DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2017
Volume 11 Number 4
Volume 11 Number 4
Reappearing Acts: A Review of Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound
Abstract
A review of Lori Emerson's Reading Writing Interfaces: From The Digital To The Bookbound (2014). The reviewer highlights Emerson's demands that we uncover and demystify the “invisible” interfaces governing our digital tools and platforms, situates Emerson's work with the larger field of digital humanities, and talks at length about the movie Big.
I did not expect a book titled Reading Writing Interfaces: From
the Digital to the Bookbound to announce, on its first page, that it “begins and ends with magic”
[Emerson 2014, ix]. But Lori Emerson’s convincing argument in favor of “demystifying
devices” — as well as their architects and users — is full of parlor tricks
as well as missing Statues of Liberty, Gob Bluths and David Copperfields [Emerson 2014, 9]. Truly, the greatest trick Emerson pulls off is
convincing the world that the “interface,” a term that sounds
like something Will Ferrell might have come up with in a Saturday Night Live George W. Bush sketch, is tied to a rich and
far-reaching history worth exploring. Rather than “simply that which opens up from one distinct space to
another distinct space”
[Emerson 2014, x], the interface, in Emerson’s hands, is the site which determines the very
nature of our approach to reading, writing, and navigating the world around us,
often with an invisible, at times even nefarious, hand.
Thoughts on the relationship between magic and technology have inspired countless
science fiction novels, comic books, and press releases in recent years. Was it
Steve Jobs or a character from Warren Ellis and John Cassady’s Planetary who bragged about the ability to send “a signal to reality’s operating system”
[Ellis et al. 2001, 20]? My favorite story about the intersection between these two
seemingly-disparate worlds is Big, the 1988 Hollywood
fable starring Tom Hanks. The architect of the embiggening that transforms the body
of thirteen-year-old Josh Baskin (played by David Moscow) into one that resembles an
Academy-Award-winning adult is Zoltar, a coin-operated machine who promises to grant
wishes. Zoltar is uncomplicated. He is efficient. He is a literal plot device, an
animatronic fortune teller that less charitable viewers might find heavy-handed (not
to mention orientalist, given his turban and robes and angry glowing eyes). But he
also has a well-designed, intuitive interface: he can be operated by a child with
minimal prompting or instruction (though Baskin does have to hit the machine a few
times to get it started). He can only perform limited functions, but his users seem
to find little reason to pursue other avenues of inquiry. He even provides a
receipt: a tiny “Zoltar Speaks” card that lets users know their wish has been
granted. Viewed through the lens of Emerson’s magical thinking, he is also the dream
of many twenty-first century users of digital technology, a device of seemingly
limitless possibilities. If only he accepted credit cards. And fit in your
pocket.
The interface is surprisingly front and center in many parts of Big. Beyond Zoltar, there is, of course, the famous scene set in New
York City’s FAO Schwarz (RIP) where Baskin, in the midst of providing UX advice to
the CEO of the MacMillan Toys Company (Robert Loggia!), literally stumbles across
the toy store’s “Walking Piano” and “magically” performs two
musical numbers. While the first steps on the piano are preliminary and cautious,
Baskin and the CEO quickly master the device, speeding through “Chopsticks” to the delight of the assembled shoppers. The CEO is so
impressed that he gives Baskin a job on the spot. Like many viewers, “Big Piano”” creator Remo Saraceni sees in Big
“a beautiful message of innocence”
[Saraceni 2008].
But what if we do not subscribe to this romantic notion of wisdom inherent in a
child’s gaze? What if, like Emerson, we are aware of the ways in which “the supposed naturalness of ubicomp-related gestural
interfaces is utterly misleading”
[Emerson 2014, 6]? As a kid I was amazed by how quickly this Baskin kid figured out how to play
the piano: I didn’t have “Chopsticks” up my sleeve,
because I didn’t grow up in a suburban environment that encouraged and afforded
piano lessons. While there is some exploratory tinkering in this scene, there is no
real trial-and-error with the device, no room for failure. These narrative
trajectories live on in the marketing materials for new devices: for example, who
could forget the irritating hipster star of an early Google Glass commercial, a man
who uses his gadgets to track down a Ukelele in A Day
book and broadcast his fast and easy mastery of the instrument (with a New York City
skyline backdrop, at sunset no less!) to impress his significant other? Why be John
Cusack at the end of Say Anything when you could buy a
device that turns you into Peter Gabriel in less than 24 hours?
