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Interface Culture How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
Interface How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate{Paperback,1999}
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First published January 1, 1997
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About the author
Steven Johnson
122 books1,959 followersSteven Johnson is the bestselling author of twelve books, including Enemy of All Mankind, Farsighted, Wonderland, How We Got to Now, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad Is Good for You.
He's the host of the podcast American Innovations, and the host and co-creator of the PBS and BBC series How We Got to Now. Johnson lives in Marin County, California, and Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons.
He's the host of the podcast American Innovations, and the host and co-creator of the PBS and BBC series How We Got to Now. Johnson lives in Marin County, California, and Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
April 23, 2010
Some technology books hold up for years after the technologies they discuss have become obsolete. This is not one of those books. Johnson has some interesting theories and paradigms for how we should conceptualize our digital world but you don't really need to read the whole book to learn about them.
Interface Culture is quite postmodern in that it compares the digital shift to various shifts in media and communication throughout history and literature. I took away some interesting concepts such as his exploration of Darwin's theory of exaptation. He uses it to refer to unexpected and unintended ways that we embrace technology.
Interface Culture is quite postmodern in that it compares the digital shift to various shifts in media and communication throughout history and literature. I took away some interesting concepts such as his exploration of Darwin's theory of exaptation. He uses it to refer to unexpected and unintended ways that we embrace technology.
October 21, 2016
Steven Johnson brings up a lot of good points. I read this book as a reference for an essay I was writing in a Digital Literature class, but I finished the whole book. I honestly found what he was saying to be so interesting that I couldn't put it down. Learning about Advancements in Technology and how people react to them has fascinated me greatly this past year.
With the development of the first computer came the opportunity for the visual interface to look like anything. It was not a lazy decision to create the interface into something simple and easy to represent. In fact, Johnson calls it, “the most important design decision of the past half-century.” (Johnson45) As with any form of technology that came before the digital, it was formed to represent the “cultural, social and political values” of the people of that time.
Interface Culture speaks primarily about computers and how the screen was picked specifically so that the user would feel like they were entering into another world, but it had things like the keyboard and windows to make the user feel more comfortable. The first computer was very simplified so that the transition from book to computer would be less shocking to the user. Over time the user can now make the screen look like pretty much whatever they want. There is a reason people can sit in front of a computer an entire day, because its like entering another world. You can be sitting in your living room, but you are living in the interface. You don't see what really is just a bunch of technological 0's and 1's...you see a room you can step into and play in. Steven Johnson, says “for the magic of the digital revolution to take place, a computer must also represent itself to the user in a language that the user understands.” (14)
Steven goes into how people react differently to technology in this way and calls them
Steven Johnson explains that people have a habit of putting themselves into two separate camps, “those that dwell on the shores of technology and those that dwell on the shores of culture.” (1)
Although Interface Culture speaks primarily about computers, it can easily be seen as a metaphor for technological advancements today. We are living in a Digital Era and this book explains exactly what that means.
Great read, I would recommend that everyone reads this book!
With the development of the first computer came the opportunity for the visual interface to look like anything. It was not a lazy decision to create the interface into something simple and easy to represent. In fact, Johnson calls it, “the most important design decision of the past half-century.” (Johnson45) As with any form of technology that came before the digital, it was formed to represent the “cultural, social and political values” of the people of that time.
Interface Culture speaks primarily about computers and how the screen was picked specifically so that the user would feel like they were entering into another world, but it had things like the keyboard and windows to make the user feel more comfortable. The first computer was very simplified so that the transition from book to computer would be less shocking to the user. Over time the user can now make the screen look like pretty much whatever they want. There is a reason people can sit in front of a computer an entire day, because its like entering another world. You can be sitting in your living room, but you are living in the interface. You don't see what really is just a bunch of technological 0's and 1's...you see a room you can step into and play in. Steven Johnson, says “for the magic of the digital revolution to take place, a computer must also represent itself to the user in a language that the user understands.” (14)
Steven goes into how people react differently to technology in this way and calls them
Steven Johnson explains that people have a habit of putting themselves into two separate camps, “those that dwell on the shores of technology and those that dwell on the shores of culture.” (1)
Although Interface Culture speaks primarily about computers, it can easily be seen as a metaphor for technological advancements today. We are living in a Digital Era and this book explains exactly what that means.
