Note for the Committee: I wanted to include an example of my academic writing from my undergraduate work. I thought this seemed like an appropriate length and subject. Thank you.

Critical Theory

Ideology, Meaning, and Mediation: The New World of Interfaces

…The computer’s own cosmology… [and] Similarly, new media in general can be thought of as consisting of two distinct layers—the “cultural layer” and the “computer layer.”1

-Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media

Lev Manovich, in his seminal work The Language of New Media, discusses what

he identifies as “new media,” by which he means new forms of media and art that are

defined by their being digital in nature. Within his first chapter he outlines five

distinctions that divide new media from previous forms, such as film, television, and

photography. Four qualities set apart new media: Numerical Representation (they exist as

data); Modularity (they are made of independent units); Automation (media can be

altered automatically); and Variability (many identical versions exist). These all lead to

what he believes “is the most substantial consequence of the computerization of data.”2

Transcoding, the fifth quality, is a major part of the division outlined in the above quote.

Manovich views the computer as essentially divided into two “areas” of the cultural and

computer, one being the raw data and algorithms involved in the base structure of a

computer, and the other being the cultural level at which average, non-computer

programming, people are able to interact with the machine. Transcoding is, “in new

1 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. Pg. 46.2 Ibid. 45

media lingo,” the act of, “translat[ing]” one form “into another format.” He goes on to

add that, “the computerization of culture gradually accomplishes similar transcoding in

relation to all cultural categories and concepts.”3 From this process of transcoding, in its

literal sense, Manovich is drawing the analogy that cultural meaning and language are

transcoded over time into the computer’s ontology and vice versa, making for computers

that speak our language (so to speak), and allowing us to communicate with them as

well.4 So, what he also refers to as “conceptual transfer,”5 is a defining feature of new

media, and by extension, a defining feature of computers themselves. Given that two

layers exist to Manovich, the crossing of the those layers, the point at which meaning and

understanding occur between humans and their digital boxes, is what is commonly

understood in computer terms as interface.

Interface, in its most basic definition, is principally something which allows two

otherwise unrelated systems to act and communicate with one another.6 This, quite

literally, textbook definition may, in the context of computers, seem simple enough,

especially given the concept of “two layers.” But it carries a host of implications with,

and can help us consider how we collectively understand our world through the lens(es)

of television media, film, newspaper, and, more recently, the Internet. Essentially what

interface does, in the context of computers, is allow people to interact with otherwise

impossibly large systems of information; the divide that Manovich points to is powerful

in its ability to act as an analogy for how other mediums can act as interfaces. Manovich

speaks specifically of interface as a term that can span more than just new media, but can

3 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. 47.4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Interface>

be used for the printed word and cinema (television) as well.7 This analogy is particularly

apt when speaking of news media, given the pictorial nature of television and Internet

news. Naturally, Internet news comes with its own baggage, given the fact that it is not

only interfacing between the “data” of the news and ourselves, but also performing the

transcoding that Manovich speaks of, making computer data into news data into

information that we can all understand; this might be thought of as a possible three layer

paradigm, as Manovich speaks to in his analysis of Interface. More on that later. In

essence, what the computer Interface can show us is that numerous daily operations

involve Interfacing with many systems too complex to normally interact with. The

“ideology” associated with this mode of interface is also part of the launching point into a

larger discussion of how information is disseminated through various media; no media

performs the act of informing without leaving its own fingerprint on the content, and in

turn the user or viewer. The analogy of the computer-cultural split in computer

technology can be extended to theorize about how we look through many interfaces, and

rely on them in the tech society.

7 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. 83.

