conversation is an engine

“Another model, which undermined the designer’s new claim to power surfaced at the end of the 1990s, borrowed not from literary criticism but from human-computer interaction (HCI) studies and the field of interface and usability design. The dominant subject of our age has become neither reader nor writer but user, a figure conceived as a bundle of needs and impairments—cognitive, physical, emotional. Like a patient or child, the user is a figure to be protected and cared for but also scrutinized and controlled, submitted to research and testing.

How texts are used becomes more important than what they mean. Someone clicked here to get over there. Someone who bought this also bought that. The interactive environment not only provides users with a degree of control and self-direction but also, more quietly and insidiously, it gathers data about its audiences. Barthes’s image of the text as a game to be played still hold, as the user respond[s] to signals from the system. We may play the text, but it is also playing us.”

Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type, (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004) p. 73

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Image Credit: this isn’t happiness