This is actually quite a literal one. I travel for my job from time to time. When I do, like so many other business travelers, I find myself taking an ever-increasing amount of tech with me; some of it for work, some for communications, and some just for fun. So I end up with a laptop, an iPad, a Kindle Fire, a PS Vita, an Apple Watch, an iPhone, Bluetooth headset for the phone, proper Bluetooth earphones for music, a nice set of plug-in headphones for when I'm playing Minecraft on the plane, and so on.
Of course, I also end up bringing along about four hundred linear feet of charging cable, because each of these things has its own gimmicky way of charging up. A lot of them use Mini-USB, which is handy, and the Apple stuff has its own proprietary cable design, and the watch has that weird magnetic induction thing.
The real problem is that each of these things needs a power outlet. Now, about half the time this isn't a real issue, since I'm probably traveling somewhere in Japan or North America, or even Trinidad, where they all use the same 100/110 volt system with the same plug. But last year I went to Mauritius, which used to be French, which means that the house current is about a billion volts. There aren't even any wires in a building in Mauritius. If you open up the cover plate on the power socket, you just see random lightning bolts shooting around inside there. I had to buy this weird adapter thing the size of my fist that cost about fifty bucks just to plug in one piece of equipment. No way was I going to be able to keep all my electronics alive for the whole two week trip. I looked at all the charging cables, bound up into a wad the size of a child's forearm, and began to despair.
And then just as quickly began not to despair, because I realized something. All these devices are weird and different formats at one end, but at the other they are all identical: USB jacks.
I went down to Don Quijote and bought a four-port wall-to-USB adapter for about five hundred yen, and then a four-port USB hub for about two hundred. I could plug the adapter into the power converter, and plug the hub into the adapter. Anything left over I could plug into my laptop, which has extra USB ports.
It's convenient when something lives up to its name, and the Universal Serial Bus does just that. It's supposed to be for data transfer, but since it carries power as well, it's just too handy. I've started seeing, in newer homes, USB ports in wall sockets next to the regular outlets.
Power cords haven't always been so uniform. I can remember seeing older appliances with the old braided insulation, which reminded me too much of a fuse for me to be very comfortable in using. As a musician, most of the cables I dealt with (and still do) harken back to the glory days of radio: 5-pin microphone connectors; quarter-inch audio cables; eighth-inch headphone cables; RCA plugs; coaxial cable; and the like. There was a legitimate reason for each of these designs to exist back then. 5-pin provided better audio recording and broadcasting quality. RCA plugs were difficult to knock loose. Quarter-inch cables could handle repeated connecting and disconnecting.
I'm starting to think that just about everything worldwide should be USB. It seems to be able to handle just about everything, except the heavy power load of larger electrical appliances, like clothes dryers and dishwashers. A Microsoft Surface Pro is pretty much the same device no matter which country it works in. By the time the electricity gets to the actual device it's been stepped down a fair bit.
Maybe we'll see the USB become truly universal, until induction recharging gets up to speed. This might not be a particularly profound topic, but I'm fascinated by it.
Maybe they'll even solve the mystery of why it takes three tries to plug one in.
Showing posts with label Interfaces. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interfaces. Show all posts
Monday, 22 May 2017
Monday, 15 May 2017
Interfaces: Tableware
This is part of a larger series involving the interface of consumption. How it will all link together I'm not quite sure as of yet. I don't know if you have worked this out or not, Dear Reader, but one of the rules I've set for myself in writing on this blog, no matter what series it is, has no predefined structure or draft writing, apart from thinking about it for the 45 minutes I'm on the elliptical at the gym beforehand. This is me winging it, just to get this stuff out of my head; any editing I do is on the fly. When and if I write properly, later on, I'll have all this to use as reference. For now, Blithering Ahoy.
I've already talked a bit about the very basic interface of doors a little while ago, and now I would like to discuss another physical interface we use in consumption, that of tableware. The manner in which humans consume their daily nourishment says a lot, I think, about their cultural relationship to said nutrition, and we can learn from examining it.
There are, to my mind, four basic utensil systems for the consumption of food. The first and most basic, and most likely still the most prevalent worldwide, is to use the utensil systems with which we have been issued at birth: our hands. I can't think of anyone, in any society anywhere, that doesn't eat at least some foods by hand. There's even a common English name for it: "Finger food." Every day, we eat something by simply picking it up and shoving it directly into the face hole. I myself, not five minutes ago, ate a banana by this method.
It's really one of the benefits of having hands, as any simian can tell you, or will if the speech center of their brain is properly developed. Hands are brilliant, and can do so many amazing things. You can form a scoop to eat a biryani right from the dish, or make that weird inverted-pyramid thing with your fingers that we do when we grab a piece of cake directly from the serving plate, or, if your fingers are small enough, you can stick a pitted olive or a Bugle corn snack on the end of each one and nom them while watching Speed Racer. Or that might have just been me at age 5.
Just barely one step removed from eating with one's hands is the concept of wrapping the food in another food, held in one's hand, and eating that way. This is where we get sandwiches, wraps, harumaki, and other delectables. Tuna salad, for example, is messy and problematic to eat with the fingers. So is Ossetra caviar. But wrap that tuna and mayo in a lettuce leaf or put that fishy jam on a toast point, and you can eat it for days without spilling a drop. This is also the source of the pinnacle of modern cuisine, the taco.
So the first two utensil systems aren't actually utensils, per se. The third one is, although just barely. Chopsticks are used around the world, and have been in use for at least 6,000 years. It's not hard to see the evolutionary line that goes from stick used to poke/stir/subdue food in the pot, to using two sticks for better purchase, to eating with said sticks to prevent burning your mouth, to using them to scarf down a Spicy Teriyaki Chicken with a side of Gyoza from Paul's Teriyaki in Federal Way, Washington, arguably the finest teriyaki shop known to mankind. (You would think that, living in Japan, it would be easy to find proper Seattle-style teriyaki here. You would be wrong.) Every day, millions and millions of meals, possibly billions, are consumed using chopsticks.
Finally, we have the Western knife-fork-spoon combo, the most recent of the group at only a handful of centuries of age. We Westerners tend to think of this setup as being the best of the bunch and the easiest to use. We enjoy using the Sharp Cutty Thing, the Stabby Gimmick, and the Tiny Bowl on A Stick for all our foods, as it gives us a wide range of options for quickly transferring food to mouth on those occasions when simply grabbing a fistful of Lobster Thermidor and mashing it into one's head might be seen as somewhat gauche. It's also quite difficult to eat Kix with milk without a spoon.
These are all tools that serve to establish our relationships with food, in some way. Some of it has to do with material availability. Most households had access to some wood and rudimentary carving tools, so making chopsticks wasn't difficult. Western utensils started with the aristocracy and worked their way down as materials such as stainless steel or silver plate became cheaper. I think the history of Western utensils seems to indicate a desire to keep food at a remove from one's person. For quite a large period of Western history, eating was seen as a rather revolting and physical act. Given the state of both the average set of teeth and refrigeration technology at the time, they might have had a point. Food was meant to be consumed quietly and carefully and in dainty, controlled bites. The same went for many Asian cultures, as well. Keeping your food at the end of a long stick might be the best.
Of course, the people in the street just kept on doing what they've always done, buying and eating food straight from one hand to the other. There's a weird dichotomy here, and it all revolves around that most confusing of customs, table manners. The closer we physically are to our food, the more sensual it becomes, and the more it seems to control us. Keeping our food at the end of some sort of implement seems to create a barrier in our interaction.
I've already talked a bit about the very basic interface of doors a little while ago, and now I would like to discuss another physical interface we use in consumption, that of tableware. The manner in which humans consume their daily nourishment says a lot, I think, about their cultural relationship to said nutrition, and we can learn from examining it.
There are, to my mind, four basic utensil systems for the consumption of food. The first and most basic, and most likely still the most prevalent worldwide, is to use the utensil systems with which we have been issued at birth: our hands. I can't think of anyone, in any society anywhere, that doesn't eat at least some foods by hand. There's even a common English name for it: "Finger food." Every day, we eat something by simply picking it up and shoving it directly into the face hole. I myself, not five minutes ago, ate a banana by this method.
It's really one of the benefits of having hands, as any simian can tell you, or will if the speech center of their brain is properly developed. Hands are brilliant, and can do so many amazing things. You can form a scoop to eat a biryani right from the dish, or make that weird inverted-pyramid thing with your fingers that we do when we grab a piece of cake directly from the serving plate, or, if your fingers are small enough, you can stick a pitted olive or a Bugle corn snack on the end of each one and nom them while watching Speed Racer. Or that might have just been me at age 5.
Just barely one step removed from eating with one's hands is the concept of wrapping the food in another food, held in one's hand, and eating that way. This is where we get sandwiches, wraps, harumaki, and other delectables. Tuna salad, for example, is messy and problematic to eat with the fingers. So is Ossetra caviar. But wrap that tuna and mayo in a lettuce leaf or put that fishy jam on a toast point, and you can eat it for days without spilling a drop. This is also the source of the pinnacle of modern cuisine, the taco.
So the first two utensil systems aren't actually utensils, per se. The third one is, although just barely. Chopsticks are used around the world, and have been in use for at least 6,000 years. It's not hard to see the evolutionary line that goes from stick used to poke/stir/subdue food in the pot, to using two sticks for better purchase, to eating with said sticks to prevent burning your mouth, to using them to scarf down a Spicy Teriyaki Chicken with a side of Gyoza from Paul's Teriyaki in Federal Way, Washington, arguably the finest teriyaki shop known to mankind. (You would think that, living in Japan, it would be easy to find proper Seattle-style teriyaki here. You would be wrong.) Every day, millions and millions of meals, possibly billions, are consumed using chopsticks.
Finally, we have the Western knife-fork-spoon combo, the most recent of the group at only a handful of centuries of age. We Westerners tend to think of this setup as being the best of the bunch and the easiest to use. We enjoy using the Sharp Cutty Thing, the Stabby Gimmick, and the Tiny Bowl on A Stick for all our foods, as it gives us a wide range of options for quickly transferring food to mouth on those occasions when simply grabbing a fistful of Lobster Thermidor and mashing it into one's head might be seen as somewhat gauche. It's also quite difficult to eat Kix with milk without a spoon.
These are all tools that serve to establish our relationships with food, in some way. Some of it has to do with material availability. Most households had access to some wood and rudimentary carving tools, so making chopsticks wasn't difficult. Western utensils started with the aristocracy and worked their way down as materials such as stainless steel or silver plate became cheaper. I think the history of Western utensils seems to indicate a desire to keep food at a remove from one's person. For quite a large period of Western history, eating was seen as a rather revolting and physical act. Given the state of both the average set of teeth and refrigeration technology at the time, they might have had a point. Food was meant to be consumed quietly and carefully and in dainty, controlled bites. The same went for many Asian cultures, as well. Keeping your food at the end of a long stick might be the best.
Of course, the people in the street just kept on doing what they've always done, buying and eating food straight from one hand to the other. There's a weird dichotomy here, and it all revolves around that most confusing of customs, table manners. The closer we physically are to our food, the more sensual it becomes, and the more it seems to control us. Keeping our food at the end of some sort of implement seems to create a barrier in our interaction.
Monday, 8 May 2017
Interfaces: The Narrative
I was recently an impartial observer in a bit of an old foofaraw that took place, as so many great foofaraii do, on the internet. I'm not going to give even the vaguest details of what went on or how it all went down, for a variety of reasons. Of primary importance is to protect the privacy of all involved, of course, but also because it's just not that relevant.
What was important, I noticed, was the need for everyone to tell their version of what happened. This need to control the narrative seems to be very important to humans for some reason. We have an overwhelming need to control the story. "History is written by the victors," it is said, usually by a card-carrying member of the winning team. We wrestle vigorously for control of the narrative. Abraham Lincoln did his sums on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal, our childhood history states. Then, as we get older, a new story emerges: that story was made up by a writer in the 1920s to romanticize Lincoln's homely forest upbringing. I'm sure there's a third story emerging, that there's a grain of truth to the shovel story after all, but it wasn't sums, it was Latin. Sic semper fabula, as it were, and I'm sure there's a historian to tell me Lincoln would have appreciated that dark humor, and another to tell me he wouldn't have done.
There are even whole narratives about the narrative, in a wonderful meta that feeds on itself. Rashomon is a great movie in which the story is not so much about the events, but the different versions of the narrative that surround them. This has the wonderful effect of taking the narrative out of the realm of device and essentially making it one of the characters of the story. We grow more and more familiar with this new character in much the same way we do with other characters in a tale; by observing the way other characters interact with it. This makes the narrative in Rashomon a very real interface. It changes and is changed by those with whom it interacts.
Historians have a very personal relationship with this particular interface, and the very best ones treat it with the respect it deserves. Properly trained historians (and I know a few) tread carefully in the narrative of the past, observing it with scientific detachment. They treat history as though it's under investigation by the FBI. "These are events that we know to have happened," they say. They require multiple sources, like reputable journalists. They require verification with the assistance of other scientific disciplines. Proper historical research will use just about any scientific discipline you care to name in its quest. Pages from a manuscript are subject to chemical testing. Inks and dyes are recreated using manufacturing techniques known to have existed at the time. Metals are refined to see if they might have been commercially viable. Animal bones are exhumed and studied.
There are two stories about exploring the narrative that fascinate me a great deal. The first involves the famous case of Otzi, the 5300-year-old man found frozen in ice in the Tyrol Alps. If you haven't read about this guy, go and do so. Heck, the Wikipedia page is a great place to start. He was found in 1991, and research has been ongoing since then. I can't help but think that if we had found him even thirty years ago, we wouldn't know anything about him. But microscopic examination of this well-preserved corpse has advanced what we know of the narrative of human life five millennia ago beyond imagination. (Spoiler Alert: they really weren't all that much different from us.) Otzi is a great example of not destroying the narrative with conjecture, or with the desire to control the past.
My other favorite story involves a horrible tragedy. Apollo 1, originally called AS-204, was meant to be the first in a series of manned missions meant to meet President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon. On January 27, 1967, during a test on the launchpad, a fire in the spacecraft took the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
There were two investigations that almost immediately formed. The first was led by Washington DC administrators and a congressional committee, with Senator Walter Mondale on board. This committee effectively had as its focus a single question: "Who is to blame?"
There is a problem with questions like that, namely, the logical fallacy petitio principii, "begging the question." Asking, "who is to blame," creates an expectation for the outcome. Blame will be found, and assigned, and those guilty will be punished. The focus is thus no longer on the truth of the narrative and instead on the control of it. It does not admit of the possibility that there might be no blame to apply. There must be blame; otherwise our entire investigation is invalid. This is not because Congresspersons are inherently evil, necessarily. It more than likely has to do with the blindingly obvious fact that Congress deals in law, and many of its members are attorneys, who, again, it must be said, are not evil in and of themselves. But these are people who deal in blame and guilt, so naturally their investigations would expect them.
The second investigation was composed by top scientists from NASA and academia, and also by the astronauts themselves. Anyone who's read that Tom Wolfe book will come away with the idea that astronauts were a bunch of crazy risk-taking test pilots who chased women and drove Corvettes the wrong way up the interstate and what have you. This description has some merit. Both pilots and aviators could share stories of adventure and fun.
What everyone forgets about the astronauts, however, is that just about every single one of them had at least a bachelor's degree in some sort of engineering discipline, and a large percentage of them had advanced degrees in the field as well. When you think of a bunch of hard-drinking, hard-partying woo-hoo rednecks, you also need to see thirty crew-cut heads in short-sleeve shirts bent over desks while furiously working away at slide rules. These were not, by and large, men of great imagination, prone to works of poetry and a love of opera. These were men who had a serious vested God-damned interest in exactly how many foot-pounds of torque that alloy bolt would take before it sheared right off, taking your wing with it and leaving your wife and kids with a tiny pension to survive on.
These people had no interest whatsoever in controlling the narrative; they let the narrative speak to them.
"What the hell happened?" they asked, and got to work. They disassembled the entire AS-204 command module, down to the individual bolts, and photographed and examined each part. If there was a discoloration or something the engineers didn't understand, they refused conjecture; they handed that part of the investigation off to an expert who did understand. They ran tests on identical parts, and identical spacecraft. They took the entire ship apart, figured out what went wrong (the story is too complex to go into detail here, but the main culprit was an electrical short in a pure oxygen environment), and then used their data to completely redesign and rebuild a much safer and ultimately successful spacecraft.
Beware people who spend too much time looking for someone to blame, because they will inevitably find someone, and it won't be them. Instead, focus on the truth of the narrative. Ask yourself, and the world around you, these two questions:
"What the hell happened?" and
"What the hell is happening?"
Remove yourself from the need to control the narrative and instead allow yourself to simply understand it. Knowing what is happening is almost always more valuable, and is easier to navigate.
What was important, I noticed, was the need for everyone to tell their version of what happened. This need to control the narrative seems to be very important to humans for some reason. We have an overwhelming need to control the story. "History is written by the victors," it is said, usually by a card-carrying member of the winning team. We wrestle vigorously for control of the narrative. Abraham Lincoln did his sums on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal, our childhood history states. Then, as we get older, a new story emerges: that story was made up by a writer in the 1920s to romanticize Lincoln's homely forest upbringing. I'm sure there's a third story emerging, that there's a grain of truth to the shovel story after all, but it wasn't sums, it was Latin. Sic semper fabula, as it were, and I'm sure there's a historian to tell me Lincoln would have appreciated that dark humor, and another to tell me he wouldn't have done.
There are even whole narratives about the narrative, in a wonderful meta that feeds on itself. Rashomon is a great movie in which the story is not so much about the events, but the different versions of the narrative that surround them. This has the wonderful effect of taking the narrative out of the realm of device and essentially making it one of the characters of the story. We grow more and more familiar with this new character in much the same way we do with other characters in a tale; by observing the way other characters interact with it. This makes the narrative in Rashomon a very real interface. It changes and is changed by those with whom it interacts.
Historians have a very personal relationship with this particular interface, and the very best ones treat it with the respect it deserves. Properly trained historians (and I know a few) tread carefully in the narrative of the past, observing it with scientific detachment. They treat history as though it's under investigation by the FBI. "These are events that we know to have happened," they say. They require multiple sources, like reputable journalists. They require verification with the assistance of other scientific disciplines. Proper historical research will use just about any scientific discipline you care to name in its quest. Pages from a manuscript are subject to chemical testing. Inks and dyes are recreated using manufacturing techniques known to have existed at the time. Metals are refined to see if they might have been commercially viable. Animal bones are exhumed and studied.
There are two stories about exploring the narrative that fascinate me a great deal. The first involves the famous case of Otzi, the 5300-year-old man found frozen in ice in the Tyrol Alps. If you haven't read about this guy, go and do so. Heck, the Wikipedia page is a great place to start. He was found in 1991, and research has been ongoing since then. I can't help but think that if we had found him even thirty years ago, we wouldn't know anything about him. But microscopic examination of this well-preserved corpse has advanced what we know of the narrative of human life five millennia ago beyond imagination. (Spoiler Alert: they really weren't all that much different from us.) Otzi is a great example of not destroying the narrative with conjecture, or with the desire to control the past.
My other favorite story involves a horrible tragedy. Apollo 1, originally called AS-204, was meant to be the first in a series of manned missions meant to meet President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon. On January 27, 1967, during a test on the launchpad, a fire in the spacecraft took the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
There were two investigations that almost immediately formed. The first was led by Washington DC administrators and a congressional committee, with Senator Walter Mondale on board. This committee effectively had as its focus a single question: "Who is to blame?"
There is a problem with questions like that, namely, the logical fallacy petitio principii, "begging the question." Asking, "who is to blame," creates an expectation for the outcome. Blame will be found, and assigned, and those guilty will be punished. The focus is thus no longer on the truth of the narrative and instead on the control of it. It does not admit of the possibility that there might be no blame to apply. There must be blame; otherwise our entire investigation is invalid. This is not because Congresspersons are inherently evil, necessarily. It more than likely has to do with the blindingly obvious fact that Congress deals in law, and many of its members are attorneys, who, again, it must be said, are not evil in and of themselves. But these are people who deal in blame and guilt, so naturally their investigations would expect them.
The second investigation was composed by top scientists from NASA and academia, and also by the astronauts themselves. Anyone who's read that Tom Wolfe book will come away with the idea that astronauts were a bunch of crazy risk-taking test pilots who chased women and drove Corvettes the wrong way up the interstate and what have you. This description has some merit. Both pilots and aviators could share stories of adventure and fun.
What everyone forgets about the astronauts, however, is that just about every single one of them had at least a bachelor's degree in some sort of engineering discipline, and a large percentage of them had advanced degrees in the field as well. When you think of a bunch of hard-drinking, hard-partying woo-hoo rednecks, you also need to see thirty crew-cut heads in short-sleeve shirts bent over desks while furiously working away at slide rules. These were not, by and large, men of great imagination, prone to works of poetry and a love of opera. These were men who had a serious vested God-damned interest in exactly how many foot-pounds of torque that alloy bolt would take before it sheared right off, taking your wing with it and leaving your wife and kids with a tiny pension to survive on.
These people had no interest whatsoever in controlling the narrative; they let the narrative speak to them.
"What the hell happened?" they asked, and got to work. They disassembled the entire AS-204 command module, down to the individual bolts, and photographed and examined each part. If there was a discoloration or something the engineers didn't understand, they refused conjecture; they handed that part of the investigation off to an expert who did understand. They ran tests on identical parts, and identical spacecraft. They took the entire ship apart, figured out what went wrong (the story is too complex to go into detail here, but the main culprit was an electrical short in a pure oxygen environment), and then used their data to completely redesign and rebuild a much safer and ultimately successful spacecraft.
Beware people who spend too much time looking for someone to blame, because they will inevitably find someone, and it won't be them. Instead, focus on the truth of the narrative. Ask yourself, and the world around you, these two questions:
"What the hell happened?" and
"What the hell is happening?"
