CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)
Fridays 12:30-1:50 · Gates B01 · Open to the public- 20 years of speakers
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October 25, 1996
The open secret of the Internet is community: open because among its users it's well known; secret because as obvious as it is, many folks don't "get it." Community -- in whatever form -- is about engagment. Engagement in its active forms means beloninging, the glue that binds together folks who might otherwise have little in common. They form to preserve something for themselves - against the boundariless body politic. Communities exist as differences in needs - one identifies with a community in the context of these needs and mantains relationship in community as long as these needs are perceived as important. Interface, equally, is about engagement. The invisible interface -- an ideal -- engages us totally, at every point, in a subterranean narrative which feels absolutely natural. And interfaces exist to fufill a need. So community and interface share an isomorphism -- the need to engage. Their meeting point, the Internet, brings both together into autopoeic unity. It's impossible -- and self-defeating -- to separate them. |
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