Great read, I would recommend that everyone reads this book!
January 30, 2012
There were any number of these "technology and culture" books churned out in the 1990's for a mass market, but this one is a keeper. On the one hand, Johnson is insightful and restrained enough to age well; many of his contemporaries look ridiculous in retrospect. On the other hand, the book simultaneously acts as a fascinating historical artifact. There are any number of intriguing possibilities that never amounted to anything. Don't be scared away by the year of publication: this book is worth your time.
October 28, 2014
É uma leitura fascinante: não entendo como não ficou conhecido no Brasil, aonde foi traduzido como "Cultura da Interface". Trás tantos insights sobre nossa cultura e o modo como interagimos com as máquinas ao nosso redor!
Fantástico!
Fantástico!
August 8, 2014
Sadly dated, but an interesting piece on intellectual history.
April 13, 2025
Muito bom reler depois de 25 anos
June 27, 2023
I really enjoyed this book, and I see a number of mixed reviews here. I think there's a couple dynamics behind that.
First, I wonder if this book is best appreciated by those who are old enough to recall the "PC revolution"; as a kid, I had fun with a Commodore 64 (I recall something like "
So Johnson talks about interfaces, and I suspect that his discussion makes more sense to those of us who clearly recall what things were like before this modern era. I can pick up my Pixel 7a, point it at a sign written in a foreign language, and get a real-time overlay with an English translation -- and I remember making posters and documents on an Apple II. This books makes a lot more sense when you've seen that range.
Second, Johnson wrote this book in 1997, and it's amusing to see the "cultural museum" elements here, the references to mid- and late-90s tech culture that are now hilariously out of date. But if you're coming to this book more strictly in terms of user interfaces, I can imagine you'd be disappointed. What you do to design a good user interface in 2023 is very different from what you'd do in 1997. Johnson's book isn't so much a book on usability, UI design, user experience (all of which are now mature, well-established fields of expertise; contrast that with the state of things in 1997), but a work of cultural criticism.
In other words, there are questions like "my users need to do *this* workflow, how can I make a website that lets them do that easily?" and questions like "how do all these novels, written in a certain form, affect the broader culture?". If you are laser focused on the former, this won't be a great book for you; if you find it interesting to think about the cultural elements, definitely check this out.
I'll add that it would be lovely to see followup work to this book -- especially these days, with the rise of chatbot AIs. In many ways, our dominant interface with cutting-edge technology is reverting to a more text-based format. Load up ChatGPT and have a conversation. Look at the screen. In many ways, it's not much fancier than that Commodore 64 I was using in the mid 80s!
First, I wonder if this book is best appreciated by those who are old enough to recall the "PC revolution"; as a kid, I had fun with a Commodore 64 (I recall something like "
LOAD "*",8,1" and writing programs in BASIC, sometimes typing hundreds of lines of code from a magazine -- a paper magazine! That printed programs that you would manually type in!)
So Johnson talks about interfaces, and I suspect that his discussion makes more sense to those of us who clearly recall what things were like before this modern era. I can pick up my Pixel 7a, point it at a sign written in a foreign language, and get a real-time overlay with an English translation -- and I remember making posters and documents on an Apple II. This books makes a lot more sense when you've seen that range.
Second, Johnson wrote this book in 1997, and it's amusing to see the "cultural museum" elements here, the references to mid- and late-90s tech culture that are now hilariously out of date. But if you're coming to this book more strictly in terms of user interfaces, I can imagine you'd be disappointed. What you do to design a good user interface in 2023 is very different from what you'd do in 1997. Johnson's book isn't so much a book on usability, UI design, user experience (all of which are now mature, well-established fields of expertise; contrast that with the state of things in 1997), but a work of cultural criticism.
In other words, there are questions like "my users need to do *this* workflow, how can I make a website that lets them do that easily?" and questions like "how do all these novels, written in a certain form, affect the broader culture?". If you are laser focused on the former, this won't be a great book for you; if you find it interesting to think about the cultural elements, definitely check this out.
I'll add that it would be lovely to see followup work to this book -- especially these days, with the rise of chatbot AIs. In many ways, our dominant interface with cutting-edge technology is reverting to a more text-based format. Load up ChatGPT and have a conversation. Look at the screen. In many ways, it's not much fancier than that Commodore 64 I was using in the mid 80s!
