Interface - Vanessa Richter
You are reading all this on a graphical user interface that translates the technical black box behind it into a visual understandable for the 21st-century user. Even though, it was invented at the end of the last century considering that every second person uses a smartphone in Germany right now illustrates that the importance of interfaces has steadily increased since the middle of the 20th century remodelling it´s meaning multiple times. There is a diversity of understandings depending on the field of usage looking at computer science, design, physics, humanities or chemistry in the history of the interface.
The interface interesting for and coined by the 21st century addresses a variety of disciplines from communication and media studies to computer sciences and also marketing, that are closely related to the keyword. “Since the advent of mainframe computers in the early 1960s “interface” has been used commonly to refer to conduits for data transfer. It wasn’t long thereafter that the term also became nearly synonymous with interpersonal communication. Today, one can just as easily talk about the interface between a lawyer and a client as one can talk about the interface between a lawyer and a laptop. This goes to show the close association of “interface” with the idea of communication, particularly in the digital era.”1 To interface with each other can as easily be the machine or the human or any other area two different parties meet to negotiate with each other terms of communication and information exchange. If the interface is a meeting space, it could be questioned with whom one negotiates because an act of communication always needs a form of encoding and decoding to transfer a message as Hall said already 19732. Do we negotiate with the interface before we even write the message checking, which requirements are put upon us? Therefore, there needs to be a known context to find a common space for any functional #communication to happen at all.
Does the interface itself in the digital realm take an active part here or is it just the surface for the message to be displayed. I would make the argument that the interface can be seen as an active participant impacting language choices, content, style and recipient of possible communication accumulating a certain kind of control over the conversation happening and power in its own right. In contrast to the former interfaces of natural sciences or medicine the 21st century interface this argument tries to portray shifts its focus from a described chemical phenomenon to an interactive counterpart in communication and social interaction developing through the human as well as forming human actions. The two main User Interfaces important in the digital I refer to are the Graphical User Interface (GUI) , the Web User Interface (WUI). Those two could be identified as new types of interfaces as described before changing from a passive phenomenon to an active part of communication.
In the change of the 21st century, beginning in the mid 1990´s of the last century with the emergence of the WUI and GUI, technical devices have invaded our realm to an extent that we don´t consider them anymore as something excluded from us but as part of our reality in the form of smartphones, tablets and computer screens showing us any imaginable number of interfaces providing any content programmable in code. As a Digital Native, our youngest generation does not consciously distinct between the offline and online anymore but merges both into one. To interact with each other one on one or through a technical device is not differentiated as such.3
Therefore, the importance of the Interface as a keyword goes beyond the idea of the User Interface as our daily communication partner translating our thoughts and messages into technical code to communicate for us with the rest of the world. It catapults the technical structure of the interface into the realm of all human interaction transforming from a technical tool into a part of our communication and adds an unavertable social component to the technical frame.
I think the keyword is mainly used in a technical way focusing on the protocol and code, which creates the interface but the usage aspect producing the linkage between human and machine is the important point, which constitutes the interface in its original meaning providing a common intermediary between two unrelated systems to communicate and interchange.
With the beginning of the 21st-century, communication changed dramatically, considering the technical innovations currently dominating our social interactions, communication might play an overly important role but does it really involve humans? Even now I´m formulating my thoughts looking at the interface of my word program following the protocological structures provided for me or better to say making me follow the provided rules. You won´t hear about this keyword not from myself but read a clearly organized entry ordered into functional pieces like “text”, “pictures”, “media” etc. and will be following consciously or not the rules put upon your use the interface shows you. How free is our choice as user not just about how we communicate or with whom but what we are saying? And with whom are we communicating anyway?
Does the interface itself in the digital realm take an active part here or is it just the surface for the message to be displayed. I would make the argument that the interface can be seen as an active participant impacting language choices, content, style and recipient of possible communication accumulating a certain kind of control over the conversation happening and power in its own right. In contrast to the former interfaces of natural sciences or medicine the 21st century interface this argument tries to portray shifts its focus from a described chemical phenomenon to an interactive counterpart in communication and social interaction developing through the human as well as forming human actions. The two main User Interfaces important in the digital I refer to are the Graphical User Interface (GUI) , the Web User Interface (WUI). Those two could be identified as new types of interfaces as described before changing from a passive phenomenon to an active part of communication.
