Between ‘resilient’ and ‘resile’ there is something of a semantic sleight of hand as, although the two share a root, their common meanings have diverged. But the comparison is instructive. OED tells that resilient means ‘Rebounding; recoiling; returning to the original position’ and most pertinently, ‘tending to recover quickly or easily from misfortune, shock, illness, or the like; buoyant, irrepressible; adaptable, robust, hardy.’ These sound, to be sure, like positive characteristics of an individual, organisation or society. But to resile means, rather, ‘To draw back, withdraw, or distance oneself from an undertaking, declaration, course of action,’ and ‘To recoil or retreat from something with aversion; to shrink from.’ These appear almost opposed: could one retreat in an irrepressible manner? Yet in practice I think these are not so distant and, in fact, when the discourse of resilience informs policy it is more likely to produce an ability or preference for resiling than structural resilience. To see why, consider the following example.

For an extreme case we may look to the survivalist enclaves already being built by individuals and small groups in various locations. The ideal is the high-lying wilderness bunker with independent power generation and long-term supplies of water, preserved food, medicines and weaponry. Apocalypse – whether financial, environmental or political in origin – is the inspiration and a future of brutal competition for scarce resources is envisaged. Protagonists could certainly conceive of their preparations as planning resilience though clearly a world of armed enclaves is not the one sought by current policy trends. But the reasons that good citizens ought to recoil in horror from survivalism should also give us pause to reconsider the discourse of resilience.

Firstly, the orientation of the survivalist is decidedly inward. Whether the individual, kinship group or like-minded community plans a secure future they do so in competition with all others. Survivalists scramble now for resources so that they can keep them to themselves in a future in which they become increasingly scarce. The targets of policies to increase resilience are also typically relatively small groups, communities or even individuals and there is no reason to suppose that reliance requires a more outward-looking approach. The resilient ‘I’ cares little about the other.

Secondly, even the most positive notion of resilience has as its best outcome the ability to persist in the same manner. We survive the shock and return to normal: we continue to live in the bunker. The allure of normality is sharpest when set aside the destructive potential inherent in the global risks we face. But it is normality, precisely normality, that has produced those risks. We must identify the causes of our multiple crises within the structures and the culture of contemporary global society and we must overcome them through far-reaching social change. The direction of change is open, but it must be change. ‘Returning to the original position’ is not an option if our ambition is to be for anything more than the constant experience of surviving shock.

Finally, then, the doctrine of resilience lacks an inspiring vision for progress. To return to its paradoxical nature: its only long-term vision is of its own failure which produces the short-term objective to avoid the seemingly inevitable. Yes, to be capable of resisting crises is a positive characteristic but it is one that should develop alongside an alternative model of a society in which risks are dramatically reduced. To target resilience truly is to resile from that most traditional characteristic of human societies: the attempt to improve one’s lot and that of future generations.

I was pleased to be invited to talk on Occupy at the opening panel of last week’s Peace History Conference, alongside Sam Walton (on the role of St Pauls), David Fernandez-Arias (on Occupy MCR) and Jacqui Burke giving us historical context with a reading of accounts from the Peterloo massacre.

There’s lots of video available from this panel and Saturday’s talks here: http://www.peacehistoryhub.org/

My talk focused on the ideological content of occupation as a direct action tactic. You can flick through the Prezi presentation on the left, hit the Peace History Hub for video.

This article explores a number of key questions that serve to introduce this special issue on the ethics of research on activism. We first set out the limitations of the bureaucratic response to ethical complexities in our field. We then examine two approaches often used to justify research that demands time consuming and potentially risky participation in research by activists. We label these approaches the ethic of immediate reciprocity and the ethic of general reciprocity and question their impacts. We note, in particular, the tendency of ethics of reciprocity to preclude research on ‘ugly movements’ whose politics offends the left and liberal leanings predominant among movement researchers. The two ethics also imply different positionalities for the researcher vis-à-vis their subject movement which we explore, alongside dilemmas thrown up by multiple approaches to knowledge production and by complex issues of researcher and activist identities. The overall move to increasing complexity offered by this paper will, we hope, provide food for thought for others who confront real-world ethical dilemmas in fields marked by contention. We also hope that it will encourage readers to turn next to the wide range of contributions offered in this issue.