August 31, 2014
1) ''Here, of course, we come up against the issue of aesthetic taste and distinction, and the criteria we use to evaluate these programs. Even if you accept the analogy between the industrial-era novel and the metaforms of the information age, surely there remains a qualitative distinction to be drawn between Great Expectations and Mystery Science Theater, between Germinal and Talk Soup. Both forms arise out of the turbulence of their respective periods, and both offer a symbolic corrective or solution to that turbulence, a sort of cognitive Dramamine.''
2) ''The other problem with Microsoft's Bob is that the imagined space is a profoundly antisocial one. It conceptualizes the infosphere as a private home, sequestered from the outside world. The only contact with other 'people' comes in the form of those ridiculous cartoon characters, those agents and info-butlers. There's a strange sense of agoraphobia hovering over this world, as if the happy-go-lucky, Disneyfied interior was just a roundabout way of blocking out the shocks and turmoil of public life. This might have been reasonable in the old days of stand-alone desktop computers, but in the age of the Internet, using an interface that doesn't offer some vision of public life can seem less like a cutting-edge exploration through information-space and more like a visit to Miss Havisham's.
This gets to the heart of the desktop metaphor and its broader implications. Organized space implies not just a personal value system---as in the religious order of the Gothic cathedrals---but also a type of community. This is true of architecture and urban planning, and it is also true of interface design. The cramped and crooked side streets of Paris up until the late nineteenth century (still visible in parts of the Latin Quarter and the Marais) invoked a human scale of neighborhoods and face-to-face contact, more like village life than that of a great metropolis. (The crowded conditions also created public health problems, of course, as in the 1832 cholera epidemic.) The city had an improvised, organic quality to it: streets wrapped haphazardly around each other, neighborhoods evolved unpredictably. There were a few regal execptions to this rule, buildings or public environs laid out by princes or priests, but for the most part the city was a great celebration of self-organization, a design etched out by millions of small-scale, local decisions, with no master planner in sight.''
3) ''What, then, are the blind spots of our own age? We have already encountered a few: the tyranny of image over text, the limitations of the desktop metaphor, the potential chaos of intelligent agents. But there is a more fundamental---and for that reason more difficult to perceive---blind spot in the high-tech imagination, and it has to do with the general region of experience that the interface is felt to occupy. Until very recently, interface design belonged squarely to the geeks and computer hobbyists---a niche market at best. The rise of Mac and Windows introduced a mass audience to desktops and icons, while the Web's popularity endowed browsers and hypertext with a certain subcultural sexiness. All these developments suggest a widening of the interface audience, but the medium itself still belongs to the world of functionality and increased convenience. We're subjected to endless advertisements promising us a miraculous digital future, and yet the scenarios they deliver tend to be remarkably mundane: ordering concert tickets, reviewing X-rays from a remote location, sending photos to relatives by email.''
4) ''The most fertile historical analogy for this process is the invention of perspective in painting. When Brunelleschi and Alberti hit upon a way to create the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface in the early fifteenth century, you could see their techniques---the vanishing point, the picture plane---as just another clever trompe de l'oeil, a curiosity piece. Certainly, it was an improvement on the muddled visual space of medieval art, but artists were always coming up with new techniques to advance their craft: chiaroscuro, the camera obscura, pointillism. Perspective, however, turned out to be more than just a minor enhancement to the painter's repertoire. The mathematical studies of Alberti and Leonardo transformed not just the spatial language of European painting but also the role of the artist itself, elevating painting to a higher cognitive stature---closer to science or philosophy than to popular entertainment, and in doing so helped create the whole notion of the artist as an intellectual. Perhaps more important, perspective centered the visual field on the human point of view, instead of a disembodied or divine locus, a shift that was imitated in countless disciplines throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as scholars and artists and scientists grounded their work in the physical, lived reality of the human body. Perspective began as a technical innovation, but it eventually helped produce what we now call the Renaissance.''
2) ''The other problem with Microsoft's Bob is that the imagined space is a profoundly antisocial one. It conceptualizes the infosphere as a private home, sequestered from the outside world. The only contact with other 'people' comes in the form of those ridiculous cartoon characters, those agents and info-butlers. There's a strange sense of agoraphobia hovering over this world, as if the happy-go-lucky, Disneyfied interior was just a roundabout way of blocking out the shocks and turmoil of public life. This might have been reasonable in the old days of stand-alone desktop computers, but in the age of the Internet, using an interface that doesn't offer some vision of public life can seem less like a cutting-edge exploration through information-space and more like a visit to Miss Havisham's.
