Finding a new category that gracefully combines the pre-technological and the technological versions of a concept often requires one to jump to a relatively high level of abstraction, as is the case, for example, for firewall, hacker, peripheral, and port. Thus in the on-line world, a firewall is a protection against hackers, whereas in a more traditional context, the phrase “a firewall against hackers” has little or no meaning. Similarly, in a computer context, it makes perfect sense to speak of “plugging a peripheral into a port”, whereas in the pre-computer world, such a phrase would merely have sounded like meaningless gibberish.
And yet there are other categories, such as address book, keyboard, move, screen, delete, and send, which scarcely seem to have been extended at all to incorporate their new aspects. One might think that these categories have emerged unscathed from all the technological upheavals, that they have withstood the earthquake without being touched in the least. However, the truth of the matter is a bit subtler than that. Thus, for instance, an electronic address book, unlike its paper forebear, is not a concrete object. One “writes” entries in it not with a pen but by typing (or possibly by speaking aloud!), and it allows one to do certain things in a flash that would be very laborious with an old-fashioned address book, such as finding a person given their telephone number.
Asking whether a virtual address book belongs to the category called “address book” or simply is analogous to an old-style address book is a question that needn’t be answered, because the dichotomy it presumes is a false one. Belonging to a familiar category and being analogous to a familiar thing are not black-and-white matters, and should not be thought of as opposites, or as excluding each other; both have sliding scales (or shades of gray) that depend on both perceiver and context; indeed, strength of category membership comes down to nothing but strength of analogousness. The gradual and natural extension of technological terms provides an excellent illustration of the fact that analogy and categorization are just two sides of the same coin.
What about the concepts expressed by verbs such as “move”, “erase”, and “send”? It might seem that their meanings haven’t budged an inch as a result of the computer revolution. And yet, would you say that “moving” a file from one folder (on a hard disk) to another is exactly the same thing as moving a paper file from one cardboard folder (in a wooden drawer) to another? Or would you say that highlighting (on a screen) the set of pixels forming an alphabetic character and then hitting the “delete” key is exactly the same thing as quickly and forcibly rubbing the pink end of a pencil back and forth across some marks (on a piece of paper) until they are barely visible any longer? And would you say that sending an electronic message is exactly the same thing as sending a letter via “ordinary” mail? It’s easy to forget that when one sends a material letter, one has to relinquish it physically, whereas when one sends a message electronically, the original remains on one’s hard disk. And so we are reminded once again that even when it comes to terms that, on first blush, seem completely unextended by their computer versions, the truth is that the categories in question have indeed been broadened, and it is only thanks to analogy-making with previously familiar everyday categories that these extensions could take place.
The Best Interface is No Interface at all
Do the hundred-odd terms given a few pages back, all resulting from analogical extensions, coexist with all sorts of other new terms that did not come from analogical extensions? The fact is that whenever a new technology comes along, the standard way of devising a new set of terms that work naturally with it is to borrow pre-technological terms and to rely on the predictable naïve analogies that most people tend to make. Anyone who doubts this should just listen to computer people talking and take note of terms that didn’t exist fifty years ago. They will discover that everyday down-to-earth words are ubiquitous, while terms that are unique to the new technologies and that are nowhere to be found in old dictionaries, such as “motherboard” or “pixel”, are not all that frequent. To be sure, if one were to transcribe a technical conversation between two computer specialists, one would find a rich harvest of acronyms and other narrow technological terms, just as one would for any specialized discipline, but there can be no doubt that ordinary people, in speaking about their computers, are constantly exploiting terms that hark back to a day long before anyone could have dreamed of the abstract uses to which those terms would be put, decades or centuries hence.
Thus concepts from the world of computers now permeate our daily lives because our down-to-earth concepts, through hundreds of naïve analogies, have permeated the technology itself. These naïve analogies, building as they do on extremely familiar categories rooted in mundane daily activities, allow us to endow complex and mysterious technological entities with all sorts of simple and unmysterious properties, and they do so at minimal cognitive cost. Terms based on naïve analogies catch on easily because they naturally bring out qualities that otherwise would be highly elusive.
Thus thanks to our naïve analogies, we all speak with ease and accuracy of “placing objects on the desktop”, of “inserting documents into a folder”, of “opening or closing a window”, of “moving, copying, or throwing away a file”, and so forth — and we didn’t need a course or an instruction manual to gain this skill. Moreover, this down-to-earth lexicon for describing the behavior of abstract technological entities (such as desks, files, windows, and documents) is not just a rough-and-ready set of linguistic tools, serving solely to help novices get their feet wet but then to be summarily dropped; to the contrary, even the most technically savvy people speak in this concrete manner. They, too, open and close windows, files, and folders — and when using such phrases, they feel they are expressing themselves perfectly straightforwardly and non-metaphorically.