We’re really excited about the range and quality of contributions to this issue.  The full Table of Contents is:

The Difficult and Hopeful Ethics of Research on, and with, Social Movements
Kevin Gillan & Jenny Pickerill
Social Movements and the Ethics of Knowledge Production
Graeme Chesters
Reflexive Research Ethics for Environmental Health and Justice: Academics and Movement Building
Alissa Cordner, David Ciplet, Phil Brown & Rachel Morello-Frosch
Ethical and Political Challenges of Participatory Action Research in the Academy: Reflections on Social Movements and Knowledge Production in South Africa
Marcelle C. Dawson & Luke Sinwell
The Gaza Freedom Flotilla: Human Rights, Activism and Academic Neutrality
Anne de Jong
Sisterhood and After: Individualism, Ethics and an Oral History of the Women’s Liberation Movement
Margaretta Jolly, Polly Russell & Rachel Cohen
Ethics, Activism and the Anti-Colonial: Social Movement Research as Resistance
Adam Gary Lewis
Disclosed and Willing: Towards A Queer Public Sociology
Ana Cristina Santos
Asking Tough Questions: The Ethics of Studying Activism in Democratically Restricted Environments
Sandra Smeltzer
A Personal Reflection on Negotiating Fear, Compassion and Self-Care in Research
S. J. Creek

Just spent the morning listening to a couple of folks who were labour activists in the 40s and 50s. Now wondering how we organise politically under the sociological conditions of late modernity. If the class structure isn’t there to support the traditional labour movement (in the same way), what can we build instead?

An important and tricky question, no doubt; in the following I may only succeeded in rewording it…

What is it about the traditional class structure that has changed? Partly it has become much more globally dispersed, and so it is harder, though by no means impossible, to see. But the change is also about the unwillingness of people (in the rich world at least) to identify with class as a way of understanding their social position.

Marxist class analysis was so powerful partly because it offered an identity that allowed people to make sense of themselves and their political opponents, to work out what their collective interests were, and to feel solidarity with others like them. And it made sense as an identity because it also fit the material conditions of everyday life. A similar story can be told about black civil rights movements, nationalist movements, women’s movements and so on. Collective identity is always a social construction, and in movements defining that identity typically involves saying not just who ‘we’ are, but also who ‘they’ are, and how we can stop them oppressing us. Reading The Communist Manifesto is still an excellent lesson in making these kinds of claims in an evocative and powerful manner. So, while class and identity movements are often seen as different kinds of thing (especially by those who see identity movements as a distraction from class struggle), class is really just another type of identity movement, albeit one that is very directly tied to the production and distribution of stuff.

One of the conditions of late modernity, so we’re told, is the instability of identities in a world where people have much more choice about how they identify themselves and what groups they align with. In earlier stages of capitalism religion, social position and vocation were perhaps the key foci of identity, although most of that sat within a broader sense of national identity. Socialism (and, indeed, sociology) succeeded in pushing class to the centre of identity discourses. However, that was an identity that functioned most clearly worked best for the male industrial worker, excluding those outside traditional employment. Today, all of those identity discourses may remain options, but perhaps the most common (rich world) focus of identity is lifestyle as expressed through consumption. We can identify ‘chavs’, ‘hippies’, ‘geeks’, ‘eco-warriors’ and a million other tribes through what they choose to buy (or not to buy) and we typically have knowledge of a bunch of stereotypes about their behaviour and morality. Marketing and branding have successfully aligned brands with values, encouraging people to express their values through consumption choices. As an aside, I seem to have had various conversations with people about dating websites recently, which, of course, match people on the basis of ‘shared interests’. Such interests may most often be gauged through consumption choices: favourite films or music, hobbies (and their inevitable consumer paraphernalia), fashion tastes and so on are all routinely used as proxies for deeper values.

So, organising on the basis of class or vocation have become difficult because for many, a role in economically and socially useful production is only important insofar as it enables the maintenance of a particular, consumption-based identity. Or, in less sociologically convoluted terms: most people only work to buy stuff. Obvious? Perhaps. But its also a radical hollowing-out of the meaning of work compared with earlier stages of capitalism. In the late 1800s the French working classes were doing 60-hour weeks but during the regular crises of over-production their bosses would lock them out of the factories while dumping unsold luxury fabrics in the river until prices recovered. The workers would march to demand the right to work (and Marx’s nephew, Paul Lafargue, ridiculed them on the grounds that they should be demanding more leisure time). Today, perhaps we’re more likely to hear demands for ‘more stuff’ not ‘more work’ and, as we’ve seen, some would rather loot the high street than confront the capitalist state.

