Kay and Goldberg’s word metamedium a powerful way to conceive of the computer (394). Metamedium expresses all that the tired metaphors of desktop and paper fail to signify. I think one of the most optimistic summation of the current state of the digital age our editors have made so far is that the “desktop and virtual paper metaphors are meeting a significant challenge, and may themselves fade” (391). As we do away with thinking that labels the computer in terms that we already know (instead of allowing it to become an entirely new thing) and replace it with Ted Nelson-style and sized thought, the closer we come to actualizing Engelbart’s vision of augmented intellect. There is much to show that we limit ourselves by thinking of computers in terms of knowledge-organization tools that we already know. For one, I’m curious about the precise evolution of the desktop metaphor. We may assume that it was first used to express the physical location of the computer (as suggests later words like “laptop”); if this is true, then using the word “desktop” to refer to the monitor’s screen and its activities is a fallacy that evolved out of convenience or metonymy—in the same way that we use the word “Kleenex” to refer to tissue. An actual desktop hardly resembles my computer screen:
although it has “documents” that are organized into “files”, I agree with Nelson that imposing archaic file cabinet systems of organization affords little to the digital medium. Think of the way information is organized on a (well-designed) website compared with a filing system or even a (poorly-designed) website that works with text as a linear entity.
The web interface promotes a level of information exchange that paper medium inhibits. The death of desktop and virtual paper metaphors will be the liberation of vivacious, uncharted human-computer interaction. Further evidence of this is Kay and Goldberg’s observation of children’s interactions with computers: “Their attention spans are measured in hours instead of minutes” (394); as indeed any of us know who have observed a five year-old at a computer. In contrast to the adult whose human faculties have the molding of years of non-digital expression and functioning, the child’s unformed infomations-palette takes naturally to the computer/the digital/the metamedium. Does this not suggest that the computer allows for record-making/knowledge-playing that is more aligned with natural thought processes than have been the page, the book, the library … Instead of understanding computer media entities by comparing them to what we were familiar with (page, document, file), we must allow them to become their own, new ___.
c paige panter 