The Flattening of the Internet

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding… William Gibson, Neuromancer 1984

The predictions of science fiction writers are sometimes right and often wrong; William Gibson admits that, in his Sprawl novels, he completely failed to see the coming importance of cell phones. But in his conception of cyberspace he seems also to have been somewhat wide of the mark. Indeed recent developments in computer and phone interfaces suggest that the “nonspace of the mind” is rapidly turning into Flatland. In the process, a strange intersection has arisen between archaeology and computer technology; the concept of “skeuomorphism,” coined by a 19^th century Mancunian doctor and antiquarian, becoming a topic of heated debate within the Apple Corporation.

From Pots to GUIs

In his 1889 article, The Meaning of Ornament, Dr H Colley Marsh suggested that, if ornamental styles derived from animals were termed zoomorphic, “it would be convenient to call those derived from structure, skeuomorphs” (1889: 166). This is entirely familiar to archaeologists where pots are decorated to resemble woven fabrics or riveted metal. But skeuomorphism actually goes beyond this where the overall form of an artefact is made to mimic that of a different material, as in the case of stone knives made to resemble those of bronze. Perhaps, then, we may say that the skeuomorph is a particular kind of visual metaphor or trope intended to transfer a concept from one material/context to another.

Given its origins in archaeology, it’s a bit odd to find the concept as a subject for heated debate in the world of computer user interfaces. In particular, the demise of Steve Jobs and the departure of Apple Senior Vice President Scott Forstall has seen the abandonment of skeuomorphic design in favour of a flatter interface, as appeared in Apple’s iOS7, a change that had already taken place in Microsoft’s Windows 8. A New York Times article remarks that:

Axel Roesler, associate professor and chairman of the interaction design program at the University of Washington, says Apple’s software designs had become larded with nostalgia, unnecessary visual references to the past that he compared to Greek columns in modern-day architecture.

In many respects, critics of Jobs and Forstall remind one of Adolf Loos (1910) diatribe “Ornament and Crime” which is often cited as a canonical text of modernism. Indeed the advocates of the flat interface are effectively echoing the arguments of Loos or Louis B Sullivan; that form should follow function and that decoration is a distraction. In a virtual sense it is the insistence on truth to materials.

Skeuomorphism, as we shall see, has its roots in the desire to make the computer interface friendly and accessible; to use concepts like the desktop, windows and icons to metaphorically link computer operations with everyday objects. To delete a file, put it in the waste bin. Yet as the critics argue, many of these metaphors have become anachronistic; the Rolodex (first marketed in 1958) as an address book metaphor means nothing to someone who has never seen one – indeed it was the computer that made the Rolodex obsolete. Moreover, it is argued, the need for a bridge between the computer interface and the “real” world is no longer necessary – the flat interface of iOS7 or Windows 8 simply acknowledges what the computer is without the need to refer to a world we no longer inhabit.

Some Origins

I think this is all well and good; the personal computer and its Graphical User Interface have been around long enough for most people to discard “real world” metaphors. But I want to suggest that there is more to the spatial interface metaphor than that. To begin with, a brief look at the history of the GUI and its implementation.

Its often assumed that the GUI began with Apple’s LISA of 1983, as more widely experienced on the Apple Macintosh (1984). But in fact the origins of the GUI lie in work by Alan Kay and colleagues at Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in the mid 1970s (Kay 1977; see Note 1). Kay’s Smalltalk system, incorporating Doug Engelbart’s idea of the mouse pointing device, pretty much implemented all of the basic GUI concepts for the reasons stated above. Learning from developmental psychologists such as Piaget and Vygotskii, Kay wanted to make the computer accessible to anyone. In 1979, after a visit to Xerox, Steve Jobs more or less bought the GUI concept from them, and the rest is history.

However, there are some fundamental aspects of the GUI concept to be considered here. First off, one might argue, it is probably wrong to see the desk top and windows are the origin of the GUI; in a real sense all computers had them from the time that monitor screens were first introduced. The first such device, the Datapoint 3300, was introduced in 1967 and initially viewed as a substitute for the teleprinter devices then in use as computer terminals. Withs teletype inspired command line interfaces such as DOS, the graphical element was mostly textual syntax, but even this stood as a representation of the underlying binary machine code, which in early computers had been represented by rows of lightbulbs. The innovation made by Kay et al at Xerox PARC was to substitute a spatial, simulation based interface for a textual one. And here I think that the spatial element is fundamental; thus, for instance, Kay explains the use of windows as follows:

In many instances the display screen is too small to hold all the information a user may wish to consult at one time. and so we have developed “windows.”or simulated display frames within the larger physical display. Kay 1977: 234

Windows are, fundamentally, a way of managing space within the limits of the screen. Moreover, the style of programming that emphasises images and objects, rather than lines of code, necessarily falls into a spatial way of thinking.