Experts in the field of human–machine interface design have stated that the best possible interface should be invisible — indeed, that “the best interface is no interface at all”. Such assertions, stressing the importance of natural and intuitive interfaces, mean essentially that designers should always try to exploit analogies to familiar things. Only if this is done will the interface become “transparent”, which means that users will feel as if they are manipulating everyday objects, a feeling that frees them up to concentrate on their main goals. Interfaces designed in this felicitous manner convert the computer into an easy-to-use tool for accomplishing a particular type of task. Instead of working up a sweat figuring out how to use the tool, one simply concentrates on the task itself.
Interfaces carefully based on analogies to familiar activities do not suffer from the great awkwardness of poorly-designed interfaces. Donald Norman, who is not only a distinguished cognitive psychologist and error-collector, -classifier, and -modeler, but also a pioneer in human–machine interface design, has stated this idea succinctly: “The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job… I don’t want to think of myself as using a computer, I want to think of myself as doing my job.”
The Naïve Side of Naïve Analogies
Although indispensable, naïve analogies that help us to relate to new technologies have their limitations, because members of the new category will sometimes behave differently from those of the older, more familiar category. In such cases, the naïve analogy is likely to lead one down a garden path. After all, when one depends on a naïve analogy, one does so, by definition, naïvely — that is, lock, stock, and barrel. For better or for worse, the naïve analogy is one’s only guide — and on occasion it will mislead. In a word, we are back again in the land of categorical blinders.
When the differences between a virtual category and its old-fashioned analogue do not involve the categories’ most central aspects, there generally is no problem. For example, it’s obvious that virtual desktops, files, and folders have no volume or mass, cannot get dirty, and aren’t subject to wear and tear. T
his is because categories such as virtual file and virtual folder are immaterial, just as is the category virtual desk (or desk2).
It’s another matter, though, when the discrepancies involve central aspects of the familiar category; the naïve analogy can then give rise to serious confusions. For instance, at one time Apple systems required users who wished to eject a disk to drag its icon into the trash. Many users balked at doing so: it struck them that there was a fair chance that taking such an action would delete all the data on the disk. The analogy behind this reaction was so natural and irrepressible that even experienced users couldn’t help but feel a twinge of uncertainty when dragging their disk into the trash, as if this operation, no matter how many times they’d done it before, was still just a tiny bit risky: “Uh-oh… Could it be that this time all my files will get erased and will be lost forever?” It’s as if they were imagining that the computer itself was thinking by analogy, and that it might get confused like a human and, by error, throw all the disk’s contents away. (“Oops! Sorry about that! I got a little distracted and when I saw you’d dragged the disk’s icon into the trash, I just tossed everything on it out. Silly me! I’d forgotten that for disks I’m not supposed to do that, but should just eject them.”)
In light of this common fear, should one infer that Apple’s user-interface designers suffered from a fleeting “senior moment” when they decided that dragging the disk icon into the trash was the natural way to say, “Please eject the disk”? Not really. They were simply presuming that users would easily jump to a higher level of abstraction than obliteration when they dragged the disk icon into the trash — say, to a concept such as getting rid of something no longer relevant. However, as it turned out, this presumption overestimated the typical user’s mental fluidity. When the designers finally realized this, they removed the ambiguity in subsequent versions. Nowadays, whenever the icon for a disk is brought near the wastebasket icon, the latter magically mutates into a different icon denoting ejection rather than destruction.
Another striking example of the failure of a naïve analogy involves the virtual desktop. Usually, the hard disk is represented as sitting on the desktop (or possibly in the workspace, which is itself on the desktop). But the fact of the matter is that all the data in memory are stored on the hard disk, and this includes the entire desktop. There is thus an apparent paradox, with the disk being on the desktop and the desktop being inside the disk. What sense does it make for A to be on top of B, while B is at the same time inside A? This shows that at times naïve analogies cannot fully do the job they were intended to do. To be sure, we humans can live with small inconsistencies on our computers just as we do in life in general, but sometimes this little paradox does cause genuine confusion, as when a user wants to locate the desktop in the computer’s memory. Interface designers, after recognizing the possible confusion due to this naïve analogy, eventually made a patch. Today the hard disk is no longer shown as being located on the desktop; instead, it is simply accessible through it. Still, it took designers some twenty years to take care of this small problem.
