden mirror reading. It is my understanding that maybe there are a few separate levels to deciding whether something is reflective or transparent. For instance, I think that a GUI on a computer screen is reflective. I draw this conclusion because I am being shown a workspace/"desktop" with windows (pages), folders, waste baskets, etc. instead of the underlying code. It is not portrayed as a "universal media machine." On that level, it's reflective. But I also feel like web pages that are designed with little content enhancing or slanting aesthetics to be quite transparent, once I stop worrying about visual metaphors such as windows or back buttons, I am not so worried about cultural interface/noise and more interested in the content.

But maybe I'm wrong, who knows. Regardless, the author mentions cultural interfaces being made up of intermingling "elements of other, already familiar cultural forms." This I see as reflective, but also necessary to get people to interact with such a foreign object that a computer secretly is.

The overarching point that I am getting out of this reading is that the HCI (human computer Interface) is built from Cinema and the printed word (which he calls "the three main reservoirs of metaphors and strategies for organizing information which feed cultural interfaces") to create a new continuous and flat information landscape that is non linear while being able to be hierarchical if the right designer comes along.

So who is going to be Christopher Columbus to this theory? Not me. I have to say that dated technological references aside, this is mostly on point with my world views.