At the same time, crude information fantasies have already entered social practice, many tinged with a distinctly apocalyptic fire.
Dick's mystical notion of VALIS (Vast Active Living Information System) are highly mobile concepts, far more penetrating and productive than mere "fantasy." Gibson's work actually created a social space, as his word and concept organized the desires and intuitions of people operating in the widely disparate fields of journalism, law, media, psychedelic culture and computer science. But the three imaginative constructs I'll touch onWilliam Gibson's cyberspace, Vernor Vinge's Other Plane, and Philip K. Of course, science fiction has already explored such mythologies of information. Today there is so much pressure on "information"the word, the conceptual space, but also the stuff itselfthat it crackles with energy, drawing to itself mythologies, metaphysics, hints of arcane magic. Inevitably, information theory mutates into an information praxis: how does one move through this space? What are its possible logics, cartographies, entities, connections? In constructing environments that mediate between brains and information space, computer interface designers are already grappling with the phantasmic apparatus of the imagination, for these are questions for the dreaming mind as much as the analytic one.įar beyond Palo Alto and MIT, in the margins and on the nets, phantasms hover over the technologically-mediated information processing that increasingly constitutes life in the world. How powerfully we engage this information space depends on how powerfully we both manipulate and inhabit these representations, these phantasms ghosting the interface.įor things do not work the same through the liquid crystal looking-glass, with its codes, hypertexts, simulated spaces, labyrinthine network architectures, baroque "metaphors," colossal encyclopedias of memory. This proliferating multi-dimensional space is virtual, densely webbed, and infinitely complex, a vast and sublime realm accessed only through the mediation of our imaginative and technical representations. As computers, media and telecommunications technology continue to collect, manipulate, store, represent and transmit an ever-increasing flux of data, they are installing nothing less than a new dimension: the space of information. Within the armor is the butterfly and within the butterflyis the signal from another star. Instead, it is a fantasized energy, like the fantasized power conferred on the shaman by his belief in daemons. It does not use up real fuels, does not transform such fuels into real energy.
While allegory employs 'machinery,' it is not an engineer's type of machinery at all. Alan Kay, "User Interface: A Personal View" If it is to be like magical paper, then it is the magical part that is all important.
For example, the screen as 'paper to be marked on' is a metaphor that suggests pencils, brushes, and typewriting.Should we transfer the paper metaphor so perfectly that the screen is as hard as paper to erase and change? Clearly not. There are clear connotations to the stage, theatrics, magicall of which give much stronger hints as to the direction to be followed. One of the most compelling snares is the use of the term metaphor to describe a correspondence between what the users see on the screen and how they should think about what they are manipulating. Originally appeared in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberspace, (Duke University Press, 1994), edited by Mark Dery Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information
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