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March 03, 2005

Interface culture

A couple of years ago during a meeting in a library room on Sun's Menlo Park campus, I noticed the title on a book jacket, Interface Culture. I have not read Steven Johnson's book, but found out at Amazon.com that it was about computers more than culture. I had instead imagined something entirely different behind that title.

What I imagined was an explanation of US social culture as an interface production system. By that I mean a treatise on how social interaction in the US involves primarily interface definition and elaboration. We define what's yours, what's mine, and where the dividing lines are.

On either side of the interface, our underlying assumption is that we're free to do what we want on our individual sides. We may of course have some pointers for you about how to do things on your side. Yet we expect that in the extreme case of contention, we'll resolve things to a contract about the interface between us, and the rest remains free.

This social model stands in contrast to the models used in other places such as France. In France we seem more to consider how we can accommodate one another than at how we can keep apart. Here I see much more interaction and discussion concerning the model we share for how to live, than definition of how not to step on each others' toes.

The boundary between you and me is only a thin, imaginary line that we can probably redefine at any time, as long as we agree more or less on how we'll do it. Why spend so much time agonizing over the boundary alone, when we have so much to discuss and to learn from each other?

There can be an urge to want to determine which culture is better. This urge appears to arise when you plunge into an unfamiliar culture, or when you experience people from two or more cultures getting all twisted up misunderstanding each other. I don't think it makes sense to waste effort determining which whole approach to life is better in general, although it would be cool to know.

Posted by Mark at March 3, 2005 05:55 AM