Into the Third Dimension

Although conceptually spatial, for example Kay states that “Once the windows have been created they overlap on the screen like sheets of paper,” the interface of Smalltalk was still flat, albeit that he envisaged the use of 3 dimensions in architectural modelling. In many respects the early Apple and Microsoft GUIs were also pretty flat. Yet in Windows 3.1, for example, there is increasing use of an imagined third dimension where skeuomorphism starts to be more generally implemented. In one respect, this reaches its apogee with the interface design of virtual music sythesisers, where the peculiarities of physical objects; patch cables, rotary knobs and switches, are faithfully reproduced in a faux 3^rd dimension.

However, there are several other strands through which a third dimension has found its way onto the screen either literally or metaphorically. First and most obvious, computer games such as Pong (1972) or Space Invaders (1978) used an entirely flat interface, albeit that they implied an at least 2 ½ dimensional environment. Indeed a key point here is the nature of Point of View (POV); in Pong the player has a vertical POV which is at 90 degrees to a naturalistic table tennis game. In Space Invaders the aliens descend the screen in what can either be regarded as a similar vertical POV, or one in which approach is metaphorised by descent. By contrast, Atari’s Star Wars arcade game (1983) gave the player a crude simulation of the X-Wing pilot’s POV approaching the Death Star.

Although games developed considerably through the 1980s, it was not until the mid 90s that computing power facilitated a more realistic “rendered” 3D such as in the games Quake or Tomb Raider (both 1996). Note that these games offered quite different POVs – Quake was what is known as a First Person Shooter (FPS) where the players POV is the same as that of the game protagonist. By contrast, Tomb Raider places the player in a third person POV, where the protagonist is represented by an avatar – I shall return to this point later.

Other developments emerged in the 1980s and 90s. Although its origins can be traced to the panoramic murals and dioramas of the 19^th century, advances in computer technology also began to make the idea of virtual reality a practical prospect, indeed the term was coined by VR pioneer Jaron Lannier in the mid 1980s. VR implementations fall into two basic categories; the head mounted display or “eyephones” pioneered by Ivan Sutherland in the late 1960s and the CAVE environment which uses a similar technology to modern 3D TV to place the viewer in a space composed of projection screens (in my limited experience, the latter induces nausea!). In the mid 90s, advocates such as Lannier believed that eyephones, such as those developed by his company VPL, would replace the screen as an interface, particularly for the then nascent World Wide Web.

Here a quick look at the timeline on Wikipedia’s Virtual Reality page is instructive; there are ten entries beginning from 1860 and converging on 1992, and then a gap until Facebook’s 2billion dollar purchase of Oculus VR in 2014. Despite Lannier’s optimism, VR did not take off in the mid 1990s. If anything it was an expression of the millenarian enthusiasm of the period, perhaps epitomised by the almost Crowleyesque pronouncements of Mark Pesce – the inventor of VRML, an HTML like system for representing 3D spaces on the WWW.

Two recent developments suggest a possible resurgence; Google Glass, if it catches on, could lead to a widespread acceptance of augmented reality, a concept that effectively takes the CAVE out into the “real” world. Mark Zucherberg, it would seem, is betting on a more conventional VR platform with his acquisition of Oculus, a company that has been carrying on the tradition pioneered by Sutherland and Lannier. What will actually transpire remains to be seen (but see below).

Finally we should consider the parallel history of 3D film and TV. Pioneered in the 1920s, 3D film had its heyday in the early to mid 1950s, but has recently been revived. Again technological considerations offer a partial explanantion. Early 3D films used 2 separate projections which were viewed through glasses with polarising lenses. This proved both expensive and unreliable, especially when projectionists allowed the two sequences to get out of synchronisation. A simpler technique uses the anaglyph, where two offset images are printed on the same film and viewed through glasses with coloured lenses of either red/blue, red/green or red/cyan. In the current iteration, a variety of polarising technologies are used to alternately black out the left and right eye in synchronisation with left and right images on the screen.

Despite the hype, and the incorporation of the technology into domestic LCD TVs, there is evidence that, since 2011, the enthusiasm of audiences for 3D is declining, as it did in the 1950s and 60s. Given the relative reliability, cheapness and availability of the current 3D techologies, an alternative explanation for this decline would seem to be required.

Why Skeuomorph?

Frieman (2010: 37) helpfully offers a table of the different explanations for skeuomorphism in the archaeological record. It might be that skeuomorphs simply represent an undeveloped sense of how to use new materials, cultural conservatism or a desire to imitate more valuable, prestigious materials in another medium. Whatever the case, as Frieman suggests, there is an overlap between social values, technological practice and material properties. Bringing this into the contemporary context, we know that a need to accommodate a degree of cultural conservatism was a motivation for GUI design. But equally, the choice of a spatial metaphor was an attempt to transform the underlying, and forbidding, domain of code into a more easily usable metaphor; skeuomorphs are not necessarily inferior imitations (Conneller 2013). Equally, it could be said that the use of skeuomorphism by Apple also reflects Frieman’s notion of Economic Value; an interface that evokes expensive or high quality real world materials. The same is true of the aforementioned synthesiser interfaces where extremely expensive pieces of retro technology are replicated on screen.