Computational and Human Levels: Defining the “Ideology of Software”

From media studies, we move to something that can be called “software studies”— from media theory to software theory.8

-Lev Manovich

In his opening discussion of new media, and the introduction of new media

theory, Manovich points here to a new means of thinking about media; instead of

attempting to fit media theory, formulated by much earlier innovators such as Marshall

McLuhan, into the study of new media, which would be, very appropriately, like

attempting to run an Atari 8-Bit system on a new Dell system, Manovich declares the

need for a break with media studies. This new type of studies involves the investigation

of various components of a new media, founded on computers, unique from all other

forms. One of the important features of this break is recognizing features of new media

that simply do not exist in previous media; one such feature is the concept of interface. In

the context of computers, interface is the very thing we might want to call “our

computer.” This would include the Desktop, my folders, my “dock,” in the case of Macs,

and so forth. Everything that appears to make the machine operate, using metaphors and

images to lead us believing that, for example, one’s iTunes library is in fact stored in a

specific “space” waiting for you to go find it. This is part of the illusion that software

creates in the form of the interface, making people feel as though they have shaped their

hyper-environment to fit their own sense of logic and organization, or lack thereof.

Manovich’s concept of a software studies examines this phenomenon, among the

many that computers have brought about, especially considering their capacity to

8 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.

appropriate “old media,” as it were, in a new media digital form. Analyzing software, and

more specifically interface, as Manovich does in the second section of The Language of

New Media, called The Language of Cultural Interfaces, allows for a reading of these

aspects of computers that can point to what Manovich conceives of as an ideology

associated with software and interface.

Before getting at this detail it will help to discuss the specificities of interface as

we know them in the context of Personal Computers. Desktop is perhaps most contingent

for our means of understanding computer interface; it allows us to have a stable home

base from which we endeavor into the system itself, locating files, or into programs that

allow us to engage the World Wide Web. No matter how far off our explorations may

carry us (and no matter if our programs lead us into the depths of video games or the

internet), there is always our comfortable starting point, complete with whatever we

desire to be visible. Within the Desktop, we place folders, another stable form for storing

information, in the form of files. Folders can have folders in them ad-infinitum, making

the system, which we perceive as very ordered, according to hierarchical structures that

govern the actual storing of files in a filing cabinet.

If one looks back at this point at the previous handful of sentences about interface,

it may seem that there are a number of misnomers in my summary of Desktops and

folders. This is absolutely true. I used a number of words (intentionally) to describe these

computational phenomena that are purely on the level of human emotion and logic. The

use of words like “stable,” “endeavor,” “engage,” “home base,” “depths,” “visible,” etc.

is exactly what Manovich wants to explain with his distinction between the computer and

cultural, or “human” level. After all, it is no accident that our personal computers work

with us in this manner; it is the absolute intention of modern computer programmers to

make the computers accessible in this way. This type of accessibility is, one might say,

pre-programmed with cultural codes that we intuitively learn and are able to use.9

Given that this kind of coding and use of natural language govern aspects of

computers, when Manovich speaks of the “code” involved in interface, he engages

necessarily in a discourse of ideology:

In semiotic terms, the computer interface acts as a code, which carries 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 its turn, the interface of the OS. In cultural communication, a code is rarely simply a neutral transport mechanism; usually it affects the messages transmitted with its help… A code may also provide its own model of the world, its own logical system, or ideology; subsequent cultural messages or whole languages created using this code will be limited by this model, system or ideology… Finally, by organizing computer data in particular ways, the interface provides distinct models of the world. For instance, a hierarchical file system assumes that the world can be organized in a logical multi-level hierarchy. In contrast, a hypertext model of the World Wide Web models the world as a non-hierarchical system ruled by metonymy. In short, far from being a transparent window into the data inside a computer, the interface bring with it strong messages of its own.10

Thus Manovich makes this crucially important argument for the status of computer

interface as not just a useful paradigm for interaction, but as a fundamental means of

making computer code (distinct from the semiotic code brought up here) into a system

comprehensible to the average human. Ideology is in this case, as Wendy Hui Kyong

Chun points out in her essay On Software or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge, “a

functional analog”11 to software (and thus interface). According to Chun:

9 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.10Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.76.11 Hui Kyong Chun, Wendy. "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge." Grey room (Winter 2005).

