- Interfaces in The Stack 2: Apps and Programming the Space at Hand
I shift the discussion here from the theory of Interfaces in general to a study of the App, an important type of everyday interface sitting between the User in motion and the rest of The Stack. What are Apps? On the one hand, Apps are software applications and so operate within something like an application layer of a specific device-to- Cloud economy. However, because most of the real information processing is going on in the Cloud, and not in the device in your hand, the App is really more an interface to the real applications hidden away in data centers. As an interface, the App connects the remote device to oceans of data and brings those data to bear on the User ’ s immediate interests; as a data-gathering tool, the App sends data back to the central horde in response to how the User makes use of it. The App is also an interface between the User and his environment and the things within it, by aiding in looking, writing, subtitling, capturing, sorting, hearing, and linking things and events. Depending on how it senses the world, the App mediates between User and environment, and so also between the Cloud layer and that particular environment via the User. Accordingly, it renders the habitat to the User and the User to the habitat, and it does this in ways that may be variously exacting or vague, prescriptive or reactive.
This dynamic of embodied prescription is built into the habitus/habitat circuit of geolocative Apps in particular, and especially, perhaps, those that superimpose descriptive layers on a device ’ s mobile camera view. <sup>41</sup> We should consider with caution (and a bit of awe) how emergent genres of Apps that project interfacial elements onto what is seen through the device ’ s eye, including augmented reality (AR) may come to radicalize absolutist and fundamentalist dispositions by making them seem real. These may be sacred or secular visions, inspired by religious or politics or economics, and may also spawn bizarre and as yet unimagined new Cloud/AR-based politico-theological mutations (this is discussed in more detail below). In many AR applications, synthetic textual annotation of the world is fused with direct perception, and for these Apps, visual symbols don ’ t signify things as much as they are directly laminated onto real things in real situations. As these Apps become more commonplace, how might this collapse of representational distance within the immediate perceptual field undermine the power of metaphor and contingent interpretation to guide User thought and action? Does an immanent and tactile sign demand a more exact duty from the believing reader? It seems likely that selecting from a categorized interface, like a GUI ’ s choice-array of menus and buttons, must work differently when that interface is perceived as a real object out in the world, as opposed to a screen event at a distance that merely refers to things iconographically. More troubling is when its annotations are labeling and dividing not just commodity X from event Y, but instead the absolute categories of the sacred and the profane, clean things from unclean things, our land and their bodies. Seeing the world through such an apparatus, can the primate brain manage to keep the critical space of doctrinal metaphor open against absolutism? Does it want to? Are the User’ s cognitive abilities extended by this reality, or are they amputated?
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Interface Layer