Interface Culture:
How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate

As editor of the heralded webzine Feed, and one of Newsweek's "Fifty People Who Matter Most On The Internet," 27-year-old Johnson is certainly ready to talk about computer interface. This new information era, which Johnson believes to be in its "gestation period," provides enough anecdotes, fresh slang, and intellectual stimulation to fill a small book. But the territory of his thesis might be too vast for any writer to cover in fewer than 200 pages: "This book has been conceived as a kind of secular response to the twin religions of techno-boosterism and techno-phobia.... I have tried to think about the elements of modern interface design as though they were the cultural equivalents of a Dickens novel, a Welles film, a Rem Koolhaas building" [9-10].

Johnson wants to be a good modern historian, to contextualize and normalize our understanding of computer interface. But he also wants to show us how little difference there is between a young Picasso and a young interface designer. Therefore, it would seem that his most pressing concerns would be to establish the qualities of the triumphs of past culture, then to define the quality of "interface," and then to build an substantial connection between the two. But the author, preferring allusion and anecdote to abstract argument, manages only a weak stab at his original thesis. This book works more successfully as a short history of digital information, highlighting innovations that have occurred along the way.

The first chapter plunges in with the story of Doug Englbart's 1968 demonstration of his invention, "bitmapping" – a way of revealing information on a screen that is not constrained by predefined alphanumeric symbols, but allows for pixel-by-pixel graphical representation. Ten years later, Englebart's "mouse" gave computer users the ability to point-and-click their way through digital information. Obviously, both of these inventions have revolutionized the way man uses computers. But Johnson wants us to believe that modern interface, by interpreting an unseen world, rivals the great works of literature: "The Victorians had novelists like Dickens to ease them through the technological revolutions of the industrial age, writers who built novelistic maps of the threatening new territory and the social relations it produced" [18]. This, of course, begs the question: are the social forces Dickens helped "map" comparable to the digital information which computer interface interprets?

In the second chapter, "The Desktop," Johnson discusses Gothic architecture with the same logic: "Where the flying buttresses of Chartres rendered the kingdom of heaven in stone, the information space on the monitor embodies ... the otherwise invisible cotillion of zeros and ones whirling through our microchips" [33]. We must agree that the interface designer's task bears similarity to the Gothic architect's. Both labor to create a set of symbols that "users," parishioners, will recognize. Both are artisans, of a sort. But there is also a significant difference, and that is the quality of that which is being symbolized. In the case of the architect and the novelist, the subject matter – God, history, social change, fate – is out of man's control. Contrarily, the interface designer's subject matter – digital information – was developed and invented by man, and is fully under his control. Digital information forms the infrastructure of digital interface! Computer interfaces would seem to be more accurately compared to car dashboards than to cathedrals.

Although this mistake plagues the rest of the book, Interface Culture surveys thirty-some years of changes in digital media which will lead to a fantastic future, and therefore might prove good reading. It's also a good introduction to the internet for those who have been out of the loop. The style of the writing might get in the way, though, swinging as quickly as it does from articulate to glib to pure jargon ["And given the steady flow of press releases and wire stories, adding up to a veritable corporate Kamasutra of cross-promotional entanglements, it's almost impossible to separate the unprincipled bedfellows from the merely strange. On the West Coast, of course, the techno-libertarian weltenschaung made it hard to object to any corporate partnership..." p. 74]. The challenge for readers will be to avoid Johnson's own error, the mystification and spiritualization of digital information. We must struggle to see digital information as a resource, and "interface" as a means to manage that resource.

–Aaron Belz, 9/97
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