Adaptive Path Blog

In this first part of his conversation with Adaptive Path’s Jesse James Garrett, bestselling author Steven Johnson talks about his 1997 book Interface Culture and how his thinking on the design of interactive media has evolved since then. Steven Johnson’s keynote kicks off Day One of User Experience Week 2006, August 14-17 in Washington, D.C.

Jesse James Garrett: It’s been nine years since the publication of Interface Culture. In the world of technology, we tend to think of that as a long time. How much do you think has actually changed since then?

Steven Johnson: It seems like a longer stretch of time for me, actually, because I came up with the basic argument for Interface Culture in the summer of 1994, when I was still in grad school and before Stefanie Syman and I started FEED. I wrote a proposal for the book then, and shopped it around to a few publishing houses. But of course, this was before the Web had become a mainstream phenomenon, so I think people were somewhat baffled by the idea. I was a little baffled myself: The original proposal kept referring to this emerging new “medium” called Mosaic.

I think an immense amount has changed, and much of that change has been encouraging to see. The one constant online — which of course supports one of Interface Culture’s main arguments — is that linked text is still central to the medium and its interface innovations. When I was writing the book in 1996-97 there was a sense in the industry that the textual basis of the Web was just this accident of limited bandwidth and processing power, and as soon as those limits disappeared, the Web would become a multimedia experience, and hypertext would go the way of the command line. Obviously, there’s much more audio and video online today, but the medium — and its new interfaces — are still mostly about doing things with words.

JJG: Speaking of hypertext, in Interface Culture you spend some time analyzing the hypertext style of Suck, the daily essay site that for many people epitomized the irreverent voice of online writing in the ’90s. You credit much of Suck’s effectiveness to the site’s use of hypertext to suggest hidden connections rather than making those connections explicit. This is almost exactly the same argument you make years later in Everything Bad Is Good For You regarding television narrative in shows like The Sopranos. Do you think the ascending complexity of other media can be attributed to the influence of the Web in our culture, or are both symptoms of some deeper trend?

SJ: I think the ascending complexity that I called the Sleeper Curve is in part attributable to the influence of the Web, or at least to the rise of interactive media in general. All other things being equal, a person who is used to making active choices while consuming media is going to be more receptive to complex media, even if the medium is a passive one, like television. Also, the Web supports complexity because there are so many para-sites (as I called them in IC) annotating and explaining every little detail of The Sopranos or The Simpsons. I think Lost is a show that could only have been made in the Internet age, and from the way the creators have embraced the fan sites, it’s pretty clear that they feel the same way.

JJG: What interface approaches are you excited about these days? If you were writing Interface Culture today, what applications would you point to as examples of where the field of interface design could go?

SJ: Like most of the people reading this, I suspect, I’ve been incredibly energized by all the grassroots Web 2.0 applications that have exploded over the past few years, most of them descendants of Firefly in one way or another. (Someone — and come to think of it, it’s probably me — should go back and track all the core ingredients of today’s Web that were visible at Firefly circa 1996.) So my list is the usual suspects: Blogger, Six Apart, Flickr, Delicious, Technorati, 37signals, Flock, all the GMAP mashups, and so on.

JJG: It’s interesting that you mention Firefly, because I’ve often thought that the Web today might be a really different place — and that we might have reached this stage in its evolution much more quickly — if Firefly had remained an independent company rather than being swallowed and buried by Microsoft. Are there other examples that come to mind of early Web innovations that expired before fulfilling their potential?

SJ: It really is interesting about Firefly, isn’t it? I’m curious how you imagine that non-Microsoft scenario playing out. I was and am very good friends with some of the key people behind Firefly, and lived through a lot of that period side-by-side with them, since I was doing FEED at the same time. But I’ve never asked them if they think about alternate scenarios, and what they would have meant. It was just a little too early, I think: They were very Web 2.0 in the whole user experience — it was all architecture of participation/wisdom of crowds stuff. But at the same time, they had a more proprietary relationship to the data they were collecting. If they’d opened the system up — followed the del.icio.us model — it would have gone some other way, for sure. I’m just not sure what way it would have been.

As for the lost arts of the early Web, I wrote a piece a while back about the John Snow archive that’s been collated by a wonderful UCLA professor named Ralph Frerichs. I’ve spent a lot of time there because Snow is the hero of my new book: It’s filled with old maps, original documents, quotes, pictures, bibliographies, links. It’s a great resource, and it’s the kind of thing that academics first started doing in the early days, but then the whole genre kind of died out. I suppose this is the kind of thing that Wikipedia could eventually evolve into, but right now the experience is completely different. It’s the difference between an encyclopedia and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project…

Connecting virtual space to real space is clearly the most exciting area right now, though in a funny way I think we’re living through another phase of being too literal with our spatial metaphors — mapping tools are amazing, and incredibly useful for some applications, but they’re not always the best way to represent physical places. I’m actually working on a project that deals directly with some of these issues, and not to get too dramatic about it, but I’m hoping to be able to show some screens from it in D.C. this August.

To be continued…

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