The last technological interface to be introduced in Big
remains in production limbo by the end of the film. As a kid, Baskin’s dream of the
ultimate comic – one with a “choose-your-own-adventure” interface
that allows readers to pursue a wider range of stories than you’d generally find in
a single issue – fascinated me. As his coworker Susan notes, “the kid makes his own decision”
[Big 1988]. That the comic’s target demographic will inevitably run out of stories is
touted as a feature, not a bug: when someone asks what happens when a reader
exhausts the options stored on the device’s computer chip, Susan replies that “you
just sell different adventures.” Instead of spending a dollar for 22 pages of
a single story, children (and their parents!) now have the option of shelling out
$19 for the illusion of choice [Big 1988].
Josh Baskin leaves before finishing his presentation on his digital comic book,
deciding to return to the Zoltar machine and overwrite his initial wish with a wish
to return to childhood. It’s interesting that the film chooses to stage his retreat
at the moment when he is on the cusp of solving the problem he faced at the
beginning of the film. The very first image we see in Big is, perhaps surprisingly, a computer screen. “YOU ARE STANDING IN
THE CAVERN OF THE EVIL WIZARD,” it reads, underneath an image of said wizard.
“ALL AROUND YOU ARE THE CARCASSES OF SLAIN DWARFS.” Called to action by the
game, Baskin types, “MELT WIZARD.” The program requires a more specific
command. The boy seems frustrated: the thermal pod his digital avatar carries in his
hand seems to be the obvious tool of destruction, yet it ends up dying when his
follow-up response is delayed by a request from his mother to take out the trash
[Big 1988]. Baskin spends a significant portion of his time at
MacMillan Toys designing a more engaging, more intuitive, more mobile version of
this story; one that might, for instance, anticipate a user’s need to pause while he
or she is being yelled at by their parents. Was the project a failure, too
cost-prohibitive, not innovative enough? Are we expected to read in the immediate
consideration of the economics of such a device the ways in which innovation is
limited by market forces? Big is obviously more
interested in imagining the possibilities of toys designed by children, warts and
all, than in manufacturing the real thing.
Melt The Interface
Thomas Padilla argues that, “failure should be a goal” in developing digital
initiatives [Padilla 2016]. The poets and artists surveyed by
Emerson revel in various acts and performances of failure. They unlock the black
boxes of proprietary hardware and software and force the contents found therein
to misbehave. They pull algorithms kicking and screaming into the light of day.
They create works that stretch across all corners of our material landscapes,
messy portraits smeared with the fingerprints of their creators and the marks of
their tools of composition. Unlike most project managers, librarians, or
developers, artists can devote their energies to producing work “that is deliberately difficult to navigate or whose
interfaces are anything but user-friendly”
[Emerson 2014, 4]. But as Padilla suggests, maybe there is a need for more time, labor, and
institutional support devoted to explorations of difficulty and experimentation
in design. Maybe a wider range of digital humanists can productively resist or
critique user preferences for the invisible if they, like the artists featured
in Emerson’s book, use strategies of defamiliarization to make what seems
natural unnatural. We’re not going to learn how to melt wizards if
we’re afraid to explore the possibilities of melting wizards in the first
place.
Sometimes the digital interfaces of daily academic labor are very much visible to
us, almost frustratingly so. Instructors are often strongly encouraged or even
required to use Canvas and Blackboard: content management systems that seem
designed to punish students. If your university library has decided to invest
more in digital ebooks than physical copies, you have likely had a great time
doing research in Ebrary’s web interface, apparently invented by someone who
hates to read. And many digital humanists have likely heard the sounds of
snickering from the snarkier non-DH faculty members in the room while you’ve
stared with horror at an unfamiliar projector interface just before the job
talk, or when said interface decides all of a sudden that the commands it
prompts you to follow are more recommendations than directives for how the
display might be turned on. Perhaps we’ve used words like
“intuitive” or “clean” to describe our
preferred alternatives to these technological monstrosities. Emerson is here to
remind us that the bargains we make in such desperate moments are almost always
Faustian.
