Aug 30th, 2022

In justifying the name "Media Ecology" as a field of study, Neil Postman says,

"We wanted to make people more conscious of the fact that human beings live in two different kinds of environments. One is the natural environment and consists of things like air, trees, rivers, and caterpillars. The other is the media environment, which consists of language, numbers, images, holograms, and all of the other symbols, techniques, and machinery that make us what we are." "The Humanism of Media Ecology", 2000.

Language is an important part of the interface between people and computers.

In the 1970s people communicated with computers in a written language through a command line.

In the 80s, Xerox Star introduced a graphical user interface that made manipulating information and communicating with a computer appear through metaphors of paper on a desktop.

Language still played a large part here. The concepts named files and folders were two major metaphors in the operating system, and the designers believed that many people could easily learn computing by relating to their experiences with paper.

Although the idea of files and folders doesn't have very much to do with the physics of how a computer stores and handles information, it influenced the interfaces of Windows and Mac computers, and we still interact with them today.

By knowing and remembering that interfaces are made from language, we can increase our awareness of our media environment.

“Metaphor unites reason and imagination,” says George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book, Metaphors We Live By (1980). “Metaphors are not merely things to be seen beyond. In fact, one can see beyond them only by using other metaphors. It is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing or touching or hearing, with metaphors providing the only ways to perceive and experience much of the world. Metaphor is as much a part of our functioning as our sense of touch, and as precious.” Laurel Schwulst, "My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?", 2018.

With an awareness of language, we can think of different interfaces by designing the words we use.

We're going to be working with files and folders, but we can start to paint on top of those concepts by naming the files and folders. Naming gives it new meaning.

What are some metaphors that you encounter every day?

What might these metaphors say about the people that makes and uses them?