User:Colm/RW&RS-project-outline-0.4

0.4 MMDC Project Outline Draft colm

Title

Literacy as a dependency

Introduction

I am observing how interfaces, seem to be the tangible point of responsibility for the method of communication between a service / tool / provider and it's user. Interface is everywhere. Clearly, this interest comes from the modern day computer, phone and tablet though. Are they deliberately trying to keep us away from the mechanic, and the processes happening under the hood of our computers? If so, why? What is the point of removing us from proper explanation, devising ways to explain functioning properly.

With this project I hope to be able to find and explain the line between understanding software and using software, and the dependencies that these two items interchange. What is it about the language of the software vendor that breaks so far away from the language of the user? Is it deliberate that any time I use a help / search menu in software I feel like I'm being talked down to? How is it that typically non-computer-comfortable people have developed such a great relationship with touch screens? Is user friendliness simply a marketing plan to dis-educate users away from common standard computing processes and into a semi comfortable way of working with tools designed to work in closed ecosystems?

What are you working on now?

Collecting examples, and reading about interfaces, discourse networks, and control systems. Thinking about how to formulate this idea. Wondering how to speak about it. Fearing and preparing how not to turn this into just an other 'x brand' hating project. Looking into some software history, precisely the point at which craftsmen were in touch with software makers, and vocabulary just seemed to flow both ways.

What do you want your first project to be?

Because these questions are the ones that lead me to adopt new tools for myself. These new tools are the ones that made me want to join the Media Design department. Because this is a curiosity I have to explore now, and turn it into a foundation for the rest of my work here at PZI. I'd like to use this first project to go in head first into these questions I've been having, to hopefully manage to explain why I choose the tools I choose and why I think it is a pressing issue for media and design in general. I also feel the need to develop my own vocabulary and arguments to remain coherent throughout all these process choices.

How do you plan to make it?

Reading list

• Matthew Fuller - it looks like you're writing a letter: Microsoft Word
  
• Protocol - Alexander Gallaway
  
• Program or be programmed - Douglas Rushkov
  
• Katherine Hayles - How We Think
  
• Lori Emersons - Reading Writing Interfaces
  
• Matthew Fuller - It looks like you're writing a letter. Microsoft Word
  
• Micheal Seeman - Digital Tailspin, Ten Rules for the Internet After Snowden
  
• Suggestions ?

I hope to bring together some theoretical background to some writings, and illustrate them with some examples. Ultimately I would like to find a way to illustrate the contradictions and the irony of the issues in a visual manner to slide items out of their context, as a metaphor, or explanation technique.

I might start by acknowledging and making clear that software is exactly like any other cultural object, and that it rarely (never) is unidirectional. It is not innocent, and it lives inside a context that is very politicised so using it innocently is not possible.

Then I'll need to make a point about applying this research. This is a very important topic to me, I want to engage with it, and in the process, I'll research a feeling that maybe the only thing that is left to us as a self definition method is exposing our day to day choices. (internal implosion)

Choice as a point, display as a discourse. There is no innocence in choice. One is no longer allowed to make a choice blindly.

Why do you want to make it?

Because I feel it's a pressing issue for our little world of practitioners. Because I know I have these ideas, but I've never spent time on trying to express them properly. Because I want to be able to address these items now, and then grow the rest of my projects upon them. Because user friendly (read dumb) interfaces are more and more present in our lives, and that it's important to think about them now, before we get too far into their usage.

Because I'm scared.

Who can help you and how?

Some tutors will have a more direct relation to these topics. Some less. I plan to use my tutorial time with the further removed tutors as people on who to test my ideas on. In a way they are also the people I'm trying to target: users of digital tools, who might not yet have thought of the relations between the choice of a tool and it's outcome.

Relation to previous practice

Relation to previous project in the non acceptance of tools as a finished objects. Relation to a thought process around tools to design communications.

• Drawing curved
  
• OSP
  
• http://colm.be/blog/index.php/posts/digital-freedom

Relation to a larger context

The larger context is probably why I think this is going to be a topic for me. I hate the fact that vendors of numeric items, software or hardware, take advantage in the lack of know how of most of their customers.

Considering your customer to be stupid is something that happens broughtly in computing. Why is this relation of power so present here, and not in other vending schemes?

In the distance is a relation to the current topic of privacy and the necessary understanding of the implications of user-friendly systems.
The more our devices shut us out of their processes, the less aware we are about how they work, and more frustratingly, what else they do apart from performaing a task, magically.

User data, access to identification, email, text messages, location, connection information, these pieces of information are given away almost every time we install new applications on our devices. We're not only fed bad interface to dumb us down, but we're being used for our data, in the aim of participating in demographic schemes, to better understand how we interact with these devices, and how better to sell us advertisement.

It's then an easy bridge over to the hidden proceeding revealed by Snowden in huge govenrment orgs. The reason for briging this up, is that as with any argument, there is a counter argument that seems to think that new development in interface is a good thing for the masses of people who have a desire to use computers, but have not been able to feel comfortable with them. I should find a logical way of putting that point of view aside by arguing that what is trated in this new relationship is, indeed a degree of comfort, but the implications of this new found ability is overweighing the scales.

References

Michael Seemann — Digital Tailspin: Ten Rules for the Internet After Snowden
http://reader.lgru.net/pages/index/