The Interface is the Message

TED Talks

Aaron Koblin: Artfully visualizing our humanity

Summary:
Aaron Koblin's talk on TED Talks was about how technology can make us more human. He talked about how people can be connected together through technology, and they can actually express themselves through interface technology. He showed several projects that he was working on, using primarily sites such as the Mechanical Turk. In each of these projects, he had people do a simple task- such as drawing a picture, and every picture drawn would be put together to make a piece of art. In some cases the people knew the context of why they were doing a particular task, in others no context was given at all.

"19th Century culture was defined by the novel, 20th century culture by cinema, the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface."

This was a tweet that was shared by Aaron Koblin at the beginning of his talk. It was interesting because it really summarized everything he was going to talk about. It was also very interesting because the quote itself was a tweet- it was a product of interface itself.

"The interface is the message."

This was the phrase that Koblin ended on. It was very interesting because it was a play on the "medium is the message", this time he was saying that the specific type of interface had a message of its own.

The Mechanical Turk.

This was a site that Koblin talked about quite a bit. He used it to get people to do a specific task- without giving them any context for that task. It was a site created by Google, and it was named after the story of the amazing chess machine that wasn't actually a machine- just a legless man playing chess.

Questions:

Interface

I didn't exactly know what he meant by interface- I had a vague idea, but was still a little confused.

Sheep.

How did the sheep portray anything about humanity being increased by technology, was it the individuality?

Koblin, Aaron. Artfully Visualizing Our Humanity. Making Sense of Too Much Data. TED. 4/7/13. Web. http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data.html.