Remove yourself from the need to control the narrative and instead allow yourself to simply understand it. Knowing what is happening is almost always more valuable, and is easier to navigate.
Monday, 1 May 2017
Interfaces: Generational Labels
The concept of nomenclature as interface is not a new one. There is an old saying to the effect that to name a thing is to control that thing. In changing the name of an object, person, or concept, you can in fact change the perception of that object.
For example, very few people ever wanted to eat the lowly (literally; it's a bottom-feeder) toothfish, and with good reason: it is one ugly sumbitch. Toothfishes look like a slime-covered reject from the Jim Henson Creature Workshop and come in a variety of colors ranging from black to lighter black. Not only that, but their name is grammatically problematic. What is the plural of a toothfish? Toothfishes? Teethfish? Toothenfishen? Feh.
However, fishermen kept catching the damn things and having to throw them back. So the Toothfish Marketing Board, or another entity whose name I did not just now make up, decided that the easiest possible thing to do was to stop trolling the bottom of the water and come up with new and less-invasive ways of catching the fish that they really wanted.
I'm kidding, of course. The marketing board just changed the name of the toothfish to the "Chilean Sea Bass." Have you ever eaten Chilean Sea Bass? I have. Did you pay a lot for it? I did. Do yourself a favor and Google an image of the toothfish. Yum.
Observe now as I circle around back towards some sort of a point. If something so simple as a name change can convince people that a hideous toothfish is in reality a gourmet treat, what then are we to make of generational labels, those names slapped on us by...
...By whom, exactly? Who establishes the criteria and labeling of generations? Is there a Generation Labeling Authority that issues position papers and directives regarding these things? Is there someone with a master calendar somewhere, carefully guarded and controlled, assigning labels to every American (these days, every Westerner) as they are born? Who decides what the generations are and when they begin and end?
Well, you won't be surprised to discover that it was originally advertising and marketing executives in the 1950s and 1960s, hoping to tap into the disposable income of the postwar "baby boom" generation. Granted, there had been some advertising directed at children prior to the war, but most of it had been of the gee-whillikers-fellers-lookit-this-swell-bike-I-got-from-selling-Grit-variety. In other words, it wasn't until after the war that selling to kids ut res ipsa became a thing. Before that, advertising and marketing to kids was literally a nickel-and-dime business.
Here's where we get into marketing theory a little bit. In order to sell to a group, the obvious first order of business is to have a group. Now, it's pretty easy to sell to some groups. The elderly are easy as hell to market to, for example. They have a shared set of general physical attributes, behaviors, and emotional triggers that can be broadly manipulated with a simple set of symbolic appeals to pathos, as expressed in the simple and perfect advertising line: "I've fallen and I can't get up." This simple strategy works well with the elderly, who grew up in a "less complicated time," rife with subtle class distinctions, racial discrimination both great and small, heavily controlled media and limited information dissemination, sexual repression, gender inequality, outmoded concepts of science, little to no understanding of educational theory, monetary and banking systems that created wild swings in the economy, religious dominance, multiple wars, and polio. ("Less complicated," my ass.)
The strange bit is that the baby boomers are now well and truly getting into that elderly group, and advertisers are having a rough time figuring out how to deal with them. I have two older brothers who are both retired. How do you sell Lotrimin to guys who still have ticket stubs from seeing It's A Beautiful Day at the Paramount in 1969? These new old people are problematic. Do we sell them as physically active? Are they (gasp) sexually active? Do they go hiking and jump out of airplanes and go surfing, or do they sit at home and shout at Fox News like the other old people did?
The answer lies in that marketing theory stuff that I was talking about a few paragraphs back and that you thought I forgot. The key to these groups is the key to all magic: naming a thing defines the thing. Once you have given a name to a group, the person or persons doing the naming has a certain measure of control over that group. Just ask any internet fanbase that has ever existed. If you are a Doctor Who fan, or a Trekkie, or a Marvel fan, or a Legophile, or an orchid enthusiast, or a breeder of exotic antelopes, there is a group somewhere that decides on your behalf: in or out. Someone, somewhere, is the gatekeeper, and decides who gets to be in the group and who goes. The group can be very small. There have been, to the best of my knowledge, five humans who were members of XTC, at various times. The group can be very large. The VFW has about 1.2 million members as of 2016. The criteria can be as arcane as you like. Prairie Prince played drums on three or four XTC albums, but he's not a member of the band. I'm a veteran, but I can't join the VFW because I wasn't lucky enough to get shot at overseas.
If there's a group, then there's someone minding the door. If you're a marketing group or advertising consortium, the best thing you can do is create a group of your own, and make it really attractive. Are you a baby boomer? Then you should like the Beach Boys and feel bad that you didn't make to Woodstock and have some guilt about making it home alive from Vietnam when all those other guys didn't. You should also have an affinity for Volkswagens, Whole Foods, NPR, craft beer, granola, Greek yogurt, and higher-end domestic red wines and Rieslings. If you're a Gen-Xer, you like skateboards, tattoos, Snapple, green tea, Subarus, and you tell everyone that you saw Weezer on their first tour at a small bar near your college but really you saw them at a festival around the time Maladroit came out when Rivers was being all weird. If you're a Millennial, who cares what you like because you don't have any money. We guess that you like eating at Panda Express or Chipotle or maybe Panera Bread if you're feeling posh.
A label is more than just an easy way to name something or someone. It is a contractual interface. It wasn't created by the guys who invented "Keeping up with the Joneses," but they certainly put a keen edge on it. When you agree to be labeled, you tacitly agree to conform to a certain set of expectations and boundaries. You wanna be part of our group? You buy these products, you share these tastes, you sing from this hymnal. Calling someone a Boomer, or an Xer, or a Millennial, might seem, on the surface, to simply assign a age range to a person.
What it really does is diminish them, in a Huxleyan classification system that reduces all of a person's unique attributes, qualifications, and experiences to a minima that serves no other purpose than to catalog their habits of consumption.
But then, what do I know: I'm a Taurus.
For example, very few people ever wanted to eat the lowly (literally; it's a bottom-feeder) toothfish, and with good reason: it is one ugly sumbitch. Toothfishes look like a slime-covered reject from the Jim Henson Creature Workshop and come in a variety of colors ranging from black to lighter black. Not only that, but their name is grammatically problematic. What is the plural of a toothfish? Toothfishes? Teethfish? Toothenfishen? Feh.
However, fishermen kept catching the damn things and having to throw them back. So the Toothfish Marketing Board, or another entity whose name I did not just now make up, decided that the easiest possible thing to do was to stop trolling the bottom of the water and come up with new and less-invasive ways of catching the fish that they really wanted.
I'm kidding, of course. The marketing board just changed the name of the toothfish to the "Chilean Sea Bass." Have you ever eaten Chilean Sea Bass? I have. Did you pay a lot for it? I did. Do yourself a favor and Google an image of the toothfish. Yum.
Observe now as I circle around back towards some sort of a point. If something so simple as a name change can convince people that a hideous toothfish is in reality a gourmet treat, what then are we to make of generational labels, those names slapped on us by...
...By whom, exactly? Who establishes the criteria and labeling of generations? Is there a Generation Labeling Authority that issues position papers and directives regarding these things? Is there someone with a master calendar somewhere, carefully guarded and controlled, assigning labels to every American (these days, every Westerner) as they are born? Who decides what the generations are and when they begin and end?