All this is to say that while people’s life experiences are undoubtedly determined in a large part by a global class structure, class (as economic location) no longer provides a compelling focus for identity. Warren Buffet hadn’t read the script when he proclaimed ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ [1] But for most people, to mangle a phrase: the greatest trick capital ever pulled was convincing the world class didn’t exist.

So, under these conditions, what can we build? The easier route might be consumer movements for better stuff. Everton football fans marched last Saturday demanding more investment in players and an interview with one of the organisers focused on the need to develop Everton as a ‘global brand’ in order to attract ‘inward investment’. A trivial example, of course, that Barry Glendenning described as ‘a march from a pub they were meeting at anyway to a football match they already had tickets for’. But demands for better stuff can at least include less environmentally destructive production and better labour conditions and the fair trade movement shows some progress can be made in this way. But that is hardly going to convince labour activists of the ’40s that there is a generation of political organisers ready to make a radically equal world. In going with the flow of consumerist identity one inevitably gives ground to those who profit most from consumption.

Finally, its worth noting that while the shift from class to consumer identities is a significant historical shift, they are both premised on the centrality of economic behaviour in defining a political collective for political action. It may seem perverse given the context of economic crises and blatant redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, but perhaps our political organising needs something other than an economic base. Could a wholehearted and honest return to ideology unite people from a range of class backgrounds in struggle for a fairer society? After all, Buffet’s comments on class war came not from stupidity but from a recognition that something ought to be done, and there is now a burgeoning ‘tax me harder‘ movement from the ranks of Europe’s elite. What would a truly radical liberal movement look like? And could there be a compelling story of collective identity that cast off the traditional ties to nation, religion or economic position?

So here’s a different question to the one we had before, just who do you think we are?

Reference:

[1] Quoted in

The triggers in 1981 were ‘heavy handed’ and often racist policing reflecting long running policing policies that systematically targeted young black men whose experience of state authority would likely have been unremittingly negative. This combined with racial tensions between communities and with the deep-set inequalities of urban life where whole areas were devoid of opportunities for meaningful work. There were instances of looting and arson but the prominent images of Brixton, Toxteth and so on is the violent clashes with police. At times small numbers of police found themselves surrounded by angry youths with improvised weapons. More often, lines of police in riot gear would tackle large groups of rioters head-on. Battles would last hours and the aim, it would seem, was primarily to hit back at the police while the usual power relationship had been reversed.

This summer, after the first night of anger at the police shooting of Mark Duggan, people’s purpose on the streets seemed to be different. Rather than directing violence at police, such confrontations were often avoided as the fast moving and, at times, well organised crowds descended like bargain hunters on high street stores. Rather than an opportunity to settle scores with authorities, this looked like a rush to get free stuff, as was sometimes evident on various communications on social networks and in media interviews after the events[Guardian, Telegraph]. This difference in the character of the riots is suggestive of  a different explanation for why they occurred. As Zygmunt Bauman was quick to argue ‘these are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.’

Bauman’s contributions to the sociology of contemporary capitalism have drawn out the implications of a shift in the way in which people create and understand their own identities, which in turn frame their understandings of the world around them, their decisions about action and their identification of friends, allies, and opponents. Whereas once most people understood their identities in terms of religion, nation, social position or vocation in the present we can talk about a multitude of consumer-based identities. This analysis is understood best by clever marketer, who consciously try to create brands for products that carry a heavy load of meaning. As a result, a large portion of the value of global corporations is attributed to their brands (see Interbrand for current values.) The value of a consumer object becomes detached from either the cost of production or the utility that product has, but instead is tied to what it signals about us both to ourselves and to those who see use engaged in conspicuous consumption. Apple iThing brand construction is a little stroke of genius in this regard  - I’d be very surprised if Apple marketers didn’t come up with a list of things that the now ubiquitous ‘i’ could stand for that included identity. If we’d had the ‘myPod’ we’d have an everyday description of ownership of a thing, but by using the active, verbal form of the pronoun ‘i’ we get a much deeper signal that ‘I do Apple products’, such that ownership of the product also says something much more meaningful about the consumer , perhaps that they see themselves as technologically savvy lovers of design and aesthetics, willing to pay a high premium for apparent quality (and therefore relatively wealthy), keen on music, smart, intelligent.