In the change of the 21st century, beginning in the mid 1990´s of the last century with the emergence of the WUI and GUI, technical devices have invaded our realm to an extent that we don´t consider them anymore as something excluded from us but as part of our reality in the form of smartphones, tablets and computer screens showing us any imaginable number of interfaces providing any content programmable in code. As a Digital Native, our youngest generation does not consciously distinct between the offline and online anymore but merges both into one. To interact with each other one on one or through a technical device is not differentiated as such.3
Therefore, the importance of the Interface as a keyword goes beyond the idea of the User Interface as our daily communication partner translating our thoughts and messages into technical code to communicate for us with the rest of the world. It catapults the technical structure of the interface into the realm of all human interaction transforming from a technical tool into a part of our communication and adds an unavertable social component to the technical frame.
I think the keyword is mainly used in a technical way focusing on the protocol and code, which creates the interface but the usage aspect producing the linkage between human and machine is the important point, which constitutes the interface in its original meaning providing a common intermediary between two unrelated systems to communicate and interchange.
With the beginning of the 21st-century, communication changed dramatically, considering the technical innovations currently dominating our social interactions, communication might play an overly important role but does it really involve humans? Even now I´m formulating my thoughts looking at the interface of my word program following the protocological structures provided for me or better to say making me follow the provided rules. You won´t hear about this keyword not from myself but read a clearly organized entry ordered into functional pieces like “text”, “pictures”, “media” etc. and will be following consciously or not the rules put upon your use the interface shows you. How free is our choice as user not just about how we communicate or with whom but what we are saying? And with whom are we communicating anyway?
As Alexander Galloway pointed out in his book about protocol the power mechanisms behind the interface go even beyond the denying of choices into a form of controlled freedom. If our current society should be described in forms of power distribution and implementation after Galloway, we are living in a control society, where the structures of control have become invisible to us since they are distributed in the network itself. Even though there is no single center of power, if you look close enough in a distributed network like the internet or WWW as examples one can find control mechanisms and structures producing an invisible power embedded in the protocols written in code as the foundation of the networks.4 Those same control mechanisms could be applied through the interface based on code implementing control in a system that does not simply have a technical impact but a social one too. Through the interfaces, a user interacts with the hidden power structures that can control user experiences as well as have an impact on generated data and communication by providing access or denying it. Beyond that, it should be noticed that a form of controlled freedom leaves the illusion of no hierarchical power and control even though the user complies to a high amount of restrictions due to design and transparency without consciously noticing the influence of the interface and the code he follows. Those factors surely could be seen to have a social impact on us. Did you never get lost on your phone while ‘just’ checking your emails? Well, social structures also rely on protocols even though one might call them norms.
To understand to what extend a technical tool can have an impact and interdependency on social phenomena there needs to be a broader understanding of the interface not merely as a form of translation between machine and human but also as a form of intervention. The human-machine or human-media interaction cannot be thought of as singular but as a feedback loop leaving the relationship in a constant state of change. “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”5
(1) Schaefer, P. (2011). Chapter 10: Interface: History of a Concept, 1868-1888. In D. W. Park, N. W. Jankowski, & S. Jones, The Long History of New Media: Technology, Historiography, and Contextualizing Newness (Digital Formations) (S. 163-173). New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
(2) Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. Culture, media, language, 128-138. Retrieved from: http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~jdslack/readings/CSReadings/Hall_Encoding-n-Decoding.pdf
(3) Shah, N., & Jansen, F. (2011). Introduction. In Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? BOOK ONE - TO BE (pp. 9). the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India and Hivos Knowledge Programme, The Hague, The Netherlands
(5) McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The Medium is the Message: An inventory of effects. (S. 26) Corte Madera: Ginko Press inc.
(1) Schaefer, P. (2011). Chapter 10: Interface: History of a Concept, 1868-1888. In D. W. Park, N. W. Jankowski, & S. Jones, The Long History of New Media: Technology, Historiography, and Contextualizing Newness (Digital Formations) (S. 163-173). New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
(2) Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. Culture, media, language, 128-138. Retrieved from: http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~jdslack/readings/CSReadings/Hall_Encoding-n-Decoding.pdf
(3) Shah, N., & Jansen, F. (2011). Introduction. In Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? BOOK ONE - TO BE (pp. 9). the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India and Hivos Knowledge Programme, The Hague, The Netherlands
(4) https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog (30.09.2015) Galloway, A. R. (2004). Protocol. How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
(5) McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The Medium is the Message: An inventory of effects. (S. 26) Corte Madera: Ginko Press inc.
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