Specifically, Emerson critiques “glossy” interfaces that “further [alienate] the user from having access to the
underlying working of the device”
[Emerson 2014, xi]. She identifies the paradox at the heart of contemporary technobabble:
for all the rhetoric about the ways in which “the boundary between human and
information is eradicated” with every new user-friendly device, the
reality is one where we rely more and more on tools “entirely closed off to the user”
[Emerson 2014, x–xi]. Some of the benefits of averting a future where The Singularity is
sponsored by Apple are self-evident. We like knowing where and how to get out in
the event of an emergency, and we are perplexed if not completely apoplectic
over design decisions that remove entrances, let alone exit paths: the
disappearances of USB ports, CD drives, and now headphone jacks. What happens
when I try to crank up Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You’ve
Got (Till It’s Gone)” and it turns out my ear buds are dead?
Heartaches come and go, and all that’s left are the words, but now, like, the
words are gone too.
Some of the sleight-of-hand tricks revealed in Emerson’s book are likely already
known to many Digital Humanities Quarterly readers.
I’ve asked my last few DH classes here at Brown to read Mitchell Whitelaw’s
“Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural
Collections” (2015), an essay which implores those of us curating
digital objects to offer “multiple, fragmentary representations to reveal the
complexity and diversity of cultural collections, and to privilege the
process of interpretation”
[Whitelaw 2015]. Even more recently, Renée Farrar, citing Emerson, has argued that
“individual effective resistance” of pre-packaged interfaces and their
conventions enables both artists and general users to find “opportunities to think critically in forgotten,
invisible spaces, and to shirk off the often unacknowledged influences
of user-friendly”
[Farrar 2016]. There is also the longer history of critical examinations of the
interface, highlighted by Emerson in her introductory chapters: Mark Weiser’s
“The World Is Not A Desktop” (1994), Friedrich
Kittler’s “There Is No Software” (1995), Steven
Johnson’s Interface Culture (1997), among other
antecedents.
In “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital
Humanities,” Miriam Posner suggests that digital scholars might focus
their efforts on creating interfaces that explicitly challenge their users: for
example, she describes the ways in which the design of Evan Bissell and Erik
Loyer’s The Knotted Line
“asks us to question the purpose of an interface” and “links our assumption that we are entitled to
straightforward, transparent interfaces with our inability to look
deeply at the structures of injustice and inequality in the United
States”
[Posner 2016]. By examining, dismantling, and reimagining digital interfaces and their
aims, we can stress the ways that “natural” or
“intuitive” design methodologies rely heavily on false
(and often white, North American, and economically privileged) assumptions about
the realities of many users.
The Tyranny of Uncertainty
Emerson notes that the “rhetoric” touting the magic of
twenty-first century devices, invisible interfaces, and ubiquitous computing
initiatives “might not be so disagreeable if it didn’t also help
determine the shape of the future of computing”
[Emerson 2014, 8]. Channeling (or perhaps more accurately, “Exorcising”)
Arthur Clarke, Emerson, in her first chapter, “Indistinguishable from Magic: Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature
as Demystifier,” claims that “the future of computing is domineering, branded, and boring”
[Emerson 2014, 8]. We are more indebted to our interfaces than unburdened by them. Current
trends in computing — specifically, the current state of “ubiquitous
computing,” a dream of a pervasive “Internet of
Things” operating silently and efficiently to augment our daily
lives to their fullest potential — privilege “the value of an interface that recedes from
view”
[Emerson 2014, 6]. Our iPads, smart refrigerators, and phones “sense for us
what information we need and want,” liberating us from the tyranny of
uncertainty [Emerson 2014, 5]. Even better, we can use the
time these decision-making gadgets save us to express ourselves creatively,
provided these forms of expression utilize applications have been approved for
consumption and use on Apple devices.
Or we can try to remember “what creativity via computers could
mean and in fact at one point did mean,” marketing be damned
[Emerson 2014, 19]. Emerson takes readers on a crash
course in digital defamiliarization, introducing us to projects that experiment
with multitouch interfaces (via Myron Krueger’s work from the 1970s and 1980s,
which predates the finger-swiping mechanics we have come to rely so heavily upon
in the 2000s and 2010s), poetic apps created specifically for the iPad by Jason
Edward Lewis and Erik Loyer (among others), projects that exploit glitches in
software (Deena Larsen’s Samplers: Nine Vicious Little
Hypertexts) and interfaces that explicitly reject or subvert
canonical web design principles and conventions (projects by Jason Nelson and
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries). These projects do not direct their audiences
to new or better uses of technology; instead more often than not, their
structures and perceived shortcomings serve to remind us that “the Web has become so familiar to us that we’re not
even aware of its structures, its codes, and the way it works on us
rather than us working on it”
[Emerson 2014, 43].