So, what’s the problem with people using objects of consumption to build an identity? Intrinsically, perhaps nothing, but this trend has to be understood in relation to two realities of contemporary capitalism: first that we are inescapably bombarded with advertising so that claims that certain products are required for certain aspects of identity are familiar to people from early childhood; second that many are excluded from participation in this make-believe world of music players, cars or deodorants with sex appeal. The unemployed and the underemployed are Bauman’s ‘defective consumers’, stoked with the desire for identity-confirming objects by a lifetime of marketing but unable to grasp them by legal means. The impact of consumerism on the poor is just to make their experience of inequality much sharper; their lack of opportunity for income or credit robs them also of the primary social tools for self-expression.

This argument needs to be tempered though, and shouldn’t be reduced to the idea that these riots were simply about consumerist greed. Owen Jones made some useful observations at an RSA talk (audio here) including plenty of quotes from people involved in rioting who were directly complaining about police behaviour or about the lack of opportunity for work. Just because, to my mediated view of things, the riots didn’t look like a well targeted kick at the police, doesn’t mean that that wasn’t exactly what was intended. As Jones points out, we’re actually looking at a series of riots and each one contained many motivations. For some it may have simply been hedonistic bravado, for others free stuff and for others still a battle with police. Whatever the mix of motivations, a broader explanation for episodes of collective willingness to transcend the normal rules are demanded. As in the early 1980s, deep material inequalities and an abiding hopelessness in the face of more restrictions on opportunity and shrinking safeguards for even a basic standard of living seem to be clear precursors, generating anger and resentment on a huge scale.

So, while this casual comparison of riots is suggestive of an explanation for differences in the form of the riots, with this higher emphasis on iLooting an outgrowth of wild consumerism, perhaps the traditional explanation for the existence of the riots in the first place – an austere state exacerbating deep social and economic inequalities – remains intact.

Here’s a useful graph (from the BBC) that shows the fluctuations in the budget deficit since the 1980s, with the deficit expressed as a proportion of GDP. Prudence was Gordon Brown’s watchword as Chancellor and when Labour came into power in ’97 they quickly turned their inherited deficit around. It creeps up again after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but remains less than the 7.5% peak seen in the Major years. The deficit only went wild after 2008. What could possibly have prompted this uncharacteristic change in policy? Oh yes. The government spent $850 billion, or 51.7% of GDP on bailing out the City (world bank data, converted roughly). There is of course no justification for this massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich, which is why ministers so often repeat the lie that the cuts are in some way related to overspending on the welfare state.

Of course, the 3-400,000 marchers in London yesterday know this already, I hope their efforts will stop the lie becoming received ‘wisdom’.

Here is the presentation from my talk at 6 Billion Ways, you can make it full screen and explore by clicking on items and zooming in and out (a scroll wheel is handy). Or use the controls in the bottom right corner to follow a pre-defined path.

If it doesn’t seem to be working here, try the external link to prezi.com.

“In a paean to American productivism, David Potter suggests that ‘advertising [is] an instrument of social control’; it is, he continues, ‘the only institution which we have for instilling new needs, for training people to act as consumers, for alterning men’s values, and thus for hastening their adjustment to potential abundance’.” (Potter, 1954; quoted in Robins & Webster, 1999: 97)

So, here we have a claim that consumerism is not in any way natural, but needs to be inculcated, a belief in the coming abundance of capitalism, and a valorisation of the advertisers’ abilities to change people’s values, all wrapped up in one tidy quote! The ‘New Machine’ certainly has plenty of momentum, but now we’re beginning to realise that there really are limits to growth and market expansion we need some development akin to advertising for altering values and thus hastening their adjustment to potential scarcity – who’s going to take on that job? Could that be what Tesco are up to with the Institute for Sustainable Consumption Institute?

Spending on housing - set to rise faster?

UPDATE: Just been reminded there’s a book on exactly this topic, where Ed Howker and Shiv Malik argue that a Jilted Generation – those born after 1979 – has generally been very hard done by. Looks like another one for the reading pile.

Johnson, Steven. 1997. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way we Create and Communicate. Basic Books.

[NB These are notes to self, they become pretty ungrammatical towards the end!]

