Wednesday, December 8, 2010

fuzzy/crisp

We will be enhancing both the fuzziness and the crispness of our interfaces.

Fuzziness (unintended consequences)

"You lean over my meaning's edge and feel / A dizziness of the things I have not said." Trumbull Stickney

Let's think about how information about and from me, as an Internet user, will percolate through the global community of Internet users in the Internet of tomorrow. The others' screens will not just display streams of data about/from me as they do today -- my location, my manually typed updates, etc.; their interfaces will begin interpreting the information I provide and feeding those interpretations into their filters, as data helping to determine their interfaces' criteria for selecting what to display. Thus the new system will facilitate automatic communication of more unanticipated/unconscious implications of our actions, of information related in multitudes of different ways to whatever has been explicitly stated/intended.


Crispness (intended consequences)

The automatically-generated associations, whereby information that I generate percolates fuzzily outward into the rest of the Internet, will allow our interfaces to present us with kaleidoscopically transforming arrays of moving images -- constant streams of guesses as to what may interest us -- images with visually ascertainable meanings (encoded graphically rather than alpha-numerically). With so many such options constantly flashing, dancing, before our eyes, we'll enjoy an expansion of our ability to express ourselves with precision: the collective intelligence of humanity (or at least of humanity's computers) will be brought to bear in generating an optimal array of relevant images around each object that we invoke/select. When we misspell words we type, our word processors generate arrays of alternatives. We can get lists of near synonyms from thesauruses. When we type words into Google or our browser address bar, we get lists of similar items. All such functions will come under the aegis of this filter. Communication of subtle nuances of intention will be facilitated -- and writer's block likely eliminated -- through the presentation of so many options that it will become vastly easier to "say it just right," or, in fact, to say it much righter, much more interestingly, compellingly, precisely, and descriptively, than we have been capable of even in our most eloquent moments.

No comments: