Online documents and e-books are designed to give readers or viewers a sense of similarity and feeling of understanding. Through designed features made to look like the physical medium, it gives viewers a feeling of ease moving from the physical medium to the other. In Chapter 4, Borsuk writes, “e-readers have dimensions that appropriate a thin paperback. Most enable highlighting and annotation, stimulate both page-turning and virtual bookmarking, and hold one’s place. This is entirely on purpose, making an allusion by designers so people are more apt to buy a digital product because of its familiarity. When docs or search engines came out, it needed to look familiar, taking knowledge of where things go on the paper and try it on the digital page. Google docs shows a literal paper page on the screen so we then know where to start writing and how to transfer physical text to digital.
For the past decades, most things have been made to look like the physical and ignore the code underneath, hiding that what we do on the computer isn’t exactly what we do on paper, it’s a completely different system. But now it seems as though that’s starting to change. Consumers and designers are accepting more unfamiliar versions of technology like VR or self-driving cars, putting more trust in advancing tech.
Our advancement of what we’re comfortable with and the fascination for technology and something digital and unhuman is displayed in coming designs. Borsuk writes, “the design of such readers has gradually streamlined to minimize buttons and dials, heightening the sense that they are simply interfaces for engaging with text and perpetuating the myth of digital disembodiment. They let readers change type size and interface, illuminate the screen in low light, and, on some devices, use built-in text-to-speech functions to play their books aloud. These accessibility features mark an important distinction from the fixed interface of print and would not be possible without digitalization.” Our tolerance for a more tech-based world are based on how the digitalization of the interface has helped people. It has made it easier, faster, and more accessible to learn. Our concern with the strangeness of digital interfaces has worn off over the years of it easing our lives. In that emphasis though, is the lack of care whether an interface stays familiar, ignoring the importance of the physical and being physically active in our learning, reading, and writing? In our encouragement of tech advancement and moving design further into technological and sterile aesthetics, is that ignoring the creative history of the interface and appreciation of physical work like making pages, ink, and illustrations?
Hi, Janesa! 🙂 I like your language of “the digitization of the interface.” The interface concept helps me conceptualize how the design and functions of a technology are always dependent on others in their communications circuit (for example, the “desktop” skeuomorph we discussed in class). Technologies are entangled with their future iterations and referents. I’ve been thinking about this in relation to electronic literature…Amaranth Borsuk says that “digital downloads” threaten mass-produced media that are “somewhat form-agnostic and don’t provide much in the way of material experience” (238). That’s like the “sterility” you mention. Artist’s books, conversely, maximize “material experience” when “the reader must manipulate them to experience their full effect” (255). Electronic literature often uses its medium in the same way, making readers aware of their electronic interfaces and medium. So maybe we can look to e-lit as a counterbalance to the immaterial illusion of the digital interface, and we can think about how this is wrapped up with future iterations of literature. Thanks for putting this into perspective for me!
Hi Janesa, I really love the comparison you made to self-driving vehicles and VR, and it made me think about how we have been giving up so much of our control and autonomy to technology recently. If we are interacting with the road when we drive a car, interacting with the car even more intimately with a manual transmission, does that help us develop a relationship with those things? Similarly, when we are interacting with a physical book we are making a permanent marking on its pages and edges and its spine, while if we read an ebook, we might be getting the same information, but it seems like we are interacting with an imagined world rather than the real one, as we walk through an imaginary world when we strap on a VR headset rather than the one we currently inhabit. I wonder what that says about what we have become as a society and what we have done to our world so that we feel we must escape it to a created one.