This interesting and erudite book starts from the position that the collision of technology and culture is nothing new, but that with the increased pace of technological change the collision has become more obvious. That is, new media have always intersected with cultural change but major innovations have lasted for millenia (cave painting), centuries (printing) or decades (television). As media technology change begins to happen within the span of one lifetime the relationship with culture becomes more obvious. An important point here is that the invention of the technology is itself a creative cultural act; engineers have always been artists and vice versa. Thus, the modern science/art of interface design and its relationship to culture is the topic of the book. Obviously, this is a very technologically led (even determined?) point of view, but well put nonetheless.

The story begins with the 1968 demonstration of the first graphical user interface, complete with mouse and cursor, by Doug Englebart. This was the first creation of an information space on a computer, with the various now familiar spatial metaphors of desktops and trash cans. Paradoxically, it moves the user further away from the data processing (with a whole extra layer of code) while making the user feel in much more direct control. “the tactile immediacy of the illusion made it seem as though the information was now closer at hand, rather than farther away. You felt as though you were doing something directly with your data, rather than telling the computer to do it for you’ (21) No more typing esoteric codes to, say, delete a file, just drag it to the trash can. “That informationscape was both a technological advance and a work of profound creativity. It changed the way we use our machines, but it also changed the way we imagine them. For centuries, Western culture had fantasized about its technology in prosthetic terms, as a supplement to the body… but the bitmapped datasphere he [Englebart] unleashed on the world in 1968 was the first major break from the machine-as-prothesis worldview. For the first time, a machine was imagined not as an attachment to our bodies, but as an environment, a space to be explored. Your could project yourself into this world, lose your bearlings, stumble across things… Not since the Renaissance artisans hit upon the mathematics of painted perspective has technology so dramatically transformed the spatial imagination.” (24-5)

Johnson then shifts to talk about mass media and the unending rise of what he variously calls metamedia, metaforms or the parasite forms. What he means is the culture of celebrity and the enormous amout of programming and magazines that feed off other media. This, he argues, is ‘more than just standard issue postmodernism’ but argues rather that the mass media has become naturalized, a thing in itself rather than something that must speak to the ‘real’. (29) Thus its as natural to comment on the media as it is to comment on the weather. But, the form this commentry takes is of a particular type and performs a particular type. “What unites the diverse strains of this emergent species is a shared belief in the need for information filters – data making sense of other data. The parasite forms thrive in situations twhere the available information greatly exceeds our capacity to process it… They feed on surplus information, on the bewildering sensory overload of the contemporary mediasphere.” (32)

And this is where it all gets interesting, because Johnson contrasts the metamedia forms of today with the narrative structure of the Victorian novel. “Where the novel ushered its readers through the crowds and assembly lines of industrial life, the metaforms process and contextualize the byzantine new reality of information overload… The old-style narratives acculturated their audience to the industral age by building elaborate structures of casue and effect, connecting the increasingly atomized public spaces of the new cities, linking working-class orphans to withered aristocrats to idle speculators to colonial scavan ers. These narrative webs – dense and meticulously interwoven – were a way of restoring a sense of connection, of unity, to a culture that had transformed itself utterly in the space of fifty years. The novel was a response to the question: “What connects all these bewildering new social realities?” And that answer was phrased in the form of a story. The parasite forms, on the other hand, are a response to the question: “What does all this information mean? Which sources are the most reliable ones? How does this information relate to my own particular worldview?” The response arrives as a kind of hybrid, a mix of metaphor, footnote, translation and parody. It is a measure of the newness of the form that we lack a single word to describe it.” (33) Johnson, of course, and emphatically, draws the line between high culture and low – “Anyone who thinks MTV is the Shakespeare of our time would probably do well to have the cable cut off for a few months , just to get some perspective on it all” (34) and argues that the poor quality of the metaforms results from the fact that “they are taking on a symbolic task that exceeds the capacity of their medium.” He slips into a cultural criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the character of Satan, to argue that when a new form comes about, the old forms strain to adapt themselves to the new, “a glimpse of the future shrouded in the worn, restrictive garments of the past, like a Cubist body rigged together with corsets and lace. They are the ghosts of technologies to come.” (34) Or, alternatively – “at transition points, some messages may evolve faster than their medium. And in doing so, they anticipate another medium, one that is still in embryo” (35) The point of all this, is that the low culture metaforms on the TV don’t work well, because they are essentially trying to do something that is suited for the digital world, and it is through an exploration of ‘interface culture’ – operating in a zone between medium and message, and between producer and consumer – that we can see what the metaform is becoming.

