"Permanent Present..."
-Futuristic dystoia (futurism & decay)—sounds tasty
"Thus... in cyberspace we have to work to forget."
-This is a value we hold true & dear now; With the possibility of all files, applications, and interactions existing on the WWW, the internet, a fear has arisen (one that Manovich could not have predicted, possibly). Soon we will no longer own our files, and I assume that, in the event the internet crashes (implausible, but interesting enough), cyberspace will be just as "forgetful," making it just as hard for us to "remember" our files. Does this fear of loss reflect our culture's relationship with physical things in our lives as well, our need to have, hold, possess for far too long? ...Oops, tangent.
"This operation (cut & paste) renders insignificant the traditional distinction between spatial and temporal media, since the user can cut & paste [nearly anything]."
-Made me think of this, this, and this. The GUI has created a culture for us—imagine, cut & past lives.
"While in a menu-based interactive multimedia application or a static website, all data already exists before the user accesses it, in dynamic new media artworks, the data is created on the fly, or, to use the new media lingo, at run time."
-Lambert seems to be thinking in this way, by creating rather than revealing with his human-computer interactions.
"Commercial products that use AL and evolution approaches include computer games and 'virtual pet.'"
-Leisure activities; I wonder if this paradigm could be serve something that really mattered, like education or financial planning?
"I introduce the term 'cultural interfaces' to describe interfaces used by stand-alone hypermedia, websites, computer games, and other cultural objects distributed via computers."
-A little fuzzy on the term, but I hope he clarifies later.
"Cultural interface: The ways in which computers present and allow us to interact with cultural data."
-What is cultural data?
"...A tool used to produce cultural content that, once created, would be stored and distributed in the appropriate media."
-Is this the issue we have the digital realm? The distribution of the cultural content created in it? Is this (distribution) the source of our "not-authentic" angst against the computer (moreso than the mouse vs. hand-crafted argument)? How can the computer be a tool for authenticity, then? How can the cyber be more real than the real?
-Another tangent: in my Philosophy of Technology class, we just got done watching a video called How Art Made the World: More Human Than Human. By analyzing the behaviors of seagull chicks and the Venus of Willendorf (weird, right?), the guy who made this film concluded that exaggeration is the what is "more human than human," that our exaggerated images/versions/creations of ourselves are in fact more real than ourself, average physical humans. Could you argue that the GUI, a space for exaggerated reality, is more real than actuality?
"Being part of our culture now for half a century, HCI already represnts a powerful cultural tradition, a cultural language offering its own ways of representing human memory and human experience."
-Note to self: don't reinvent the wheel, goddamnit. Use what you got when designing the website. It's not always about being crazy innovative; Try on for size functionality. Better yet, strive to enlighten the user to the same ol' tools, show them how they've never used then in this new way—exploit the tools already given to us by our forefathers of design and years of user-experience before us.
