Month: June 2001

Peterme, Alan Cooper, and ThumbCulture

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Peterme, Alan Cooper, and ThumbCulture [longish]

A little email discussion was prompted by the peterme.com piece on why Alan Cooper is all wrong about SMS and how he crucially ignores ‘desire’ – like so much of the bloodless discussion about usability and information product design.

Chris Locke:


“has anyone done a big mapping of desire networks/deleuze and guattari onto
interface design? I’m sure someone has – steve johnson’s interface culture?
– most of the early 90s cyberculture stuff was all about this, but not
targetted as such.

the easy and quick way to get around bone-headed arguments like the one
quoted in the peterme article is the ability of desire to overcome the
limitations of any interface. user’s routing around. nothing more complex
than that.

sms works because people love it. they’ve moulded language to fit around
the interface problems.

hell, someone better than me could write a body-without-organs piece of
language and SMS use. you could even stretch it further, and suggest that
SMS language is proof positive of nomadic subjects in action, routing around
a hierarchic linguistic system/interface issue.”

chris’s twin bruvver, Matt (who co-created/curated the UK SMS poetry competition)


At 12:15 04/06/2001 +0100, you wrote:

>sms works because people love it. they’ve moulded language to fit around
>the interface problems.

I wrote a little piece about this for the mindspace list a while ago, as
someone on that list couldn’t get the appeal of SMS either. They couldn’t
see why anyone would want to use a really fiddly text interface when you
can make a voice call really easily. As far as i can make out, SMS has two
advantages over voice calls – Discretion and Asynchronous dialogue.

Discretion is important because you might not always want to broadcast the
fact that you’re communicating in a public space. Funnily enough, this is
of great interest to the group that most mobile technologies are initially
targetted at (executives) and the group that actually ends up bringing them
into the mainstream (teenagers). Particularly for teenagers, discretion if
very important, as conversations fly around specific groups in the same way
that notes are passed around a playground. Who does or doesn’t get to
see/hear the message is as crucial to the social structure of the
playground as it is to the corporate heirarchy of a business.

Asynchronous dialogue is equally important, in that you don’t necessarily
know what social situation the person you want to communicate with is
currently in, and therefore might not want to disturb them. SMS gives you
the flexibility to send a message that you don’t immediately need a
response to, and to choose when you want to respond to messages that you
recieve. In this way, its different from a pager, that was always more of a
call to action. Although something like 90% of SMS messages probably get a
response in 5 mins, that 5 mins is still more latency thatn a voice call,
that ultimately demands a synchronous dialogue (even if this is negotiated
via voice-mail). SMS does not have to be synchronous, which is not much of
a big deal if you know where the person you’re calling is (as with a
land-line) but is a hell of a benefit when you have no idea of their
context, as with mobiles.

For social groups where these two factors are important, the hassle of
learning an awkward text interface is no great barrier.

>hell, someone better than me could write a body-without-organs piece of
>language and SMS use. you could even stretch it further, and suggest that
>SMS language is proof positive of nomadic subjects in action, routing around
>a hierarchic linguistic system/interface issue.

That’s where i’m, trying to take my TIZ research (though i’d like to be
more ethnographic than post-structuralist!). I’d really love to spend the
next couple of years doing what i’m doing, but for a PHD, or at least a
publication. i’m *fascinated* by this stuff…

nick sweeney:


> sms works because people love it. they’ve moulded language to fit around
> the interface problems.

The thing in “1000 Plateaus” on the triumph of “minor languages” is your
friend. “Set the major language racing…” The insistent glossolalia of the
wireless space.

ahem.

Nick

and furthermore from nick:


too right. Anyway, here’s the section from Mille Plateaux (p. 105):

::

It is in one’s own language that one is bilingual or multilingual. Conquer
the major language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown languages. Use
the mindor language to /send the major language racing/. Minor authors are
foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience
themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of
languages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language
achieved by stretching tensors through it.

::

which is pretty damn apposite.

love that last quote…