The World of Computers Yields Analogy Sources for Itself
Not all naïve analogies designed to help people use computers more easily are rooted in pre-computer experiences, because today computers are familiar enough that some of their best-known properties can themselves be exploited as sources for naïve analogies. Indeed, something that was once understood only by analogy can eventually become familiar enough that it can act in turn as the source for new analogies. This happens not only with technological devices, but in all aspects of life. For example, sound waves, which were first understood by analogy to water waves, became in turn, many centuries later, the analogical basis for understanding light waves.
The world of computers is thus starting to yield sources for its own analogies. For example, the notion of a floppy disk, which for many years was the standard device on which one saved all one’s files, was originally understood by analogy to a vinyl record. But once floppies had become familiar to all computer users, thanks to their widespread use in the 1980s and 1990s, they became the source for new analogies. And thus even today, the icon that stands for saving a file is frequently a stylized picture of a floppy. This is ironic, since writing a file onto a floppy disk is almost unheard of today; floppies have long since been supplanted by internal and external hard disks, CDs and DVDs, flash drives, and so forth (each of these, after a brief day in the sun, gave way to newer technologies). Although the floppy-disk icon is still found in some software, it is a remnant of a bygone era — a bit like the stylized pictures of ancient bicycles with huge front wheels that were sometimes used, not too long ago, to indicate bike lanes in the U.S. — and it’s a safe bet that this icon will soon go the way of floppies themselves. As the objects themselves are no longer around, the concept of floppy disk is approaching extinction. Children who see the square icon don’t know where it comes from, and the recent tendency is to make the icon for file-saving look like a hard disk instead.
When the Virtual World Helps Us to Understand the Real One
Because of their constant and increasing presence in our lives, computers and related technologies have recently turned into a rich source of categories that, through their great familiarity to us, can serve as rich new sources for analogies. This is a curious twist, since computers, for most of their brief existence, have standardly been explained through analogies to phenomena in the physical world, but today, the reverse is happening: that is, physical things are coming to be described through analogies to phenomena in the world of digital technology. For example, a recent television ad for an SUV crowed, “Think of it as a search engine helping you to browse the real world!” Who would have predicted such a reversal of roles? This tendency will surely increase, ushering in unpredictable changes in society.
Take the concept of multitasking. This was a clever invention of the 1960s allowing a computer to execute several distinct processes concurrently by breaking each process into tiny steps and doing a single step of process #1, then a step of process #2, and so on, thus interleaving the various processes so finely that, to all appearances, they are all being carried out simultaneously. But in our lives today, the concept of multitasking is routinely applied to human beings and their activities. Thus, sentences like “As a single mom, believe me, I’m constantly multitasking!” and “Every morning on my way to work, I sip my mocha, yak on the phone, savor the scenery, and listen to music, all while driving my car — I’m such a multitasker!” are standard parlance. Indeed, the computer origin of the term has begun to fade out of view. Here are definitions of it taken from two dictionaries a couple of decades apart:
Webster’s New World Dictionary (1988):
Computer science: the execution by a single central processing unit of two or more programs at once, either by simultaneous operation or by rapid alternation between the programs.
The American Heritage Dictionary (2011):
1.The concurrent operation by one central processing unit of two or more processes.
2.The engaging in more than one activity at the same time or serially, switching one’s attention back and forth from one activity to another.
As this comparison shows, the term was purely technical in the 1980s, whereas today many people use it fluently for everyday activities, having no idea that it came from computer science or even has any technical application! There was a transition period where the analogical extension was explicitly felt by people who knew they were stretching the concept, but after a while, the stretching had been accomplished, and the term, stripped of its original technical connotations, entered the public lexicon.
Another computer term that has been imported into daily life is “to interface”, which originally meant adapting two pieces of hardware or software so that they would work together seamlessly, but which is now used in such nontechnical phrases as “The gay community needs to interface much more with the black community.”
The term “core dump” was used for decades to mean a printout of the entire contents of a computer’s main memory (once called “core”); this was a somewhat desperate measure that could help in pinpointing very recalcitrant bugs. But it was analogically extended to daily life, with the result that today nontechnical people say things like, “Sorry for going on and on so long — I didn’t mean to give you a brain dump!” What is preserved is the abstract idea of visibly or audibly outputting a huge amount of information that normally is invisibly stored in some kind of memory device.
Another computer concept that has recently enjoyed considerable popularity as the source of casual conversational analogies is cut-and-paste. Thus, a television newscaster describes a political candidate’s speeches as being “cut-and-pasted from her previous speeches”, a newspaper describes attempts to cut-and-paste Silicon Valley into various European countries, and a book reviewer criticizes a new book by saying, “This book is just a cut-and-paste of other books on the same subject; I learned nothing new from it.”
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