Interface and Interpretation

Throughout these last sections, Drucker is urging us to redefine our methods and approaches towards the web and new interfaces. She pushes us to question our assumptions about text and these varying knowledge forms and reevaluate our goals in designing them.

One example of Drucker highlighting a false assumption is in our use of the term "real time" regarding online metrics showing that the term itself is a fallacy:

"Nothing about that metric is "real," except that it describes the limit of our perception of temporal units" (p. 149)

Her main argument throughout these chapters was that we need to move away from a "user" focused approach towards interface design and towards a "subject" focused approach. "User-centric" approaches, in Drucker's eyes, are too engineered and mechanistic and assume a rational and autonomous agent that Drucker suggests just doesn't exist. As Drucker writes,

"The standard theory of interface, based on the "user experience," is reductively mechanistic." (p.151)

and then continues a few pages later with:

"The very term "user" needs to be jettisoned -- since it implies an autonomy and agency independent of the circumstances of cognition -- in favor of the "subject." (p.158)

Another part I found interesting was Drucker's analysis of text and the printed word and how that changes with the introduction of the web. On one hand, she challenges our assumptions by poignantly pointing out that books as we know them are not the static, absolute forms of knowledge that we often take them for. Instead they are a snapshot of a particular social and intellectual network taken at the point in time in which the book was published. She writes,

"Just like a web page, a book is a site of social exchange. Its apparent stability and fixity are an illusion" (p.162)

and then continues with,

"Printed and manuscript pages are and were their own snapshot of a continuum of socially networked exchanges." (p.170)

I find this to be a beautiful and nuanced view of authorship that highlights the depth that the context (social, historical, environmental) adds.

She then continues to discuss how the whole concept of authorship and stability that we take for granted in books is now being redefined with the web. Examples of collaborative authorship (ex: wikis) and the constantly changing network are redefining this field. She elaborates by writing,

"The search I perform with one string of characters today yields a different result tomorrow... the conditional text has become the norm." (p.184)

Overall, I found Ducker's analysis very interesting and compelling, but also found it difficult to understand the shift she is pushing for. She explained it by referencing many social theories that I am not immersed in and, even with her examples, I found it hard to conceptualize what it would really mean to design for a "subject" rather than a "user."