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Introduction: Opening Closings
- University of Minnesota Press
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ix Introduction Opening Closings Interface This book begins and ends with magic—sleights of hand that disguise how closed our devices are by cleverly diverting our attention to seemingly breathtaking technological feats. From the stylized, David Copperfield–inspired Apple launch for the iPad, which is touted as a “truly magical and revolutionary product,” to (as of this writing) the impending launch of Google Glass, which is already being marketed as a device that will provide “answers without having to ask,” we are well into the era of the marvelous. It’s marvelous in the sense of that which is wondrous—for how could we not wonder at how the iPad simulates , for example, the relationship between inertia and friction or at how Google Glass is an invisible portal to information now embedded into our very perception of the world? But it’s also marvelous in the sense that these devices seem to have supernatural properties. But, of course, supernatural they are not. Reading Writing Interfaces is, then, anything but a breathless account of the wonders of contemporary digital computing. From beginning to end, it is about demystifying devices— especially writerly demystification—by opening up how exactly interfaces limit and create certain creative possibilities. Technological constraints are nothing new, for—as I discuss in chapter 4—Emily Dickinson’s work with fascicles clearly records her fine-tuned understanding of pen, pencil, paper, and even pinning as interface. But what is new is that the interfaces themselves and therefore their constraints are becoming ever more difficult to perceive because of the blinding seduction of the wondrous that at least partly comes back into view again x Introduction once we undertake an excavation of how things (could) have been otherwise. While interface is a productively open-ended, crossdisciplinary term, generally speaking in computing it refers simply to the point of interaction between any combination of hardware/software components. Florian Cramer has, however , usefully delineated eight different kinds of interface, including hardware-to-hardware interfaces (such as sockets and drives), hardware controllers for software functions (such as joysticks), software-to-hardware interfaces (such as the operating system), and—especially relevant for this book— human-to-hardware interfaces (such as keyboards, screens, and mice) and human-to-software interfaces (such as the graphical user interface [GUI]).¹ Throughout, however, I settle on an even more expansive definition so that interface is a technology—whether it is a fascicle, a typewriter, a command line, or a GUI—that mediates between reader and the surfacelevel , human-authored writing, as well as, in the case of digital devices, the machine-based writing taking place below the gloss of the surface.² The interface is, then, a threshold, but in a more complex sense than simply that which opens up from one distinct space to another distinct space. Instead, I draw on Alexander Galloway’s articulation of interface as “the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system” as a way to highlight the fact that while interface does grant access, it also inevitably acts as a kind of magician’s cape, continually revealing (mediatic layers, bits of information, etc.) through concealing and concealing as it reveals.³ With the advent of so-called interface-free devices such as Google Glass and the iPad—“interface-free” in the sense that, as multitouch designer Jeff Han enthused in 2006, “there’s no instruction manual” and in the sense of Apple’s and Google’s favorite marketing slogan of the moment, “It just works”—largely what’s at issue in this book is what’s revealed, or what writers in particular reveal via practices of media poetics, through what is concealed . The dream in which the boundary between human and [3.237.87.69] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:31 GMT) Introduction xi information is eradicated is just that—a dream the computing industry rides on as it attempts to convince us that the dream is now reality through sophisticated sleights of hand that take place at the level of interface. Throughout, I identify these interfaces that obscure ever more from the user in the name of “invisibility” and the “userfriendly ” with what’s fast becoming an ideology. I use ideology not merely in the sense of the adamant belief in making the computer more approachable but more in the sense that userfriendly is used quite deliberately to distort reality by convincing users that this very particular notion of a user-friendly device—one that depends on and then celebrates...