Sunday, 11:45am, Grand Salon B
An Atlantic Monthly article posed a provocative question and set off debates across our electronic spheres: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” However, the article didn’t engage whether or how specific interactions and interfaces may contribute to increased intellectual acumen, or lull us into somnambulistic stupor. This presentation will examine that question at the interface level, in an attempt to discover how seemingly routine interaction design decisions made in the name of ease of use may be inadvertently shaping human consciousness, as with our laptops, into becoming “dumb terminals,” with more and more thinking processes “outsourced” to The Cloud. This discussion will also be strongly informed by the framework presented in Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, “The Future of the Internet-And How to Stop It,” comparing prescriptive use interfaces associated with “tethered appliances” with those considered more “generative” technology.
INSTRUCTOR
Christine Boese
Dr. Christine Boese is an information architect at Razorfish in New York City. She is also a former professor, cyberculture columnist for CNN.com, and a long-time blogger and blog host for journalists and writers. In 1998 she completed what has been called the first “born digital” dissertation to be accepted in the U.S., at Rensselaer Polytechnic, an early cyberculture ethnography of the fandom communities and the interfaces they built around the TV show “Xena: Warrior Princess.” The scholarly hypertext weaves itself into the community studied, and folds community input and feedback into the interactive project, which cannot be reproduced on paper.