8.4 A Multiplicity of Media

Amidst dramatic changes enabled by convergent computing and telecommunications technologies, there are fundamental shifts in concepts associated with the word media. Many conventional connotations of this term originated during the early 1900s in the concerns of advertisers who wanted to use newspapers and radio to reach mass markets. The term medium has been applied variously to:

1. 1. Storage surfaces such as tapes, discs, and papers
2. Technologies for receiving, recording, copying, or playing messages
3. Human communication modalities such as text, diagrams, photos, or music
4. Physical and electronic infrastructures such as broadcast networks or cyberspace
5. Cultures of creation and use such as sports media, edutainment, the paparazzi, and "cyburbia" (Allen, 1991, p. 53)

These forms of usage are broadly consistent with a more general concept of a medium as "something intermediate in nature or degree [or) an intervening substance, as air, through which a force acts or an effect is produced" (Random House/Reference Software, 1993). This notion of intermediary underlies technical usage and popular imagination of media as channels for sending and receiving messages. Intermediary was also implicit in the metaphors of cognitivists in the 1970s and 1980s that characterized human cognition as information processing in which symbols flow through registers and processing modules in a progression of transformations akin to serial computation. A logical extension of this kind of thinking is that the way for humans to work with computers is to communicate with them through symbols and language-based discourse, including verbal commands.

This chapter is grounded in an emerging paradigm in which a medium is conceptualized as "the element that is the natural habitat of an organism [or] surrounding objects, conditions, or influences; environment" (Random House/ Reference Software, 1993). This media-as-environments metaphor is certainly relevant in an era where electronic information pervades virtually every aspect of everyday life. Our perceptions of the planet are influenced by worldwide "supermedia" events (Real, 1989) even as we are surrounded by "info-cocoons" patched together from components such as facsimile machines, computers, copiers, cellular phones, radios, TVs, and video games. Public awareness of virtual realities and other immersive environments (see Chapter 15) has grown steadily since the early 1990s as these technologies have been popularized in films and amusement parks, and as they have been more widely used in architecture, medicine, aviation, and other disciplines.

Developers of computer-based environments of all types, and especially interactive multimedia, rely increasingly on object-oriented design and object--oriented programming (Martin, 1993). Object technologies challenge the media-as-channels and media-as-conveyors (R. E. Clark, 1983) metaphors because the objects-files and segments of code--contain instruction sets that endow the objects with varying degrees of behavioral autonomy.

Similarly, it is difficult to model as communication the kind of user interactions that typify graphical user interfaces (GUI) as employed by the Macintosh or Windows operating systems. When a user drags a folder into a trashcan icon, does the user intend to "communicate" with the computer? Possibly. When the trashcan icon puffs up after receiving the file, does the user interpret this as evidence of the trashcan's intention to communicate? Possibly. Yet the act of tossing an actual file into a real trashcan would not normally be interpreted as the result of some intent to communicate with the trashcan but rather as an intent to dispose of the file. And the presence of the file in the trashcan would not normally be interpreted by the tosser as the result of some intention of the trashcan to communicate its status as "containing something." What is the difference between virtual file tossing and real file tossing? To well adapted computer users, both virtual and real trashcans have similar dispositional properties: From the user's point of view, trashcans are not receivers of messages but receivers of unwanted files.

GUIs and similar environments also challenge conventional notions of symbols. In conventional usage, the meaning of a symbol is determined by its referents--that is, a symbol refers to a set of objects or events. Letters in this sense refer to sounds, numerals refer to quantities, and isobars on a weather map refer to readings of air pressure. In arranging letters to spell a word, however, one is not voicing actual sounds; in arranging numerals to represent a mathematical operation, one is not manipulating actual quantities of objects; and in estimating the distance between isobars, one is not sensing the wind.

The dispositional properties of computer icons and tools set them apart from conventional symbols (see 5.4.4.2) because icons and tools afford opportunities for direct action. Double-clicking on a selected file icon does not symbolize the action of opening the selected file. Rather, it is the action of opening the file; the double-click causes the operating system to execute the code associated with the selected object. Clicking on a selected file does not symbolize file opening anymore than toggling a light switch symbolizes activation of the light bulb.

However useful engineers may find the communications metaphor in rationalizing the logic of information flows within hardware and software subsystems, questions about the research and design of contemporary user interfaces cluster at the level of object perception and manipulation precisely because perception and manipulation of objects invokes powerful cognitive abilities that are also used in many everyday activities: locating, tracking, and identifying objects; grasping and moving them; altering the properties of the objects, or "switching" them from one modality to another.

The means by which users carry out such activities in a GUI are often partially or completely removed from language-based communication: Pointing, dragging, and pushing allow the user to perceive and to continuously adjust virtual tools or other devices without using propositions or commands such as "erase selected file." Ecological psychologists recognize that, in spite of their apparent modernity, such activities represent very ancient modes of unified action-perception that are shared by many organisms: Every predator worthy of the name must be able to locate, track, identify, grasp, move, and modify objects. The cognitive faculties used by an artist who cuts objects from a complex computer-based drawing and saves them in her electronic library have much in common with the faculties employed by a wolf who snatches white rabbits from a snowfield and buries them until spring.

Contemporary, object-oriented regimes for interface design result in complex communities of semiautonomous entities--windows, buttons, "hot spots," and other objects that exchange messages with each other, usually by means that are invisible to the user. Thus, the user is in a very real sense only one of many agents who populate and codetermine events in cyberspace. Increasingly, human computer users are not the only senders and receivers of messages but are, rather, participants in arenas that have been likened to theaters (Laurel, 1986) and living communities ("vivaria"; Kay, cited in Rheingold, 1991, p. 316).