This gets to the heart of the desktop metaphor and its broader implications. Organized space implies not just a personal value system---as in the religious order of the Gothic cathedrals---but also a type of community. This is true of architecture and urban planning, and it is also true of interface design. The cramped and crooked side streets of Paris up until the late nineteenth century (still visible in parts of the Latin Quarter and the Marais) invoked a human scale of neighborhoods and face-to-face contact, more like village life than that of a great metropolis. (The crowded conditions also created public health problems, of course, as in the 1832 cholera epidemic.) The city had an improvised, organic quality to it: streets wrapped haphazardly around each other, neighborhoods evolved unpredictably. There were a few regal execptions to this rule, buildings or public environs laid out by princes or priests, but for the most part the city was a great celebration of self-organization, a design etched out by millions of small-scale, local decisions, with no master planner in sight.''
3) ''What, then, are the blind spots of our own age? We have already encountered a few: the tyranny of image over text, the limitations of the desktop metaphor, the potential chaos of intelligent agents. But there is a more fundamental---and for that reason more difficult to perceive---blind spot in the high-tech imagination, and it has to do with the general region of experience that the interface is felt to occupy. Until very recently, interface design belonged squarely to the geeks and computer hobbyists---a niche market at best. The rise of Mac and Windows introduced a mass audience to desktops and icons, while the Web's popularity endowed browsers and hypertext with a certain subcultural sexiness. All these developments suggest a widening of the interface audience, but the medium itself still belongs to the world of functionality and increased convenience. We're subjected to endless advertisements promising us a miraculous digital future, and yet the scenarios they deliver tend to be remarkably mundane: ordering concert tickets, reviewing X-rays from a remote location, sending photos to relatives by email.''
4) ''The most fertile historical analogy for this process is the invention of perspective in painting. When Brunelleschi and Alberti hit upon a way to create the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface in the early fifteenth century, you could see their techniques---the vanishing point, the picture plane---as just another clever trompe de l'oeil, a curiosity piece. Certainly, it was an improvement on the muddled visual space of medieval art, but artists were always coming up with new techniques to advance their craft: chiaroscuro, the camera obscura, pointillism. Perspective, however, turned out to be more than just a minor enhancement to the painter's repertoire. The mathematical studies of Alberti and Leonardo transformed not just the spatial language of European painting but also the role of the artist itself, elevating painting to a higher cognitive stature---closer to science or philosophy than to popular entertainment, and in doing so helped create the whole notion of the artist as an intellectual. Perhaps more important, perspective centered the visual field on the human point of view, instead of a disembodied or divine locus, a shift that was imitated in countless disciplines throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as scholars and artists and scientists grounded their work in the physical, lived reality of the human body. Perspective began as a technical innovation, but it eventually helped produce what we now call the Renaissance.''
November 10, 2008
Apesar de pouco usuais, as metáforas que Johnson utiliza tanto em Cultura da Interface foram bem recebidas. Ele acredita que quando CI foi lançado, em 1997, havia a impressão de que alguém precisava traduzir o discurso sobre o mundo ciber em um contexto mais tradicional e literário. Se falava muito em "mudanças de paradigma" e deixar para trás o mundo impresso e os elementos de continuidade quase não eram destacadas. "Como meu livro fazia essa ponte entre os dois mundos, ele acabou sendo recebido como algo conciliatório" lembra Johnson, "quando na verdade eu estava defendendo uma tese bastante radical sobre a importância do design de interface".
"Bastante radical" é uma boa descrição da idéia sobre a qual Cultura da Interface está montado. Se aproximando bastante de McLuhann - autor do slogan mal compreendido "o meio é a mensagem" - o livro admite que o computador modifica a maneira que criamos e nos comunicamos. Mas, como o computador é uma máquina sem uma função, são as interfaces que determinam como entendemos os computadores.