You may be unfamiliar with many of the pieces of experimental literature
highlighted in these and other chapters. You might also be skeptical of
Emerson’s insistence upon “the importance of digital literature as an intervening
force in the computing industry’s push to have our devices do all the
thinking, perceiving, and even creating for us”
[Emerson 2014, 35]. I too have been burned by the rhetoric of innovation. While surveying
work for my dissertation, which focused on poetry and digital media, I would
occasionally find myself shaking my head at seminal works of electronic
literature that were held in high regard by other audiences. I do think there is
still a great deal of hyperbole circulating in appraisals and defenses of
electronic literature, and I wonder about the negative influence of
institutional circuits and funding outlets who privilege particular claims about
its value. But I also, at times, have lacked an understanding of key contextual
and conceptual material in relation to particular projects, which is why I’ve
grown more and more appreciative of the critical and curatorial lenses of
authors and artists like Dene Grigar, Mark Sample and Élika Ortega (among
others), as well as initiatives like the Electronic Literature Collection
series. I don’t know if Reading Writing Interfaces
will succeed in converting all skeptics, but I think Emerson does an admirable
job of connecting seemingly-esoteric work to experiences with interfaces that
might resonate with many of our heavily-mediated, everyday lives.
For example, I was particularly fascinated by Emerson’s “Postscript,” in which she proposes the term
“readingwriting” as a way to acknowledge “the practice of writing through the network, which as
it tracks, indexes, and algorithmizes every click and every bit of text
we enter into the network is itself constantly reading our writing and
writing our reading”
[Emerson 2014, 163]. This unwieldy (in a good way) term is used by Emerson to argue that “[w]hat is new and particular to the
twenty-first century literary landscape is a revived interest in the
underlying workings of the algorithms that are reading, writing, and
reading our writing”
[Emerson 2014, 164]. The reference to a return to the algorithm may surprise
some readers, but in fact “poets have been writing with the aid of digital
computer algorithms since Max Bense and Theo Lutz first experimented
with computer-generated writing in 1959”
[Emerson 2014, 164]. Algorithms and their impact are increasingly visible to us, especially
when social media networks are constantly refining and rewriting theirs to win
favor with particular advertisers or entice new users, revisions that can
infuriate early adopters or raise questions about how user information had been
previously concealed from view.
The Road Not Googled
Google, its search interfaces, and its algorithms are the particular objects of
critical inquiry here: Emerson highlights several artists interested in “questioning how it works, how it generates the results
it does, and […] how it sells ourselves and our language back to
us”
[Emerson 2014, 166]. For example, Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler’s “apostrophe
engine” project, which has created poems out of the language of
Google and AltaVista search results, documents the impact of search inquiries
and parameters on language that we gravitate towards online and offline. But it
is also an experimentation in media archaeology across time, one that “provides us with bits of material evidence that reveal
the ever more sophisticated workings of Google’s search algorithm
through the shape, the content, and the syntactical structure of the
statements themselves”
[Emerson 2014, 179]. It is in moments like these where Emerson is most impressive in her
evaluations of experimental electronic literature. While many of us may have
taken note of or even screencapped amusing moments of Google’s predictive text
(“jim mcgrath linkedin” followed immediately by
“jim mcgrath obituary” is a depressing story of a life
unlived; thanks, Google) or enjoyed parody Twitter accounts like @RikerGoogling
(where we see the embarrassing daily searches of Star Trek:
The Next Generation Commander William Riker), we generally refer to
“Googling” without recalling that the term refers to a
practice that is constantly changing over time and highly dependent upon the
person, device, connection, and interface deploying the search. Emerson and the
artists she highlights perform “reappearing acts” in which
the trick is revealing what we hide behind the metaphors we use to shape our
uses of technology.
