Conversations

Alan Sondheim in My Future is Your Aim admits that today, “being online usually means working with GUI, graphic user interfaces, which are well- and sometimes over-designed.” (Sondheim, p.375) The bare nuts and bolts of design and creation are removed and we are left with a smiling layer of interface that (sometimes) works with us to create our text. We are separated from the skeleton of conversation/interaction and instead must work through the beast.

“All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.” (McLuhan, p.26) In essence, the McLuhanesque argument promotes the idea that this beast of a machine, this apparatus, is not separate from us. While we cannot place it directly opposite us within a dialogical conversation, as mentioned earlier, because that would humanise it; neither can we separate it from our selves entirely.

“The core of my technosocial argument is that a trilogical relationship is formed when an apparatus mediates creative communication – the three partners in the technosocial undertaking are human programmer/artist, the executing apparatus, and the human interpreter.” (Weight, p.414) The apparatus is just an extension of ourselves that reaches out and helps us to communicate with each other.