Grumpymutt's most recent post, which is somewhat critical of the fancy new "immediate" desktop interfaces that pseudoanonymity drew our attention to, resonated with some of my own skepticism about these interfaces.

It seems that programmers want to make these kinds of interfaces for two related reasons: 1) to make them more "realistic" so that they will be 2) easier/more natural to use. But it doesn't seem obvious to me why interfaces that are more "realistic" or more "immediate" (as Bolter and Grusin would describe them) to the user are necessarily better than other interfaces. After all, don't we create and use technology in order to improve upon our current reality? Doesn't it limit the possibilities of technology if we consider the best varieties to be those that best replicate our experiences in our current world?

As I read Bolter and Grusin, I couldn't stop thinking about other movies they didn't mention, specifically Tron, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Matrix. All these seem to parallel perfectly Bolter and Grusin's arguments concerning our continued strive toward emcompassing reality through digital expression. Our desire for immediacy in these films is satisfied by the actual immersion of a person or people inside the digital medium and the near-complete escape from the difficulties of the real world through advanced virtual reality.

I can't think of any passage within the reading, however, in which they offer a psychological explanation for why we desire immediacy and a false reality that is as close to "real" as possible. I keep wondering what it is that draws us to The Matrix in the sense of virtual reality. It certainly expresses the ultimate in immediacy, in which the medium is completely erased from our perspective.

Something I've been thinking about (the relationship between people and media):

Bolter and Grusin write: "Computer programs may ultimately be human products, in the sense that they embody algorithms devised by human programmers, but once the program is written and loaded, the machine can operate without human intervention. Programming, then, employes erasure or effacement" (27).

Two observations on this quotation:

1. The blog seems to be one big exception to B&G's assertion that all computer programs can function without human intervention. You can't have a blog unless you have a human interacting with the computer software-- and frequently. The same goes for 'online community' sites like MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook. Because the purpose of these sites is to extend the human processes of talking to other people and making friends into a technological world, they do not function unless people interact with them and input information into them. Even computer-programmed chatbots rely on actual human beings talking to them in order to learn the patterns of human speech. They can't be programmed with everything they need to know and then left alone.