multimedia experience: language of new media (63-78)

Part of what I found interesting in this article came from this quote, "The computer interface is simply a code that carries cultural messages in a variety of media", and that "work and leisure converge around the same interfaces". It's something I think about once and awhile, and I've noticed it here at school, at work over the summer, everywhere. People will say they're going to "take a break", but what "take a break" actually means is pull down the window they're doing work in, and pull up another window with facebook, or their e-mail, or a game to entertain themselves. It's actually pretty fascinating, but it's also a little frightening too. Actually, I blame procrastination largely on "work and leisure converging around the same interfaces", but I digress. It seems interesting in terms of the internet: in what context are people looking at your website in? Are they there to be entertained or to be informed? I suppose it all depends on the user. There are times where I look through someone's portfolio simply as something leisurely, but other times where I'm looking for something specific as inspiration. Depending on how I plan on accessing it, I may want to look through the information in a different way. I imagine it depends on the content of the website itself, and the fact that people know what they're accessing most of the time: people go to game sites to be entertained, people go to news sites to be informed. Would a different kind of interface blur those lines a little?

Another thing that I was drawn to, and partially because it's related to something I'm looking at for my degree project, was the fact that the author suggested the language of interfaces often times being drawn from other familiar forms: cinema or print. I think just by looking at some of the ideas that came up in our class's brainstorming process, it's pretty clear that people are influenced by forms of interface outside a computer: whether that's flipping the pages of a book, unfolding a piece of paper or walking through a museum space. The author also talks about trying to stretch the definition of a page by including new concepts made possible by the computer-- I'm interested in seeing the more literal outside influences work with the capabilities of the computer taken into consideration.

(Whoooops, sorry guys! I posted this to the VA blog at first... lack of sleep is amazing!)