In a formal sense computers understood as comprising software and hardware are ideology machines. They fulfill almost every formal definition of ideology we have, from ideology as false consciousness (as portrayed in The Matrix) to Louis Althusser’s definition of ideology as ‘a representation of the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’12

This concept also appears as N. Katherine Hayles argues that, indeed, “computers are no

longer merely tools (if they ever were) but are complex systems that increasingly produce

the conditions, ideologies, assumptions, and practices that help constitute what we call

reality.”13 She actually goes on to summarize Wendy Chun. In all, these assertions

provide a means of recognizing how computers, in their use of cultural codes and

practices, act to construct a reality within themselves that works to render us compliable

subjects. We make these programs and interfaces for people to be able to engage with

advanced technology, and in doing so we create a new set of conditions for the average

person when using that interface. In essence, as Manovich points out, using a cultural

code (desktop, open, folders etc.) allows us use of a far more complex and “unnatural”

type of code, that which actually makes the computer run and comprises the software of

the interface itself.

It is worth noting that I am blending the terms ‘software’ and ‘interface,’ though

Manovich and Chun most often keep them separate. For the sake of discussion, and in

theoretical terms as well, I do not feel this distinction carries enough weight to really

make it worthwhile to have a separate engagement with each. In the context of this essay

it is more useful to think of these two phenomena as functioning for the same purpose:

making hardware functional for humans. This is the basic underlying principle that it

12 Hui Kyong Chun, Wendy. "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge." Grey room (Winter 2005).13 Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. New York: University Of Chicago, 2005. 60.

seems the proposed software studies would examine, among other software features. We

are all subjects of computation and interface, just as some would claim we are subjects of

ideology. As Wendy Chun says, truly demonstrating the analogous theories at play here,

“Software produces users.”14

Interface Metaphors: Internet News, Cinema/Text, and the “Cultural Interface”

Taking a “step out” from the first section, the specific interface of human-computer

becomes a kind of metaphor for speaking of other interfaces that define our society and

are the means by which we gather information. Manovich speaks of the internet as

introducing a “third” layer to the dynamic: “we are increasingly ‘interfacing’ to

predominantly cultural data: texts, photographs, films, music, multimedia documents,

virtual environments. Therefore, human-computer interface is being supplemented by

human-computer- culture interface, which I abbreviate as ‘cultural interface.’”15 This is

an interesting supplement to his first paradigm he set up, as it acknowledges that indeed

there is more to the human-computer dynamic than just the software and the person.

Examining the ideological implications in the previous section provided a metaphor with

which to examine other instances of interface in our culture, the issue of the Internet

brings its own implications. The metaphor here is the fairly straightforward idea of

humans being able to interact with computer hardware via interface as being a basic

frame for thinking about how people receive information from media. Data, the events

and information that populate our world, are consolidated and simplified for what we

would, by extension, call “user interface,” our collective understanding. This would be 14 Hui Kyong Chun, Wendy. "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge." Grey room (Winter 2005).15 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.

the case for Television news, where the metaphor is clear: it provides us an interface with

our world. Using Manovich’s discussion of other media as a starting point, this metaphor

can provide the basis for even further steps outward in thinking about the phenomenon of

interface.

Turning back to the internet, the “cultural interface” Manovich proposes adds a

third layer of sorts to the computer-human dynamic. After examining the ideological

implications of that first dynamic, one must then acknowledge that computers allow users

not only interact with the hardware, but also with events, information, music, art, and

other cultural artifacts. Given the “ideology of software” hypothesis, one can state that

such cultural information is disseminated within the realm of that ideology; this would

mean basically that the logic and code of the computer interface plays a role in how the

information is understood. The logic and familiarity of the computer interface is optimal

for data comprehension, whether it be Wikipedia or NYTimes.com, as it functions

analogously to the interface of information and humans; in this way, the third layer of

culture really does add an extra level of play between the first two of computer and

human. Taking Internet news, in the realm of NYTimes.com or CNN.com, this becomes

much clearer, as “information,” a vague and difficult term, is translated purely to mean

“news,” or collected information about world events on a given day. One goes to a

website of this nature and is provided, essentially, with a hyper-media newspaper,

complete with “sections” as we understand them in the context of the newspaper that we

could have gone out and bought. Instead we are faced with the interface yet again, a

series of buttons and images and hyperlinks providing us with the “hierarchical” (as

Manovich would say) structures that we already go in knowing. The online newspaper is

thus an excellent manifestation of differing levels of interface. Normally, one would have

a flat, finite, surface of information in the form of the newspaper. In the online paper, we

are given that same basic format, but now the introduction of computer interface makes

for an added level of complication; newspapers could already be said to allow us

interface with the outside world, much like any news “location”, in other words the level

of “cultural interface.”

