Oh boy, where to begin with Craig Mod’s interview with Offscreen Magazine. I’ve been following Craig’s work for a long time, so I have an undeniable bias towards everything he does. But some of the things he says in this interview touched a deep nerve for me, as it relates to a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately.

It’s a long interview, and you should absolutely take the time to read it all. I’ll just post a couple of my favorite quotes here.

On the revival of print and other analog technologies:

I think books are the perfect disconnected objects. They require no energy. They offer a fully immersive, quiet experience for hours or days. The medium dissolves but never becomes translucent. It’s quiet, but present. An exceptional technology.

When you sit down with a book, you understand the parameters of engagement. You know how long the book is. The book isn’t changing as you read it. It’s a solid, immutable thing. You and the book are on equal terms in many ways, as least from a physics point of view. You know what’s going to happen, and the book abides by its implicit contract, which is to be a book.

However, in digital-land many spaces (apps, games) quickly turn into slithering creatures beneath your feet. You never know where you stand. Their worlds are optimized to pull you back in for one more minute, one more click. Over and over. Cascades of chemical reactions in your noggin’ tell you to keep going, just one more hit; I feel this persona of the addict very strongly when I am online or using certain apps or devices.

On your life’s work and what moves you:

Does affecting one hundred lives turn you on? A thousand? A million? A billion? Why? What does it mean to have a positive impact on a life? How intimate does that connection need to be? Understanding your scale — the scale that moves you — is critical to understanding with whom and how you should work, how you should live.

On always being online:

The default expectation today is “always available.” The systems we created are so frictionless that we haven’t noticed how insidiously over-engaged we are. Step by step we’re optimizing ourselves to “maximum” productivity without defining or thinking about “productivity” on a human scale. The digital world abstracts. One could argue most problems contemporary society faces are problems of over-abstraction. As an employer with a global workforce, you have no idea where your employees might be or what they might be doing, so you expect them to answer immediately. The concept of downtime is elusive.

And finally, on “edges”, a topic he’s written about a lot:

Edges ground us. Without clear edges we don’t feel like we’re in control.

I can’t get this quote from Dan Cohen’s Back to the Blog out of my head:

It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

For anyone who doesn’t get why features like Instagram Stories are so popular, there you go. “Ambient humanity” is a very strong force. We share seemingly insignificant details about our lives not because we think everything we do is important or worth sharing. We do it to know we’re not alone.

(link via Kottke.org)

I really enjoyed Christopher Hawthorne’s essay called Los Angeles, Houston and the rise of the unreadable city:

This is going to be a column, instead, about something slightly different: about the legibility (and illegibility) of cities more generally. About how we react — as reporters and critics and simply as people — when we’re confronted with a city that doesn’t make sense to us right away.

I have never liked Los Angeles. I just couldn’t get over what I simply saw as a lot of dirt and too much traffic. But this viewpoint made me realize that, as with most cities, you can’t really love a city until you’ve lived there for a while.

If I had to put my finger on what unites Houston and Los Angeles, it is a certain elusiveness as urban object. Both cities are opaque and hard to read. What is Houston? Where does it begin and end? Does it have a center? Does it need one? It’s tough to say, even when you’re there — even when you’re looking directly at it.

I highly recommend reading this piece through the lens of a city you strongly dislike. Who knows, it might change your mind…

Paula La Farge challenges the idea that ebooks are inferior to physical books in The Deep Space of Digital Reading:

There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips.

Last year I went through a phase of reading physical books again, but I gave it up pretty quickly. There are two things about the Kindle platform that I missed too much:

• The ability to highlight sections, share to Goodreads, and access those highlights any time at the hugely under-appreciated kindle.amazon.com (I tried the app TextGrabber for a while to turn passages from a book into digital text, but it’s just not worth the effort).
• I can’t live without the X-ray function that lets you look up details about the book and its characters.

Anyway, one of the major academic complaints about e-books is that reader comprehension is lower. But, hey, turns out…

It’s true that studies have found that readers given text on a screen do worse on recall and comprehension tests than readers given the same text on paper. But a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that this may be a function less of the intrinsic nature of digital devices than of the expectations that readers bring to them. Ackerman and Goldsmith note that readers perceive paper as being better suited for “effortful learning,” whereas the screen is perceived as being suited for “fast and shallow reading of short texts such as news, e-mails, and forum notes.” […]

If those same students expected on-screen reading to be as slow (and as effortful) as paper reading, would their comprehension of digital text improve? A 2015 study by the German educator Johannes Naumann suggests as much. Naumann gave a group of high-school students the job of tracking down certain pieces of information on websites; he found that the students who regularly did research online—in other words, the ones who expected Web pages to yield up useful facts—were better at this task (and at ignoring irrelevant information) than students who used the Internet mostly to send email, chat, and blog.

My guess is that a generation from now this simply won’t be a debate any more.

In a journal article for Computational Culture Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson presents a scholarly critique of PowerPoint, and it is fantastic. It’s long and in-depth and the rare academic article that is a joy to read. From the conclusion of “One Damn Slide After Another”: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech:

PowerPoint is just one example of the oft-overlooked conditioning of knowledge production. The software profoundly shaped basic social expectations, technical conditions, and architectural pre-requisites for speech yet it was uncritically absorbed in nearly every quarter. PowerPoint does not zoom. It does not allow spontaneous comparisons. It does not accommodate several screens, multiple threads, or distributed live collaborations. It makes the analytic move of systematic comparison, so prevalent in late nineteenth and early twentieth century information presentations, extremely difficult to make. Moreover, its expansion has meant that once distinct situations have become more alike. Meetings, sermons, lectures, and talks increasingly employ the technics of commercial demonstration. Twenty-first century occasions for speech are structured by a platform that enforces the paradigm of one-slide-at-a-time.

Jeremy Keith writes about the onboarding process of the site The Session in his post Words of welcome. He shows a series of screen shots of simple messages that teaches users how to be good citizens on the site. Keith closes with this:

No intricate JavaScript; no smooth animations; just some words on a screen encouraging a human connection.

Design words to live by.