A partir dessa premissa, Johnson examina diversos aspectos das interfaces atuais, comparando-os com outros meios de comunicação e mesmo idéias de campos "alienígenas", como a biologia, a psicologia e a crítica literária. O livro foi um sucesso e acabou se tornando um ponto de partida para outras discussões que, com um pouco de sorte, vão acabar se cristalizando em uma teoria para a crítica das interfaces. Ele espera que "agora que a bolha das ponto.com estourou, vamos poder retornar às questões mais complicadas e interessantes".
"Bastante radical" é uma boa descrição da idéia sobre a qual Cultura da Interface está montado. Se aproximando bastante de McLuhann - autor do slogan mal compreendido "o meio é a mensagem" - o livro admite que o computador modifica a maneira que criamos e nos comunicamos. Mas, como o computador é uma máquina sem uma função, são as interfaces que determinam como entendemos os computadores.
A partir dessa premissa, Johnson examina diversos aspectos das interfaces atuais, comparando-os com outros meios de comunicação e mesmo idéias de campos "alienígenas", como a biologia, a psicologia e a crítica literária. O livro foi um sucesso e acabou se tornando um ponto de partida para outras discussões que, com um pouco de sorte, vão acabar se cristalizando em uma teoria para a crítica das interfaces. Ele espera que "agora que a bolha das ponto.com estourou, vamos poder retornar às questões mais complicadas e interessantes".
November 7, 2010
I am loving this book and have fantasies about teaching a class using this as a textbook. It's like opening a time capsule from 1997 with wonderful surprises inside, such as the very first computer mouse and the views of computers in the 1940s, 1980s, and 1997. To put this book in some context - google.com and "blog" didn't even appear until a few months after this book was published, which makes his points about visual metaphor in the modern interface even more interesting, i think. Awesome little trip through interface history with several asides to Victorian literature and MTV thrown in along the way.
April 24, 2010
English/Portuguese
This rating is only for the brazilian portuguese edition of this book: avoid it. I gave mine copy.
The original version I rated with 3 stars.
It is a very basic book, even int its category. The only chapter I feel ok is the last one: agents.
Essa estrela é apenas para a edição brasileira deste livro: evite-a, a não ser que você não tenha acesso a outra edição.
Para a versão original eu dei 3 estrelas.
É um livro muito básico, mesmo para uma divulgação científica. O único capítulo que eu realmente gostei foi o último: Agentes.
This rating is only for the brazilian portuguese edition of this book: avoid it. I gave mine copy.
The original version I rated with 3 stars.
It is a very basic book, even int its category. The only chapter I feel ok is the last one: agents.
Essa estrela é apenas para a edição brasileira deste livro: evite-a, a não ser que você não tenha acesso a outra edição.
Para a versão original eu dei 3 estrelas.
É um livro muito básico, mesmo para uma divulgação científica. O único capítulo que eu realmente gostei foi o último: Agentes.
July 15, 2007
This book reinforced my personal belief that the interface is the most important aspect of any technology. It was a little surprising to me to how weight Johnson puts on the importance of the interface in society.
May 23, 2008
Although dated for a book on emerging technology (1997), it did present some interesting thoughts on the evolution of the computer interface. I believe this was his first book, and a doctoral thesis at that. His later work is much more refined.
June 26, 2008
Johnson's background in technology and literature sounds like a potentially interesting mix. It's not often you find an analysis of James Joyce and Wired magazine on the same page.
...it was interesting but i didn't make it through. ah well.
...it was interesting but i didn't make it through. ah well.
September 24, 2008
With the acceleration of technology change, this text is already a bit antiquated. However, understanding the metaphors lying behind the now ubiquitous computer interfaces shall provide wisdom for decades.
December 29, 2015
The book is almost 20 years old. Therefore, much of what is discussed is obsolete by now. Two chapters ("Links" and "Text") are worth it, though. I wonder if everyone can understand the literary references, considering I graduated in Literature and had some difficulty with those.
February 16, 2007
An interesting discussion of the influence of computers and the internet on our society.
October 11, 2008
Trying to understand the base of new media theory...
February 5, 2010
i thought that i will learn how today's technology change our life. but all i got is confusing term between technology and sociology. not that much entertaining
October 8, 2014
A nice meditation on the role of computer interfaces in shaping modern culture. Also, a gift from Amy.
June 3, 2015
Interesting book with more of a philosophical approach to interfaces and ways we interact with things around us.
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