18:14, Wednesday 20 Nov., 2002 Link

Anne Galloway considers the models we're using when considering social software [via peterme's critique]. Good, yes. And, thinking...

But! At the end, this: "So now I'm working on how technologies can be designed to evoke, rather than to describe; to perform rather than to represent..."

Exactly. The dominance of tele and cinema over the past couple of decades have habituated our consciousnesses to media that refuse to acknowledge the difference between what's transmitted and what's understood. Both attempt to be as much like real life as possible. A better television is one with a higher-definition picture. However!, a better book isn't one that spends twice as long describing a scene. There's no intrinsic betterness of tele-like or book-like media, just whatever's best for the job -- and at the moment the lofi media are better suited to our lives: email, www, type. When the media isn't as rich as real life, the ones that succeed are the ones that don't try and hide the fact they're not real life. And we become habituated to this division, and subsequent systems must be coherent with this. In the future, systems will be designed to "evoke, rather than to describe" (or at least, this will be an understood and important part of design), and the following media will triumph: typography, music, architecture, cooking (no fast food), augmented reality (virtual reality won't; it attempts to mimic the total immersion of RL) and radio.