Three levels of information processing

Three levels of processing:

1. Visceral
2. Behavioral
3. Reflective

“The visceral level is fast: it makes rapid judgments of what is good or bad, safe or dangerous, and sends appropriate signals to the muscles (the motor system) and alerts the rest of the brain. This is the start of affective processing. These are biologically determined and can be inhibited or enhanced through control signals from above. The behavioral level is the site of most human behavior. Its actions can be enhanced or inhibited by the reflective layer and, in turn, it can enhance or inhibit the visceral layer. The highest layer is that of reflective thought. Note that it does not have direct access either to sensory input or to the control of behavior. Instead it watches over, reflects upon, and tries to bias the behavioral level.”

From: Norman, Donald (2004), Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, San Francisco: Basic Books, p.3

Plato: ideas

“Almost 2,400 years ago, Plato made the case against cultural context. The best of all possible worlds, he thought, was one removed from the tainting influence of embodiment I even from the taint of human culture. Plato despised politics, just as, like a good Greek aristocrat, he despised the world of commerce. In fact, Plato believed that our embodied, everyday world was only a poor reflection of the real world, which for him was an invisible world of abstract ideas, or forms. This is the great Platonic reversal. It would seem obvious that the world of ideas depends on the world of the senses and culture, because people can’t come up with ideas unless they are alive in this world and find themselves in a particular cultural milieu. But Plato reversed the dependency. He argued that the embodied world of human culture is a reflection of an invisible world of abstract ideas. Moreover, the amazing reversal became a major influence on ancient culture and later Western culture. The French philosopher Descartes in the seventeenth century reiterated this reversal and made sure that it would remain part of Western thinking into the twentieth century.”

From: Bolter, Jay David and Gromala, Diane (2003), Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 136

HCI critique

The study of HCI began at that time, as computer specialists began to worry about how users as embodied creatures could interact with computer programs. The early HCI workers focused on the empirically measurable aspects of user interaction. They were interested in the human body for the limits of response by its senses, nerves, and muscles: how fast the user could press a key in response to a stimulus, what size icons the user could discern and click on, what color combinations the user could discriminate. Their approach was an outgrowth of the long tradition of ergonomics, the study of how workers use machines, or indeed how workers themselves could become machines. Like earlier ergonomics, HCI analysis looked for principles that could be applied to all humans considered as productivity units, not as human beings living under specific conditions and with specific concerns.”

From: Bolter, Jay David and Gromala, Diane (2003), Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 126-7

transparent and reflective artifacts

“Every digital artifact oscillates between being transparent and reflective.”

From: Bolter, Jay David and Gromala, Diane (2003), Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p.6

We don’t want our computers to disappear

“As producers and as users of digital technology, we don’t want our computers to disappear, any more than we want books, films, or paintings to disappear. As producers and as users, we often want to be aware of the medium in order to understand the experience that it is staging for us.”

From: Bolter, Jay David and Gromala, Diane (2003), Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p.5

Web: Structuralists v Designers

“This was the great, almost religious difference between the Structuralists and the designers. The Structuralists were separatists, believing that form and content could and should be separated. For them, a Web site is a pipe through which content flows to the user. They opposed elaborate visual design, which they thought impeded the flow of information. The Designers, on the other hand, were unitarians, who believed that form and content could not be separated: that a Web page communicates its message through the careful interplay of words and images. For the Designers, a Web page is an experience, and they wanted complete control over it, just as they had enjoyed (more or less) complete control in print. So the Designers kept pressing for more html tags that would give them that control.”

From: Bolter, Jay David and Gromala, Diane (2003), Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p.4

From: Bolter, Jay David and Gromala, Diane (2003), Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Foucault: subject and power

“Though central to modern notions of individuality and liberty, it should also be noted that the word ‘subject’ also carries connotations of subjection, of being an individual constitued within or by power structures, ‘a subject of the Crown’ for example. So on the one hand this is a concept which constitutes an internal, private sense of self in individuals, but on the other it refers to the positioning of the individual within society. Michel Foucault’s work is particularly influential here, and is central to post-structuralist concepts of subjectivity. He argues that these two concepts of the subject are not contradictory but inseparable: the very rationality celebrated by enlightenment is not a universal principle, but a discourse which positions some individuals as rational but others as criminal or insane (Foucault 1989).”

From: Lister, Martin and Dovey, Jon et.al. (2003), New Media: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge, p.252

Society of spectacle

“In a series of epigrammatic paragraphs The Society of the Spectacle asserts that post-war capitalism has reinforced its control over the masses through the transformation of culture as a whole into a commodity. Thus the spectacle is not so much a set of particular cultural or media events and images, but characterises the entire social world today as an illusion , a separation from, or masking of, real life.”

From: Lister, Martin and Dovey, Jon et.al. (2003), New Media: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge, p. 145

McLuhan’s history of cultures

1. primitive culture of oral communication
2. a iterate culture using the phonetic alphabet and handwritten script which coexisted with the oral
3. the age of mass produced mechanical printing (The Gutenberg Galaxy)
4. the culture of electric and electronical media (: radio, tv, computer

“Mc Luhan strives hard to show how television is a tactile medium.”
“ … new kind of primitivism, with tribal-like participation in the ‘global village’ “

From: Lister, Martin and Dovey, Jon et.al. (2003), New Media: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge, p.75-6

The virtual self

“To talk about the concept of the virtual is not just to speak of headmounted display systems but also to have to take into account the way, in which experiences of self and of identity are increasingly mediated in a virtual space.”

From: Lister, Martin and Dovey, Jon et.al. (2003), New Media: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge, p. 37