R3

This, the last chapter of Drucker's book, focuses primarily on the elementary properties and propositions of graphical user interfaces. This is contextualized in a cross disciplinary review of precedents in attempts to create a foundation for a way forward towards a humanist interface. She starts with the dominant paradigm of HCI and how it orients us to a task optimized model of interaction. Beyond this, web offerings while potentially allowing more freedom still struggle with the duality of their roles as both information spaces and task oriented exigencies. The primary connection between these two is the interface which is simultaneously a culturally understood construct embodying values and by virtue of our familiarity, rendered largely invisible. Frame analysis owing to its recognition of subject affordances is one mode of engagement that could offer direction from these starting points as it allows us to consider layout in terms of a constructivist process (157). It offers options rather than dictating an experience. So too, the codex and Talmud can offer ways of navigation that are both nonlinear and context rich in ways that both assist scholarly work and have yet to be replicated on the web. Humanist, to this point, seems to be a function of a form's combinatoric possibilities amplified by (process) contextualization. The antithesis of this, is of course, a reductive mediation which allows access only to the finished form (179). What the finished form will never allow us, and what is promised by humanism is access to an internet supported noösphere where boundless information is supplied in equal parts by supporting materials allowing each subject to chose their direction unhindered by the interface perspectives of the few. Regardless of whether this process is undertaken, Drucker cautions, there are existing forms now which could serve as the beginning of her future. We have the choice to engage with science and business to direct the evolution of these phenomena now or just accept the result.

While I agree with many of her foundational assertions, as with the cholera map of the previous chapter, I often find her conclusions and methods problematic. To begin, the dream of an unregulated "cyberspace" cum autodidacts dream never fully materialized. There are reasons for this, not the least of which being monetization. There is no reason she supplies to believe her vision would fare any better. Much of what she considers a plan I would regard as a series of equivocations. (Eg: X has much to teach us...) When she does speak specifically she asserts the need for books of the future or humanist programming languages and information systems that tolerate inconsistency and fluid ontologies. Assumably this is the infrastructure for us to be able to "awaken the cognitive potential … as constructs that express themselves in forms, contingently, only to be remade again, across the distributed condition of knowing.(192)" which she again fails to clarify in any meaningful way. Perhaps most importantly, she never effectively makes the case that such tools, if they existed, would be a genuine use to anyone outside of a subdomain of her academic interests (which is, she admits the ultimate focus of her inquiry (157)).

There will be no revolution that is ushered in first and primarily by new graphical forms. When a company creates a reductionist map of the world or a scientist visually downplays data that runs counter to their hypothesis, these are intentional acts. In the age of the internet where data, algorithms, and process have been so heavily monetized the conception that Google would give you their secret sauce to contextualize your search results is, in a word, unlikely. These are not issues of lacking access to innovative graphical forms but instead of utility and/or morality we ensconce in protocol, pedagogy, or law.