MIND THE [user-programmer] GAP

I’m still reeling from Nelson’s visionary overhaul of the computer experience; despite his departure from Engelbart’s foundational model, the excerpts still had a spectacular bootstrapping quality about them: in reading Nelson’s users’ manifesto, I, the user (and someone in need of the user-friendly*) was able to understand concepts of the interactive computer system that Engelbart wanted his reader to grasp (but couldn’t because of Engelbart’s invented language). I do need to thank Charles Ulrich III, one of our “Memex to Youtube” counterparts, for helping me see where i have missed some of Engelbart’s vision. While I still feel that Engelbart focused too much on a kind of computer-elite, more essential to his goal for computer systems is the “co-evolution between computers and people themselves” as Charles termed it in his comment on my blog. Charles, i really like your vision of us all joining Engelbart’s elite: “[we] will have the tools to be augmented by, and to easily augment the computer before [us], not just use it. If everyone was in the computer-elite as Englebart had seen, all of our browsing experiences, peripherals, machines would be different based on our OWN preferences, not a company’s market research, and the best of these Ideas created by everyday people would rise to common use”, and i think we should still strive for that kind of bootstrapping. Before reading Nelson’s piece, however, i was still uncertain of how this realistically reconciled the gap between the user and the programmer. Engelbart and Nelson think of the necessary relationship between  programmer and user differently: whereas Engelbart hopes that the user will build the uses for himself, for Nelson, only the uses are taught to the user:

“interior computer technicalities have to be SUBSERVIENT, and the programmers cannot be allowed to dictate how it is to behave on the basis of under level structures that are convenient to them … we the users-to-be must dictate what lower-level structures are to be prepared within”

The user’s existence in this “prefabricated environments carefully tuned for easy use” is a happy reality that we know today, as is especially imaged (I think) in Apple products. It makes sense that in the 1970s Apple would provide its employees with Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Do we not think of Apple as the ones who brought the computer to the People? And as my brother pointed out to me in his kitchen this morning while he was preparing his famous technicolor velvet cake, Macs are as programmable as the user wants them to be—but software designers have made those features only visible to those who know how to or want to manipulate them. So, while my brother does with his Mac a multitude of things I may not be interested in (including using Open Office technologies, that present day tribute to Engelbart), the option to bootstrap my computer into advancement lies waiting for me should i choose to learn how.

*we don’t need this term user-friendly and its connotations of helplessness; i think Nelson would call it user-mindfulness-in-the-construction-stage