Change the way you think

Some symbols just won't die. Open up your version of Microsoft Word and look at the button used to save your document: it's a floppy disk. This image used to make sense, because floppy disks were the dominant mode of computer storage for a twenty year stretch. But that floppy reign ended more than a decade ago. A significant percentage of today's computer users have probably never even seen a floppy disk. Yet there it is, the international symbol for saving a document.*

*Granted, it's not easy to come up with a replacement symbol. The floppy disk example demonstrates the folly of equating the save symbol with the physical object used to save information; things just move too quickly. Maybe a cloud, representing cloud computing, could work. But even this less-literal metaphor equates the method with the outcome. 

In a similar vein, New York's Vulture blog recently had some fun compiling a list of movie clichés that technology just can't kill, including my personal favorite, automatic windows:

Any time a character needs someone to roll down a window, they still make the crankety-crank motion, assumably because mime-pressing an imaginary automatic-window button is just way too hard to decipher.

But what if our entrenched ways of thinking limit the possibilities of our technology? Venkatesh Rao raised this question in terms of our connecting computer technology to the methods it has replaced:

Consider these terms: page, scroll, file, folder, trash can, bookmark, inbox, email, desktop, library, archive and index. They are all part of the document metaphor, a superset of the “desktop” metaphor. Some elements, such as scroll, desktop and library pre-date the printing press, but all are based on some sort of “marks on paper-like material” reference.

It is important to understand that the document metaphor is more than a UI metaphor. It is in fact a fundamental way of understanding one domain in terms of another. For better or worse, we continue to understand the web in relation to how we understand documents. Unlike figurative metaphors, such as “he was a lion in battle,” which are simple rhetorical statements, conceptual metaphors like document-ness are pre-linguistic, and quietly ubiquitous. They infiltrate how we think about things on a much more basic level.

Rao identifies several services that have overcome the document metaphor: "Google Wave is based on a flux metaphor. YouTube borrows a “channel” metaphor from television." But our dominant computer vocabulary relies on a much more limited set of possibilities. (It's really interesting to think, even though I won't here, about how language affects our thoughts. Can we think of something we don't have a word for?) It seems to me that there are great opportunities out there for people able to transcend our current conceptual metaphors in technology.

Friday Collection of the Worldwide Internet

The Friday Collection is back. At least for now. It's been since gone since August 29th, quite a while for what was supposed to be my steadiest recurring feature. Better throw in many more links to distract everyone.

• The American Society of Magazine Editors has released its list of finalists for the best magazine covers of the year. I always love these. The one of Ahmadinejad in the bathroom stall is my favorite, with the Spitzer cover a close second.
• America the Gift Shop:

If American foreign policy had a gift shop, what would it sell?

America the Gift Shop is an installation project that reflects the current foreign policy in the fun-house mirror of American commerce.

My palette is the vernacular of retail. The more familiar it is, the better host it becomes for the idea. Once of the sugar coating of the ordinary dissolves, we are left with the hard and uncomfortable truth about where we've been as a nation.

We buy souvenirs at the end of a trip, to remind ourselves of the experience. What do we have to remind us of the events of the last eight years?

Awesome description of his vision. And the art itself is hilarious.

• The YouTube interactive videogame is here. We have way better games than this nowadays, but it's a clever concept. You click on the specific place which loads the next video, moving you along to the next level. Clever.
• This is a fantastic way to design a cover for a book: let someone else do it. In contest form. The results are fantastic.
• Some interesting stats that give us some sort of idea of what technology the cool kids are using.

Yo. Science. What is it all about? Techmology. What is that all about? Is it good or is it whack?

Here's a thoroughly modern conundrum:

My three-year old Toshiba Satellite lap-top computer is just about at the limits of its functionality. It keeps overheating and turning off when I don't want it to. (I have taken to propping the thing up with my fairly new copy of Editors on Editing, and that seems to cool it down just enough to stay on so long as I don't have more than two programs running concurrently.) Windows fails to initiate properly at least half the time, bringing me to a scary blue screen, which asks me if I want to retry loading Windows normally or try loading with the last known configuration that worked. All video screens in Internet Explorer for some reason turn green and fail to show the images that should go along with the sounds which I can hear. I use Firefox so this isn't a big deal, but it's annoying for things like Netflix's streaming content which only works in IE. And the wireless doesn't work in most of the places where I live. In short, it's time to get a new compy.

Now here's where the thoroughly modern conundrum comes into play. I decided to buy one of those new-fangled Mac-style computers. They're so white and sleek, and owning one will make me just as cool and different and edgy as all the other dozens of millions of young folks who own one. And, to boot, they have a deal now where they offer $300 off an iPod just for buying a compy. This seems like a pretty good deal, but, from reading the internet, I know that Apple is rolling out their new line of products within like six weeks. And they're going to be the most bitchingly cool computers in the OC. Seriously. The new lappies are going to rock: There's going to be Macbook Touches, and aluminum casings, and new iPod touches, and lots of other cool stuff. Never before in the history of the universe (at least, that I am aware of off the top of my head) has technology moved so fast that people'd be worried about things like buying a product like a month before an improved one came out, and, also, without the worldwide internet, people'd have no way of knowing that new stuff will be released. There's a crap-load of Apple Rumors websites out there which do things like read the company's security updates combing for hints of something new.

As for me, I really wanted a new iPod, and can't really tolerate another six weeks of my current compy situation until the new stuff comes out, so I ordered the current model. So I'll have at least a month of being technologically up-to-date before all my stuff becomes old.