Manovich discusses other media aside from computers in the context of interface,

suggesting that the cultural interface level occurs within the mediums of print and

cinema. As a means of approaching this subject, Manovich proposes the following:

Cinema, the printed word and human-computer interface: each of these traditions has developed its own unique ways of how information is organized, how it is presented to the user, how space and time are correlated with each other, how human experience is being structured in the process of accessing information. Pages of text and a table of contents; 3D spaces framed by a rectangular frame which can be navigated using a mobile point of view; hierarchical menus, variables, parameters, copy/paste and search/replace operations -- these and other elements of these three traditions are shaping cultural interfaces today. Cinema, the printed word and HCI: they are the three main reservoirs of metaphors and strategies for organizing information which feed cultural interfaces.16

This excerpt unites Manovich’s assessment of all these media as informing each other

throughout their development, and how they unite in some ways in the forms of computer

information. Starting with print, Manovich proposes the “page” as the first theoretical

concept that has been appropriated my new media in the form of the web page. In its

essence, a web page is very similar to any “page” that has occurred in the history of

newspapers and so forth, in that it, “is also dominated by text, with photographs,

drawings, tables and graphs embedded in between, along with links to other pages of the

16 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.

newspaper.”17 Therefore, the medium of text is itself a cultural interface alone, and then

in the context of computers, a three level interface of the human-computer-culture type.

Cinema behaves in a similar manner, but instead introduces Manovich’s concept of the

screen as a level of cultural interface. Just like the page has become a universal symbol,

appropriated by new media, so to has the screen gone through this transcoding, once

being the introductory surface for depth and movement, now becoming the basis for

computation, which includes both of the key facets that defined the screen as unique.

Thus these media are transferred to the new media, making for the three levels of

“cultural interface.”

A Synthesis: Interface Culture

The human-computer interface occurs at the level of a communication that defines

something new and unusual about our contemporary society. Theorists like Manovich,

Chun, and Hayles are among the pioneers of a discourse that is predicated on the

existence of what we now know to be a computer. This “computer” that people now take

for granted does not necessarily reflect the tangible components of the machine; to the

average computer user, the computer is the software that allows them to engage with the

programs and components that rest on the hardware. Our understanding of a computer is

thus based very little on anything that we can see is electronic or made of chips and disks

and so forth. It is the interface that is left in our minds as representing the computer. The

Microsoft Windows Desktop is a force unto itself. This digital environment is one that

has come to incorporate all of us computer “literate” citizens, interpolating us (to use this

term in the Althusserian frame that Chun considers it) into subjects of new interface

17 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.

culture.

Such an “interface culture” is nothing new or just being discovered. Marshall

McLuhan, over forty years ago, had certainly anticipated a culture in which mediums

played such a crucial role in our perception of the world and in our gathering and

synthesizing of information. Subsequent study has been done on the idea of an interface

and the implications associated with it serving such a large part of culture; Manovich and

Chun are some of the many theorists now moving into these territories. The theoretical

model that is produced in these studies, particularly in the software studies, make for

whole new ways of thinking about how we view content and what digital interfaces can

mean for older mediums being appropriated by them. The interface of humans and

computers makes for a new set of tools and language that we come to understand and to

which the computer is forced to understand. Therefore, the dialogue, if we want to call it

that, is one that enacts Manovich’s transcoding principal, in that we have two very

distinct entities that communicate by vastly different codes interacting and understanding

one another, so to speak. It is not to give computers agency, but simply to realize that

something without a cognition can actually instruct us as much as we instruct it; this is

through the code of the interface, where we are swept in to a simple and recognizable

environment, complete with a nice square screen (with other square screens inside of it),

pages of written language, buttons, tabs, folders. All of these things have existed before

the computer and were appropriated for the ease of our use. Their pictorial representation

is key to our comprehension of the otherwise infinitely complex world of computer code.