I think — have you ever seen Tron? If you haven’t, it doesn’t mat­ter, but it’s notable that they refer to what we would call “com­puter users” as “pro­gram­mers” — as in, you were expected to use a com­puter by pro­gram­ming it. I was sort of mus­ing around, talk­ing with Josh about how I’ve noticed the trend since blogs came on the scene is that “users” see their com­put­ers as ledgers — a place to record infor­ma­tion, a note­book. I always approached the web as a muta­ble art medium. Like, my catch­line was that every user who vis­its your web­site is an indi­vid­ual, so they see some­thing dif­fer­ent than what the other users may see. And I tried to explore this through inter­face (a project called Cir­ca­dian Rhythms, where the site changed minute to minute based on weather pat­terns, user loca­tion, time of day, etc) and a related piece called “Moods” where the con­tent and the inter­face were inex­tri­ca­bly linked to the path the user fol­lowed through the site — so like, I had a library of all my dif­fer­ent art works tagged with moods, and if you were in a joy­ful place, in the mood for some­thing that made you happy, the related con­tent would be joy­ful and you could eas­ily fol­low that path. Same for peace­ful, melan­choly, etc.

But we’ve hit a level of mass con­sump­tion where peo­ple don’t under­stand their machines any bet­ter than they did ten years ago, so pro­gram­mers have been essen­tially made slaves of the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor of user (and, to explain fur­ther, we’ve sort of cre­ated a mon­ster user who finds virtue in not under­stand­ing, because they expect their soft­ware to be at a cer­tain level of min­i­mum dif­fi­culty for usage. And this is appro­pri­ate and great for like, account­ing soft­ware and stuff [which at its worst is just a check­book ledger, with sim­ple cal­cu­la­tions of adding, sub­tract­ing and mul­ti­ply­ing if nec­es­sary] but ter­ri­ble for inno­va­tion and for really deeply explor­ing these rela­tion­ships between these per­sonal machines and the peo­ple on the other side of the screen.) And yeah, first and fore­most, I am a com­puter artist, I see the web as an art medium and the com­puter as a tool — but I’m begin­ning to under­stand how other peo­ple see their com­put­ers, and it’s not the same.

To explain a lit­tle bit bet­ter, a ledger is really the first step of using com­puter — log­ging infor­ma­tion. Input. And it seems peo­ple today don’t go beyond that, but you have so many options for USING that infor­ma­tion — graph­ing it, automat­ing tasks, etc. Col­lect­ing data is so use­ful, even if it’s just a per­sonal jour­nal, but what about the next step? What about some­thing as sim­ple as know­ing that you’re always bitch­ing on May 17th of every year because you have a mood indi­ca­tor on your jour­nal that’s not just dec­o­ra­tion, but pro­vides read­able feed­back to you?