Well, you won't be surprised to discover that it was originally advertising and marketing executives in the 1950s and 1960s, hoping to tap into the disposable income of the postwar "baby boom" generation. Granted, there had been some advertising directed at children prior to the war, but most of it had been of the gee-whillikers-fellers-lookit-this-swell-bike-I-got-from-selling-Grit-variety. In other words, it wasn't until after the war that selling to kids ut res ipsa became a thing. Before that, advertising and marketing to kids was literally a nickel-and-dime business.
Here's where we get into marketing theory a little bit. In order to sell to a group, the obvious first order of business is to have a group. Now, it's pretty easy to sell to some groups. The elderly are easy as hell to market to, for example. They have a shared set of general physical attributes, behaviors, and emotional triggers that can be broadly manipulated with a simple set of symbolic appeals to pathos, as expressed in the simple and perfect advertising line: "I've fallen and I can't get up." This simple strategy works well with the elderly, who grew up in a "less complicated time," rife with subtle class distinctions, racial discrimination both great and small, heavily controlled media and limited information dissemination, sexual repression, gender inequality, outmoded concepts of science, little to no understanding of educational theory, monetary and banking systems that created wild swings in the economy, religious dominance, multiple wars, and polio. ("Less complicated," my ass.)
The strange bit is that the baby boomers are now well and truly getting into that elderly group, and advertisers are having a rough time figuring out how to deal with them. I have two older brothers who are both retired. How do you sell Lotrimin to guys who still have ticket stubs from seeing It's A Beautiful Day at the Paramount in 1969? These new old people are problematic. Do we sell them as physically active? Are they (gasp) sexually active? Do they go hiking and jump out of airplanes and go surfing, or do they sit at home and shout at Fox News like the other old people did?
The answer lies in that marketing theory stuff that I was talking about a few paragraphs back and that you thought I forgot. The key to these groups is the key to all magic: naming a thing defines the thing. Once you have given a name to a group, the person or persons doing the naming has a certain measure of control over that group. Just ask any internet fanbase that has ever existed. If you are a Doctor Who fan, or a Trekkie, or a Marvel fan, or a Legophile, or an orchid enthusiast, or a breeder of exotic antelopes, there is a group somewhere that decides on your behalf: in or out. Someone, somewhere, is the gatekeeper, and decides who gets to be in the group and who goes. The group can be very small. There have been, to the best of my knowledge, five humans who were members of XTC, at various times. The group can be very large. The VFW has about 1.2 million members as of 2016. The criteria can be as arcane as you like. Prairie Prince played drums on three or four XTC albums, but he's not a member of the band. I'm a veteran, but I can't join the VFW because I wasn't lucky enough to get shot at overseas.
If there's a group, then there's someone minding the door. If you're a marketing group or advertising consortium, the best thing you can do is create a group of your own, and make it really attractive. Are you a baby boomer? Then you should like the Beach Boys and feel bad that you didn't make to Woodstock and have some guilt about making it home alive from Vietnam when all those other guys didn't. You should also have an affinity for Volkswagens, Whole Foods, NPR, craft beer, granola, Greek yogurt, and higher-end domestic red wines and Rieslings. If you're a Gen-Xer, you like skateboards, tattoos, Snapple, green tea, Subarus, and you tell everyone that you saw Weezer on their first tour at a small bar near your college but really you saw them at a festival around the time Maladroit came out when Rivers was being all weird. If you're a Millennial, who cares what you like because you don't have any money. We guess that you like eating at Panda Express or Chipotle or maybe Panera Bread if you're feeling posh.
A label is more than just an easy way to name something or someone. It is a contractual interface. It wasn't created by the guys who invented "Keeping up with the Joneses," but they certainly put a keen edge on it. When you agree to be labeled, you tacitly agree to conform to a certain set of expectations and boundaries. You wanna be part of our group? You buy these products, you share these tastes, you sing from this hymnal. Calling someone a Boomer, or an Xer, or a Millennial, might seem, on the surface, to simply assign a age range to a person.
What it really does is diminish them, in a Huxleyan classification system that reduces all of a person's unique attributes, qualifications, and experiences to a minima that serves no other purpose than to catalog their habits of consumption.
But then, what do I know: I'm a Taurus.
Monday, 24 April 2017
Interfaces: Writing Utensils
For a while, a few years ago, I considered studying to become a linguist. Then I met some linguists, and discovered that the discipline was either a) almost completely theoretical in nature, b) utterly bogged down in researching minutiae so obscure that no one would ever care, or c) completely shot through with loonies. I then briefly considered linguistic anthropology as a field, but realized that I was too old to begin a career at Starbucks.
I guess what I'm saying is that I like the concept of linguistics far more than I like the actual practice of it. I like studying languages and the differences and similarities in them. I like the methods of communication created by humans, and how we create these shared, communal symbols, both written and verbal, in order to interact with one another.
I especially love learning about Japanese, by which I mean it drives me up a wall and I hate it. That sounds like a horrible thing to say, but anyone who has ever studied Japanese knows exactly what I'm talking about. Japanese has four very distinct and different syllabaries, each serving its own purpose and two of them stolen outright from other cultures. Trying to figure out the written Japanese language is like trying to figure out, well, Japan. It makes perfect sense right up until it doesn't. You'll be walking down the street, seeing all the different yet familiar corporate logos from around the world. People are wearing Adidas and staring at iPhones and listening to whatever racket passes for pop music these days. It all looks perfectly normal and then BLAM GIANT ANIMATED CRAB HANGING OFF THE SIDE OF A BUILDING and then you're lost again.
I'm particularly fascinated by kanji, the Chinese ideograms that the Japanese use to express concepts and common objects, such as "love" or "water" or "economic analyst." There's not a really clear number on how many kanji actually exist, and some of them have several different pronunciations, depending on usage. These symbols serve a valuable function in Japanese.
But they are damned difficult to use, here in the 21st century, and here is where we come to my actual point, which is the interface of writing utensils and their effect on language.
The type of writing a culture uses (assuming it has a written language to begin with) is often shaped by utensils it uses to express that language. The Sumerians, as far as we know, invented written language. We know this because their language, cuneiform, is the oldest samples of writing we have ever found.
Except that that's probably bollocks. Cuneiform is the oldest writing we have ever found because it consists of marks pressed into wet clay with a pointed stick. Wet clay, left in the sun, becomes dry clay, which is really just a sort of rock. (Sit down, geologists.) It's the oldest writing because, well, it's the oldest. There might have been earlier scripts than cuneiform, in other places, but those lost writings were scraped into tree bark that rotted away, or onto leaves that withered and crumbled, or onto dried skin that disintegrated. Sumerian cuneiform lasted, because it was printed on a more durable medium, and went on to be adapted to serve a dozen other civilizations, before being pushed aside by the Phoenician alphabet. There are still samples today.
Another example of historical writing, and one that I personally think belongs in the bin, is cursive. Cursive script was developed centuries ago, back when most discourse was in Latin or Greek. Writing utensils were generally some sort of quill or reed, dipped in ink and then drawn across the paper. If you picked up the pen between each letter, you were basically just asking for ink spots and blots all over your nice clean letter to the Pope begging for a stay of execution for your uncle the fish merchant, who was in that part of Venice completely by mistake and had no idea how those sacks of gold went missing. His Holiness could be put off by your sloppy penmanship and put an end to dear Uncle Heinrich ahead of schedule, even. No, cursive handwriting was designed to keep the nib of the pen on the surface of the parchment as much as possible.