The following chapters dig into the details of various technological features, including their history as well as their relationship to culture:

- the desktop as a metaphor, bringing in ideas about the importance of creating space and how interface designers sometimes overplay the metaphor, accidentally bringing in the limitations of the real desktop. The spatial stuff brings in discussion of the computer as a technology that brings people together through the internet. But design of spaces affects the degree to which community is built. Text remaining the most useful medium of community building.

- Interesting new wrinkle in multiplayer shoot ‘em up game, Quake, where players can design their own spaces to wage battles. These are then exchanged and bartered so that exchange starts to use space as the content, not the context, of exchange.

- windows the point being that you can multitask, by having many applications running and flicking between windows to move to different tasks. (elsewhere Turkle (Life on the Screen, 1997) talks about the way some early internet users took on many identities in MUDDs and flicked repeatedly between them, finding no difficulty in slipping between rather diverse made up identities). The windows also relate to our method of filing and again, text is shown to be important since our process of finding files is dependent on the way we’ve categorised (rather than, say, making use of our visual memories). Talking about potential improvements and innovations leads him to frames on websites, whereby you can show content from somebody else’s site. There is some interesting material on legal battles around news aggregator sites that sold advertising space alongside frames of ‘stolen’ content from major news corporations. “Over the next decade, this stiching together of different news and opinion sources will slowly become a type of journalism in its own right, a new form of reporting that synthesizes and digests the great mass of information disseminated online every day.” (104). There m ght be something relevant here about information overload, and the ‘information cocoon’.

- links weakness of the ‘surfing’ metaphor (given that it is supposed to be a comparison to channel surfing) highlights importance of hyperlinks that you use on the web to switch between resources. The hyperlinks are, for Johnson as many others, the key feature of the web. But, he points out that no major innovations in web scripting have touched the functions of hyperlinks. Yet, the basic technology has been used in multiple ways. Creation of hypertext was always meant to revolutionise story-telling, leading to nonlinear narrative where the reader can jump around in the larger text to choose their own pathway. However, its more creatively and usefully used at the level of syntax, more like the way we use adjectives and adverbs. Rather than explain all the nuances of a point you’re making you can just point to where that is done elsewhere, leading to denser prose.

- text starts with word processing, and the way the user interface shifts the way we actually write (and how it was only the desktop metaphor that brought about on screen writing, instead of transcription). Long digression about tendency to misunderstand new technologies. Note on how ingrained text is with icon based interface. Then he gets onto the interesting stuff which is about the potential for high level processing of the textual content of documents in order to say something about their content, style and so on. Great story of how it was worked out which parts Shakespeare played in his plays, by noting the effect of the memorized vocabulary of the part played on the play he was writing at the same time. Recognition of patterns in texts particularly useful for comparing different works and suggesting similarities and differences, so you get the potential for ‘find docs like this’ commands for finding and organising files, and saving search criteria permanently as ‘view’ folders, whose content changes as documents are created, deleted and modified.

- agents working against the trend of the user interface – which made the user smarter and gave them more direct feeling manipulation of their information – agents instead make manipulation less direct, and makes the computer smarter. Three types – personal (sits on your harddrive doing routine tasks for you); travelling (goes over the net coming back when there’s info to report); social (communicates with other agents). Technical differences in agent communication requiring and enabling ‘push’ media rather than ‘pull’ media, which means more agents guessing your info needs and fulfilling them before you’ve specifically asked. Gets onto Firefly programme for matching musical tastes using data of lots of other users (they liked x and y, you like x, you might like y), pattern matching again.

- infinity imagined summing up with the claim that the biggest innovation of the digital age is ‘information space’ created through interface design, and that that innovation will have significant effects on art forms, in fact, he describes interface design as if it is to be the dominant art form of the coming period. Difficult to perceive it this way because we don’t yet have a relevant language to describe it in “For the most part, our evaluative criteria reduce to the bottomdollar question: is it easy to use or not?… Its not that our interfaces are lacking in imaginative depth or complexity; its just that we don’t have the critical vocabulary to deal with them in anything but the most rudimentary forms” (217) So, there are some key oppositions/conflicts to be worked out through improvements in interface design that will have profound impacts: – spatial depth vs psychological depth – society vs the individual – mainstream vs avant-garde – one interface or many – metaphor vs simulation – fragmentation vs synthesis