More generally, though, I believe that the issue goes beyond the usual aspects of skeuomorphism. That it is not simply the replication of real world objects, but the whole notion of the spatial metaphor that is in question. Here one might see an analogy, if not homology, with the development of modernism in the visual arts. Many of the developments discussed above have their roots in the ability of photography and film to record images of the “real world”. This led artists such as Braque and Picasso to discard the notion of figurative representation in a conventional sense, and the attempt to represent multiple perspectives on the flat plane of the canvas. One might say, vis-a-vis the preceding discussion, that the Cubist’s were discarding the attempt to make art skeuomorphic with the “real” visible world, and in the process recognising that the defined plane is nevermore than just that.

Conversely, thinking about the computer interface has often followed Gibson in imagining interface space as a kind of alternate reality, where the screen is limited by its failure to replicate Alice’s Looking Glass. In this context skeuomorphism is more than just replication of the familiar; it is tantamount to an attempt to project the familiar into an alternate universe.

What seems to me to be the underlying joke here is that on the whole users do not want to step through the looking glass, and that they are more comfortable with a degree of distance. This is certainly the case with immersive devices such as eyephones; there seems to have been no technological reason why these or other technologies could not have given us Gibson’s consensual cyberspace in the mid 1990s, if that is what people had generally desired. Even the toymaker Mattel began to manufacture its own Power Glove – a VR controller for the Nintendo entertainment system (it was a commercial failure). I suspect this is also true of 3D film; that viewers, whilst enjoying the novelty, generally prefer a flat moving picture to the experience of having monsters lurching into their living room. Again, the evidence from games suggests a similar picture; even attempts to set up an alternate reality, such as Second Life, tend to use a 3^rd person avatar, rather than placing the user in the POV of their protagonist. Although I have no statistical data, I suspect that this is generally the case of most games, and that players actually prefer not to be placed as the protagonist. Indeed, it is interesting to consider the derivation of the term “avatar,” first used in computing by Chip Morningstar for Lucas Films role playing game Habitat. Specifically, in Hinduism an avatar is an earthly incarnation of a god, and it is, I think, no exaggeration to suggest that most players prefer a certain godlike distance (c.f. Knappett’s 2002 discussion of marionettes).

Disenchantment

The flattening of the internet represents, in my view, a disenchantment of the virtual. Here I mean a trend to realism rather than disillusion. In Gibson’s original Sprawl novels, cyberspace comes to be haunted by supernatural AI gods, but the real cyberspace is somewhat more mundane. To paraphrase Captain James T Kirk, “I do not come from cyberspace, I just work there.”. Knappett (2002) sees a connection between skeuomorphism and Frazer’s notion of “sympathetic magic” – that the skeuomorphic object somehow borrows the magic of that which it imitates. This has, to some extent been true of the virtual, yet in a way there is a kind of reverse sympathetic magic at play here. Objects moved from the “real” world to the virtual become magical; our heart’s desires can be realised in cyberspace in ways that they cannot in meatspace. Thus it is that, for a variety of reasons, users learned early on that they could pretend to be someone else when on line. Ultimately, as in the case of some transhumanist/post-human thinking, persons were to be uploaded into the virtual, where they could have eternal life.

Perhaps, then, there is something encouraging in the pragmatism underlying the flattening of the internet; a recognition that it is not actually a space, but a spaceless topology. Here, as some have suggested, this might be a liberating perspective – rather than burdening the technology with “real” world metaphors, programmers and interface designers can develop tools that are more appropriate to the virtual is it actually is. In the past, the tendency to adopt skeuomorphs was generally a transitional phenomenon; even in the recent past the use of plastics to imitate other materials has largely dissipated in favour of plastics as plastics. I suspect that the same transition is occurring in the world of computers, smartphones and tablets.

Notes:

Note 1: Kay’s 1977 article is remarkable for a prescience that many sci fi writers would envy. Albeit he is a little optimistic as to timescale (he sees everyone using laptops by the mid 1980s) most of what he discusses has come to be.

References

Conneller, Chantal. 2013 “Deception and (Mis) representation: Skeuomorphs, Materials, and Form.” In Archaeology After Interpretation: Returning Materialism to Archaeological Theory edited by Benjamin Alberti, Andrew Meirion Jones and  Joshua Pollard. Left Coast press

Frieman, Catherine 2010 “Imitation, identity and communication: The presence and problems of skeuomorphs in the Metal Ages” IN Lithic technology in metal using societies. Proceedings of a UISPP Workshop, Lisbon, September 2006 edited by Berit Valentin Eriksen. Aarhus University Press

Kay, Alan C. 1977 “Microelectronics and the Personal Computer.” Scientific American 230: pp231-245

Knappett, Carl 2002 “Photographs, Skeuomorphs and Marionettes.Some Thoughts On Mind, Agency and Object.” Journal Of Material Culture Vol. 7(1): 97–117

Loos, A. 1910[1998]. Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans. Adolf Opel. Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press.

Marsh, Dr H Colley 1889 “The Meaning of Ornament”, Trans. Lancs. & Cheshire Antiquarian Soc. 7 168