Once we had movable type, however, things changed. The uniformity of type made it possible to make letters clearer and easier to read. Spelling and grammatical rules became more uniform. Written communication was no longer an art form, but a clear method of transmitting ideas and concepts. It is no mistake that the Renaissance and Enlightenment (not to mention the Protestant Reformation) all came about in the wake of movable type. Information became more easily disseminated. Cursive was dead at that point, it just didn't stop moving for some time. You'll note that very few typesetters went to the trouble of creating typefaces to mimic cursive fonts. Those were usually engraved by hand, and reserved for upper-class use.
Japanese writing does not come from the pen, of course, but from the brush. There is still an art to writing Japanese correctly, not only in kanji, but also in hiragana and katakana, the phonetic scripts used where kanji is either not viable or is unusable. Katakana, for example, is used almost exclusively to spell foreign words. It doesn't work very well, however, because, instead of creating new symbols to express foreign sounds, they simply used the existing phonemes they already had and just created new symbols for those. Which is daft. It's like if we created another alphabet, ABC through Z, and just came up with different shapes for each letter, and then said, "Okay, this is the alphabet that immigrants use."
Each character in these different syllabaries must be written in a distinctive way, following what is called a "stroke order." If you don't follow the correct stroke order, the meaning of the character can be reduced or even changed outright. This can and does cause problems. Someone's address or surname might be mispronounced or misunderstood. This could be a problem if you're trying to get the fire department to swing 'round your place. (Don't get me started on Japanese addresses.)
So, on the one side, we have Western culture, with a written language driven by the pen; on the other, we have Asian culture and the brush. Now, I'm not a fan of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which takes the position that language determines thought. It seems a little too pat at least and borderline racist at worst. (Also, it's kind of made up: Sapir and Whorf never co-authored any such hypothesis; later linguistic anthropologists [those guys again] made it up and stuck their name on it.)
But I do have to wonder if there is something to the idea that the way in which we put words on the page influences our way of thinking. For example, I maintained throughout my entire academic career that taking notes by hand was a far more effective method of retaining lecture information than by typing on a computer. (Purely anecdotal and not backed up by any data, although my GPA seems to bear it out.) Does using a pen or pencil or brush change the way in which we process ideas? What about a keyboard? In just two generations, we have moved from writing on paper to the keyboard and mouse paradigm of the desktop computer to the trackpad/touchscreen gesture-driven language we use now. Is it changing us?
And what of texting as a language interface? Done primarily with thumbs, which is a new development; thumbs were previously used as a stabilization base for the fine motor control of a pen or pencil, or to operate the space bar on a keyboard. Texting is different between cultures, as well. In English, I text by selecting the letters on a virtual keyboard, much like a typewriter or laptop. In Japanese, I text by entering the phonetic values of the Japanese word on an English-style keyboard. I type in, "do-ko-ni-i-ki-ma-su-ka," and the computer in the phone uses contextual algorithms to translate that to "どこに行きますか". It even selects the correct kanji for me, which is worrying some older Japanese, who think this is causing younger Japanese to forget how to write, a sort of parallel worry to Americans who think that an ability to write cursive is vital.
If I send a text in Mandarin, which is more and more rarely as I forget the language through lack of use, I simply write the characters with my fingertip on the screen. The computer takes a good guess at what it thinks I was trying to write, and hits, most of the time, so that I say to a vendor in Guangzhou, "xie xie ni," and the correct characters are sent. (True story: as I was writing this, every time I tried to switch the computer to my Chinese keyboard set, Chrome shut down, which is why you're seeing the phonetic words and not the characters. My computer is getting old.)
I wonder if the homogenization of language input interfaces, brought about by the necessity of the vast majority of computers only using three or four operating systems worldwide, will result in a shift in thought? Will we slowly begin to think in similar ways?
Would that even be a bad thing?
I guess what I'm saying is that I like the concept of linguistics far more than I like the actual practice of it. I like studying languages and the differences and similarities in them. I like the methods of communication created by humans, and how we create these shared, communal symbols, both written and verbal, in order to interact with one another.
I especially love learning about Japanese, by which I mean it drives me up a wall and I hate it. That sounds like a horrible thing to say, but anyone who has ever studied Japanese knows exactly what I'm talking about. Japanese has four very distinct and different syllabaries, each serving its own purpose and two of them stolen outright from other cultures. Trying to figure out the written Japanese language is like trying to figure out, well, Japan. It makes perfect sense right up until it doesn't. You'll be walking down the street, seeing all the different yet familiar corporate logos from around the world. People are wearing Adidas and staring at iPhones and listening to whatever racket passes for pop music these days. It all looks perfectly normal and then BLAM GIANT ANIMATED CRAB HANGING OFF THE SIDE OF A BUILDING and then you're lost again.
I'm particularly fascinated by kanji, the Chinese ideograms that the Japanese use to express concepts and common objects, such as "love" or "water" or "economic analyst." There's not a really clear number on how many kanji actually exist, and some of them have several different pronunciations, depending on usage. These symbols serve a valuable function in Japanese.
But they are damned difficult to use, here in the 21st century, and here is where we come to my actual point, which is the interface of writing utensils and their effect on language.
The type of writing a culture uses (assuming it has a written language to begin with) is often shaped by utensils it uses to express that language. The Sumerians, as far as we know, invented written language. We know this because their language, cuneiform, is the oldest samples of writing we have ever found.
Except that that's probably bollocks. Cuneiform is the oldest writing we have ever found because it consists of marks pressed into wet clay with a pointed stick. Wet clay, left in the sun, becomes dry clay, which is really just a sort of rock. (Sit down, geologists.) It's the oldest writing because, well, it's the oldest. There might have been earlier scripts than cuneiform, in other places, but those lost writings were scraped into tree bark that rotted away, or onto leaves that withered and crumbled, or onto dried skin that disintegrated. Sumerian cuneiform lasted, because it was printed on a more durable medium, and went on to be adapted to serve a dozen other civilizations, before being pushed aside by the Phoenician alphabet. There are still samples today.
Another example of historical writing, and one that I personally think belongs in the bin, is cursive. Cursive script was developed centuries ago, back when most discourse was in Latin or Greek. Writing utensils were generally some sort of quill or reed, dipped in ink and then drawn across the paper. If you picked up the pen between each letter, you were basically just asking for ink spots and blots all over your nice clean letter to the Pope begging for a stay of execution for your uncle the fish merchant, who was in that part of Venice completely by mistake and had no idea how those sacks of gold went missing. His Holiness could be put off by your sloppy penmanship and put an end to dear Uncle Heinrich ahead of schedule, even. No, cursive handwriting was designed to keep the nib of the pen on the surface of the parchment as much as possible.
Once we had movable type, however, things changed. The uniformity of type made it possible to make letters clearer and easier to read. Spelling and grammatical rules became more uniform. Written communication was no longer an art form, but a clear method of transmitting ideas and concepts. It is no mistake that the Renaissance and Enlightenment (not to mention the Protestant Reformation) all came about in the wake of movable type. Information became more easily disseminated. Cursive was dead at that point, it just didn't stop moving for some time. You'll note that very few typesetters went to the trouble of creating typefaces to mimic cursive fonts. Those were usually engraved by hand, and reserved for upper-class use.
Japanese writing does not come from the pen, of course, but from the brush. There is still an art to writing Japanese correctly, not only in kanji, but also in hiragana and katakana, the phonetic scripts used where kanji is either not viable or is unusable. Katakana, for example, is used almost exclusively to spell foreign words. It doesn't work very well, however, because, instead of creating new symbols to express foreign sounds, they simply used the existing phonemes they already had and just created new symbols for those. Which is daft. It's like if we created another alphabet, ABC through Z, and just came up with different shapes for each letter, and then said, "Okay, this is the alphabet that immigrants use."