In addition to highlighting the speed with which our contemporary web interfaces
vanish behind colloquialisms, Emerson recalls the philosophical shifts in the
history of personal computing that inspired the “closed, transparent,
and task oriented” devices and interfaces we are familiar with
today [Emerson 2014, 77]. By closely examining the rise of
“user-friendly” graphical user interfaces (GUIs), the
pedagogical impulses guiding the creation and dissemination of the Logo
programming language and Smalltalk software initiatives of the 1970s and the ad
campaigns for the Apple Macintosh (among other texts and archival materials),
Emerson documents the messy recent history that preceded our sleeker, flatter,
dull monoculture governed by increasingly narrower principles of design. Her
work makes visible the contradictions inherent in Apple’s victorious “gloss over the aggressively closed architecture of the
Macintosh while marketing it as a democratic computer ‘for the
people’”
[Emerson 2014, 80]. Whereas the opportunities to bridge the distance between user and
interface once invited a variety of designs and methods, these roads have been
paved over to favor the more immediate needs of businesses and consumers. This
history is particularly compelling to readers too young, too tuned out, or too
not-alive to have experienced it firsthand, and its presence here may be useful
to readers more preoccupied with the apparent benefits of the user-friendly
world we presently inhabit.
Early in Reading Writing Interfaces, Emerson notes
that she is not “arguing wholesale against user-friendly interfaces that seek
to be invisible” but is instead criticizing the privileging of
“transparency” as a design mandate “valued above all else”
[Emerson 2014, xi]. She laments the lost possibilities of a present governed by
“multifunctional, generative devices for reading as well as writing or
producing content” instead of the “appliances for the consumption of
content” we keep on us at all times [Emerson 2014, xi–xii]. In the texts and material contexts of works produced by
Emily Dickinson and concrete poets like bpNichol, she finds not digital
antecedents but “antidotes for the Interface-Free”
[Emerson 2014, 140]. “Why do we lure ourselves into believing that these
interfaces offer us the ability to somehow transcend the interface
itself and not understand that they instead offer us an increasingly
difficult to pin down, perhaps even insidious form of control on our
creative expression?”
[Emerson 2014, 144]. What if we did more than wait passively for the equivalent of Zoltar and
his invisible hand? What if we spent less time reveling in the clean, white,
endless expanses of Apple and Google commercials and instead took a closer look
at the economic and human costs of the labor generating our devices? What if it
was OK to pursue creative endeavors that called attention to their present and
attendant material conditions, instead of wasting time writing and making
excuses for sententious, pretentious trash?
Reading Writing Interfaces has helped me to more
productively call attention to ideas of the interface in my academic writings
and teaching materials. Within my immediate institutional context as an
instructor in Public Humanities, it has provided me with a useful framework to
help students and faculty members think more about the design principles
motivating their digital projects (as well as my own). Beyond professional
applications, it points the way towards new weapons to help in the war against
the wizards who are transforming the digital spaces we share into
two-dimensional kingdoms that are white, dull, and cold as ice.
Works Cited
Big 1988
Big. Directed by Penny Marshall, performances by
Tom Hanks, David Moscow, Elizabeth Perkins, and Robert Loggia. 20th Century Fox,
1988.
Ellis et al. 2001 Ellis, Warren, John Cassady,
David Baron et al. “To Be In England, In The
Summertime.”” Planetary Volume Two: The Fourth
Man. New York: DC Comics, 2001. Digital Edition.
Emerson 2014 Emerson, Lori. Reading Writing Interfaces: From The Digital To The Bookbound.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Farrar 2016 Farrar, Renée. “Word Processor Art: How ‘User-Friendly’ Inhibits Creativity.”
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Google Glasses 2012 Unknown Authors. “Google Glasses Project.”
Huzaifah Bhutto. YouTube (7 May 2012): https://youtu.be/JSnB06um5r4
[Accessed 1 October 2016].
Padilla 2016 Padilla, Thomas. “Collections as Data: Conditions of Possibility,”
Thomas Padilla (29 September 2016): http://www.thomaspadilla.org/2016/09/29/possibility/
Posner 2016 Posner, Miriam. “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital
Humanities.” In Debates in Digital Humanities
2016. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Digital
Edition: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/54
Saraceni 2008 Saraceni, Remo. “Big Piano Inventor Remo Saraceni.”
Remo Saraceni. YouTube (10 November 2008): https://youtu.be/I7a4cNHpeck
[Accessed 1 October 2016].
Whitelaw 2015 Whitelaw, Mitchell. “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections.”
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