Interfaces

"hypertext in a print medium immediately produces terminlogical problems much like those Barthes, Derrida, and others encountered when trying to describe a textuality neither instantiated by the physical object of the printed book nor limited to it. Since hypertext radically changes the experiences that reading, writing, and text signify, how can one employ these terms, so burdened with the assumption of print technology, when referring to electronic materials?

"hypertext reconfigures - rewrites - the author in several obvious ways. First of all, the figure of the hypertext author approaches, even if it does not entirely merge with, that of the reader; the functions of reader and writer become more deeply entwined with each other than ever before."

HYPERTEXT :
The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology

How you choose to navigate through a non-linear environment will influence your reading of that textual information. Marshal McLuhan is famous for coining the phrase. "The medium is the message". That is to say that how we are exposed to the information, its form, its timing will all contribute to the communication value and deciphering for the reader. Models like Shannon & Weavr see communication as a linear process with nthe intention of passing information from A to B. Whereas Barthes in The Death of the Author suggests that communication is polysemous in nature and meaning is encoded by the sender and decoded by the receiver who recalls past experiences and places it in an appropriate cultural context....

"the intensity and clarity of the information therein presented governs not only how we use and what we derive from the medium, but its effect upon our overall society".

Digital Mcluhan
Paul Levinson

"As J. David Bolter points out in the course of explaining hypertextuality embodies post-structuralist conceptions of the open text, "what is unnatural in print becomes natural in the electronic medium and will soon no longer need saying at all, as it can be shown."

"the medium is the message"

"The technology of reading in our culture is quite sophisticated, as it has been built up over centuries of tradition. Nonetheless, the contemporary era has provided it with new devices and the advent of electronic microsystems has brought the most recent of technological transformations in graphic discourse: the digital revolution. Impetus has been given by the constant search for the expansion of textual and graphic code, the production of knowledge, the storing and exchange of information, and the expansive development of the global marketplace and of telecommunications to a technological synthesis."

Graphic Design in the Digital Era: The Rhetoric of Hypertext

1 Because of their semantic mechanisms, both texts and hypertexts present both unidirectional and multidirectional possibilities;
2 The organization of parts, in the case of the book, obeys the need to fit thought into the order available in that format (the needs of the dispositio —arrangement of ideas—and elocutio —expression of ideas—in that pragmatic situation), whereas in hypertexts the same need (semantics and order) obeys its own situation with respect to the reader (who, when faced with a computer screen which provides for alternation must decide on a significant order);
3 Nonlinearity is not exclusive to computers, being a very old resource; and,
4 Nonlinearity does not necessarily imply open thought processes. The new technological tools for reading are really meta-media, and they have not, as this apotheosis of tools would have us believe, in themselves revolutionized thought. The problem still lies in terms of cognitive processes and in the way pragmatic inferences are displayed, that is to say in the rhetoric of the discursive proposal.

The novelty then is in the speed of information, in its profuse availability, in the possibilities offered by tools which allow one to generate, mix, and interconnect different textual material, icons, and sounds, and in their capacity to produce new metaphors relating to experiences that were not possible with books.

Lev Manovich coming from a post communist political experience brings with his penmanship his own interpretations on the value of authorship in the digital realm. He applies his theory using a historical context of movies, print and media to analyse the transition we as users make in our reading and understanding of new media texts and communication standards. He brings with him his own contextual rationale and questions the validity of the success of the way we now consume information. Discussing topics which overlap with Dmitri Siegels search into the 'templated mind'. His study of digital communication takes into account the way we now interact with our online experience as we now are used to an organisational system dependent on databases and the meta-data that this in turn produces.

‘culture has become data’ that can be mined and visualized, and cultural analytics uses computers to analyze cultural artifacts, providing us with the techniques to visually represent patterns and interactively explore the results. According to this, the study of single events has become futile and it became necessary to start studying trends and patterns in culture, perceiving individual projects in a larger context of global cultural production. The real potential of this methodology is that it maps everything that remained outside the canon in the past, for instance creating art history without great names, allowing one to examine the patterns in cultural sentences spoken by everybody else. Lev Manovich is not promoting this method as the only way of establishing meaning, but sees it as a complementary method, a method that will expand the tools available to interpretation in the humanities. Only by combining traditional practices and digital techniques is it possible to come closer to answering the question of what new cultural disciplines may emerge out of the new data analysis and interactive visualization.

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/lev-manovich/biography/

"In semiotic terms, the computer interface acts a code that carries out cultural messages in a variety of media. When you use the internet, everything you access - texts, music, video, navigable spaces - passes through the interface of the browser and then, in turn, the interface of the OS".

Language of New Media

For a certain sort of social scientist, the traffic patterns of millions of e-mails look like manna from heaven. Such data sets allow them to map formal and informal networks and pecking orders, to see how interactions affect an organization’s function, and to watch these elements evolve over time. They are emblematic of the vast amounts of structured information opening up new ways to study communities and societies. Such research could provide much-needed insight into some of the most pressing issues of our day, from the functioning of religious fundamentalism to the way behaviour influ- ences epidemics...But for such research to flourish, it must engender that which it seeks to describe...Any data on human subjects inevitably raise privacy issues, and the real risks of abuse of such data are difficult to quan- tify.