Each character in these different syllabaries must be written in a distinctive way, following what is called a "stroke order." If you don't follow the correct stroke order, the meaning of the character can be reduced or even changed outright. This can and does cause problems. Someone's address or surname might be mispronounced or misunderstood. This could be a problem if you're trying to get the fire department to swing 'round your place. (Don't get me started on Japanese addresses.)
So, on the one side, we have Western culture, with a written language driven by the pen; on the other, we have Asian culture and the brush. Now, I'm not a fan of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which takes the position that language determines thought. It seems a little too pat at least and borderline racist at worst. (Also, it's kind of made up: Sapir and Whorf never co-authored any such hypothesis; later linguistic anthropologists [those guys again] made it up and stuck their name on it.)
But I do have to wonder if there is something to the idea that the way in which we put words on the page influences our way of thinking. For example, I maintained throughout my entire academic career that taking notes by hand was a far more effective method of retaining lecture information than by typing on a computer. (Purely anecdotal and not backed up by any data, although my GPA seems to bear it out.) Does using a pen or pencil or brush change the way in which we process ideas? What about a keyboard? In just two generations, we have moved from writing on paper to the keyboard and mouse paradigm of the desktop computer to the trackpad/touchscreen gesture-driven language we use now. Is it changing us?
And what of texting as a language interface? Done primarily with thumbs, which is a new development; thumbs were previously used as a stabilization base for the fine motor control of a pen or pencil, or to operate the space bar on a keyboard. Texting is different between cultures, as well. In English, I text by selecting the letters on a virtual keyboard, much like a typewriter or laptop. In Japanese, I text by entering the phonetic values of the Japanese word on an English-style keyboard. I type in, "do-ko-ni-i-ki-ma-su-ka," and the computer in the phone uses contextual algorithms to translate that to "どこに行きますか". It even selects the correct kanji for me, which is worrying some older Japanese, who think this is causing younger Japanese to forget how to write, a sort of parallel worry to Americans who think that an ability to write cursive is vital.
If I send a text in Mandarin, which is more and more rarely as I forget the language through lack of use, I simply write the characters with my fingertip on the screen. The computer takes a good guess at what it thinks I was trying to write, and hits, most of the time, so that I say to a vendor in Guangzhou, "xie xie ni," and the correct characters are sent. (True story: as I was writing this, every time I tried to switch the computer to my Chinese keyboard set, Chrome shut down, which is why you're seeing the phonetic words and not the characters. My computer is getting old.)
I wonder if the homogenization of language input interfaces, brought about by the necessity of the vast majority of computers only using three or four operating systems worldwide, will result in a shift in thought? Will we slowly begin to think in similar ways?
Would that even be a bad thing?
Monday, 17 April 2017
Interfaces: Doors
Ironically, I was held up a bit in writing today's entry thanks to Google's new login system, which, in its efforts to be more user-friendly and secure, actually now requires me to log IN to one Google account, then log back out of it, and then log in to the one that I use to write these. Google enjoys using the tagline, "One password, all of Google," conveniently forgetting that some of us have several Google accounts: one for work; one for other work; one for friends; one for networking; the one we created back when we got our first Gmail invite and thought that a jokey-sounding email address would be great, not realizing that very few university librarians are going to respond to research requests from "xXxBaDaZZ420xXx@gmail.com" and that you'll need something a bit more professional to put on the header of your resume. (Yes, I just checked. It's available, for now. Knock yourself out.)
Unlike Google, which shares with Adobe Photoshop the very definition of the term "feature creep," the simple door, which humans the world over operate on a daily basis, has maintained the same basic form and function for millennia. (Unless you were born in a barn, as my mother would say. This makes no sense. I've spent a bit of time in barns; they also have doors. I keep meaning to ask her about that.)
Doors work pretty much the same no matter where you are in the world. A panel of some material is placed over a basically human-shaped hole in the wall; said human then manipulates the panel in some way in order to swing it or slide it or fold it open.
You can tell a lot about a society and a people by its doors. Big, heavy doors indicate that passage from one side of the wall in which the door is installed to the other is strictly controlled at best and contraindicated at worst. There could be anything on the other side of the door that we want to keep out (or in): miserable weather; wild animals; prisoners; zombies; a particularly cunning goat. Lighter doors indicate a level of civility while still marking a boundary. Thin panel doors, such as those found in American homes, provide a semblance of privacy while still allowing access, in case of an emergency or if the father of a sleepy high school student wants to kick it open at 7 AM and turn on the lights while shouting in German.
Doors, like any interface, both mirror and alter the object passing through them. Imagine an alien species examining an empty American house. They would be able to make a series of basic assumptions, simply by examining a standard door. They would notice that exterior doors provide more security, in the form of sturdier construction and heavy locks, and conclude that the inhabitants lived in a society in which others could not be trusted fully. They could examine the dimensions of the doorframes and make a basic guess at the size and shape of humanity. (Even more so if they had our gravitational constant and the composition of our atmosphere to calculate from.) They could even deduce quite a bit from the study of doorknobs: hand size and shape, strength, arm position and radial movement required. A sufficiently clever species could probably work out the basic size, shape, and composition of a human being without ever seeing one, just from examining a door.
Japanese doors can be similarly studied, especially in terms of their effect on non-Japanese. The doors in my apartment, for example. From them I can conclude that doors, interior ones at least, serve a purely symbolic purpose, as the ones in my home keep out neither sound nor extremes of temperature nor small-to-medium sized insects. They only barely manage to prevent the passage of light by being just dense enough to prohibit the passage of photons.
I can also conclude that Japanese people are somewhat shorter in stature than the average Westerner, another statement that is blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever spent over fifteen minutes in Japan. The shorter Japanese doorsill means that anyone over 5' 9" here begins to walk with a permanent hunch after a while, unless they want a permanent dent in their skull at about forehead level.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to see the doorway of an alien home, and I wonder how much I could deduce from it.
Unlike Google, which shares with Adobe Photoshop the very definition of the term "feature creep," the simple door, which humans the world over operate on a daily basis, has maintained the same basic form and function for millennia. (Unless you were born in a barn, as my mother would say. This makes no sense. I've spent a bit of time in barns; they also have doors. I keep meaning to ask her about that.)
Doors work pretty much the same no matter where you are in the world. A panel of some material is placed over a basically human-shaped hole in the wall; said human then manipulates the panel in some way in order to swing it or slide it or fold it open.
You can tell a lot about a society and a people by its doors. Big, heavy doors indicate that passage from one side of the wall in which the door is installed to the other is strictly controlled at best and contraindicated at worst. There could be anything on the other side of the door that we want to keep out (or in): miserable weather; wild animals; prisoners; zombies; a particularly cunning goat. Lighter doors indicate a level of civility while still marking a boundary. Thin panel doors, such as those found in American homes, provide a semblance of privacy while still allowing access, in case of an emergency or if the father of a sleepy high school student wants to kick it open at 7 AM and turn on the lights while shouting in German.
Doors, like any interface, both mirror and alter the object passing through them. Imagine an alien species examining an empty American house. They would be able to make a series of basic assumptions, simply by examining a standard door. They would notice that exterior doors provide more security, in the form of sturdier construction and heavy locks, and conclude that the inhabitants lived in a society in which others could not be trusted fully. They could examine the dimensions of the doorframes and make a basic guess at the size and shape of humanity. (Even more so if they had our gravitational constant and the composition of our atmosphere to calculate from.) They could even deduce quite a bit from the study of doorknobs: hand size and shape, strength, arm position and radial movement required. A sufficiently clever species could probably work out the basic size, shape, and composition of a human being without ever seeing one, just from examining a door.
Japanese doors can be similarly studied, especially in terms of their effect on non-Japanese. The doors in my apartment, for example. From them I can conclude that doors, interior ones at least, serve a purely symbolic purpose, as the ones in my home keep out neither sound nor extremes of temperature nor small-to-medium sized insects. They only barely manage to prevent the passage of light by being just dense enough to prohibit the passage of photons.
I can also conclude that Japanese people are somewhat shorter in stature than the average Westerner, another statement that is blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever spent over fifteen minutes in Japan. The shorter Japanese doorsill means that anyone over 5' 9" here begins to walk with a permanent hunch after a while, unless they want a permanent dent in their skull at about forehead level.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to see the doorway of an alien home, and I wonder how much I could deduce from it.
Monday, 10 April 2017
Interfaces: An Overview
It could be said that virtually everything we encounter as we make our way through our day-to-day life could be considered an interface of sorts.
This statement seems, on the face of it, to be so utterly facile and useless that the temptation is to dismiss it out of hand. Of course interfaces surround us; you'd have to be practically comatose not to interact with the world around you. That lede is so ignorant that I might have inadvertently made you slightly stupider just by reading it, and I apologize.
But that's kind of the point. Everything we encounter is an interface, yes. But not everything we encounter is a control interface. My manipulation of the screen on my iPhone in order to send a text message to a friend is a control interface. I'm directly controlling the outcome of the interaction between myself and the phone, and this is the sort of interface we mostly tend to think of when we consider the word. My swearing in incoherent rage at the iPhone when it autocorrects "plastic" to "placid" for the seventh time is another sort of interface, and, generally speaking, a less productive one.
The fact that my iPhone looks and functions in a very similar fashion to every other cellphone on the market, however, is a very different sort of interface, as is the fact that the little icon on the button that I press to start and end the call looks like a telephone that hasn't been in general use for thirty years and that most cellphone owners have never even seen outside of a movie, or, for that matter, the button design itself, which is designed to evoke its mechanical ancestor.
Interface design both programs and is programmed by us. We say that an easy-to-use interface is "intuitive," when in fact the "intuition" is years of programming passed down from previous technologies and ingrained usage. I am currently typing this on a laptop computer that weighs about three pounds (about 1.4 kilos). It is thinner than a pen when it is closed, and maintains a wireless connection to a worldwide network that provides me with research information at a moment's notice.
Yet I still enter text into this amazing device via a method derived from a mechanical invention over a hundred years old: the typewriter. The keys on the computer are even arranged in the same manner as on my mother's old Brother portable machine, which used no electricity. The QWERTY system was designed specifically to slow down professional typists, who could enter text so quickly that the metal slugs of type, each one on the end of its own little arm, would jam together.
We don't have handset telephones anymore. We don't need a button on a touchscreen. We certainly don't need to keep the keys from jamming together on a MacBook Air. Yet we are constantly using these interfaces, and thousands of others just like them, on a daily basis.
Not only that, we replicate the old experiences, expending time and effort on reverse-engineering objects with the verisimilitude of the obsolete. I personally know people who insist on having "mechanical" keyboards for their computers, and who will pay extra for them. Apple has created a haptic-touch feedback system for their watches and phones that duplicate the sensation of touching a mechanical button. Some cars are so quiet and well-insulated now that their designers have created a function that plays back the sound of a car's motor back through the sound system. And everyone has that friend who goes on about the superior sound qualities of vinyl.
Don't get me wrong. Everyone has a right to the experiences they enjoy (within reason), and if enough people like something, the market will find a way to bring it to fruition. Not every single change has to be adopted wholeheartedly and immediately. That's not what this is all about.
What I hope to examine are the ways in which we operate and are in turn are operated by these interfaces, both great and small. I want to look at interfaces at both ends of the scale, from the very small, such as typography and iconography, to the very large, such as architecture, and the very largest interface of all: religion.
This may have all been done before. In fact, I know a lot of it has, because I'm certainly not smart enough to think it all up. But, it hasn't been done by me. Who knows? I might accidentally discover something.
This statement seems, on the face of it, to be so utterly facile and useless that the temptation is to dismiss it out of hand. Of course interfaces surround us; you'd have to be practically comatose not to interact with the world around you. That lede is so ignorant that I might have inadvertently made you slightly stupider just by reading it, and I apologize.
But that's kind of the point. Everything we encounter is an interface, yes. But not everything we encounter is a control interface. My manipulation of the screen on my iPhone in order to send a text message to a friend is a control interface. I'm directly controlling the outcome of the interaction between myself and the phone, and this is the sort of interface we mostly tend to think of when we consider the word. My swearing in incoherent rage at the iPhone when it autocorrects "plastic" to "placid" for the seventh time is another sort of interface, and, generally speaking, a less productive one.
The fact that my iPhone looks and functions in a very similar fashion to every other cellphone on the market, however, is a very different sort of interface, as is the fact that the little icon on the button that I press to start and end the call looks like a telephone that hasn't been in general use for thirty years and that most cellphone owners have never even seen outside of a movie, or, for that matter, the button design itself, which is designed to evoke its mechanical ancestor.
Interface design both programs and is programmed by us. We say that an easy-to-use interface is "intuitive," when in fact the "intuition" is years of programming passed down from previous technologies and ingrained usage. I am currently typing this on a laptop computer that weighs about three pounds (about 1.4 kilos). It is thinner than a pen when it is closed, and maintains a wireless connection to a worldwide network that provides me with research information at a moment's notice.
Yet I still enter text into this amazing device via a method derived from a mechanical invention over a hundred years old: the typewriter. The keys on the computer are even arranged in the same manner as on my mother's old Brother portable machine, which used no electricity. The QWERTY system was designed specifically to slow down professional typists, who could enter text so quickly that the metal slugs of type, each one on the end of its own little arm, would jam together.
We don't have handset telephones anymore. We don't need a button on a touchscreen. We certainly don't need to keep the keys from jamming together on a MacBook Air. Yet we are constantly using these interfaces, and thousands of others just like them, on a daily basis.
Not only that, we replicate the old experiences, expending time and effort on reverse-engineering objects with the verisimilitude of the obsolete. I personally know people who insist on having "mechanical" keyboards for their computers, and who will pay extra for them. Apple has created a haptic-touch feedback system for their watches and phones that duplicate the sensation of touching a mechanical button. Some cars are so quiet and well-insulated now that their designers have created a function that plays back the sound of a car's motor back through the sound system. And everyone has that friend who goes on about the superior sound qualities of vinyl.
Don't get me wrong. Everyone has a right to the experiences they enjoy (within reason), and if enough people like something, the market will find a way to bring it to fruition. Not every single change has to be adopted wholeheartedly and immediately. That's not what this is all about.
What I hope to examine are the ways in which we operate and are in turn are operated by these interfaces, both great and small. I want to look at interfaces at both ends of the scale, from the very small, such as typography and iconography, to the very large, such as architecture, and the very largest interface of all: religion.
This may have all been done before. In fact, I know a lot of it has, because I'm certainly not smart enough to think it all up. But, it hasn't been done by me. Who knows? I might accidentally discover something.
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