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CHAPTER 3
USER-SCREEN (AGENT-SCENE)
Introduction: Circumference, and Screen as Scene
For Burke, scene is the overall “staging arena” or setting of an act or of a symbolic action: “the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred; . . . when or where it was done” (Burke, GM, p. xv). As a term of the pentad, “scene” encompasses such elements as place, time, cultural environment, social class, political power structures, filial ties, personal background, and so on. Scene is not just physical environment, but the symbolic concepts and understandings that precede, inhere in, and surround an act. In A Grammar of Motives Burke lays the foundations for the scene-agent ratio, or that rationale which stems from examining the influences and causal connections between and among the material world, its agents, and their actions. Especially as he works through ontological and teleological implications of Scene in Spinoza and in Darwin, it is easy to see why sociologists especially have found this term of the pentad both useful and frustrating. In “The Bridge Over Separated Lands” Joseph Gusfield (1989) works carefully to show the importance of the idea of “circumference” or scope of scene as a factor in sociological critique:
The characteristic method of sociology has been to derive action from context; to find in classes, status groups, or institutions the ground for human behavior, and in the processes (or forces) of historical change the motor of social dynamics. … We become members of a class, of an ethnic group, or of a family as we have names for them, and we identify ourselves within them. (p. 46)
The range or circumference of scene is determined by the critic. Circumscribing scene as “the Universe” opens out a field of grand, sweeping, usually philosophical (teleological, or even theological) scope. Burke, in almost a frenzy of dramatistic enthusiasm, flings us between narrow and broad visions of scene, now analyzing Spinozistic implications of a world or a universe in which “God is in Nature,” and next drawing our attention to implications of “feudal” materialism in Darwin (we are but what our forebears were: biological, predetermined matter-in-motion). One minute Burke encourages us to hold in our heads the scenic implications of a universe both with and without a god, and the next minute forcibly pushes us to one small spot, a miniature scene, to consider the adaptive implications of variation in the outer features of two daisies growing side-by-side (GM 146-158).
In a dramatism of internetworked symbolic action, agency and scene overlap and interlace as much as any other pair of terms in the pentad. For in addition to the frequent and ongoing “shifts of focus” that take users’ concentration sometimes in an almost violent mental movement from one electronic symbolic act to the next (we might say from one writing/computing task to the next), the computer also is a site of the incessant gaze, much like television, where ordinary “real-time” can be suspended, a site capable of producing 3-dimensional-style animated action games, messages from strangers and loved ones, detailed visual (still or moving) images, and high-fidelity sounds, in addition to work-related materials, such as appointment calendars, spread sheets, requests for information or job-completion, and various corporate documents. Because such a vast array of activities and tasks are located visually on the same screen, the lines between them, once clearly, physically separated by different technological artifacts – telephones, ledger books, stationery, cameras, videocassette tapes, stereo components, and automobiles – are now hopelessly blurred. Images of loved ones, brilliantly animated adventure games, real-time chatter with friends, sales pitches, work-related messages and tasks, all seem to emanate from one, glowing, pixellated source. Considering the computer monitor screen as dramatistic “scene” both narrows and does not narrow the “circumference” of the agent-scene site of human-computer interaction, or of internetworked symbolic action. For all the screen measures 17”, its scope and range are limited only by the power and size of the internet itself, and by the number and type of computer application programs that a given machine to which it is connected is capable of running.
Social psychologist Sherry Turkle locates one kind of computer-interface conceptualization as a kind of Life on the Screen in which internetworked users – agents – take on roles or personae, and live alternate, “virtual” realities, each acting as an agent, while simultaneously the others comprise, as a kind of electronic Bakhtinian polyphony of textual “voices,” a kind of symbolistic scene. I would like to return later to this scenic quality of the agent-agent site of human-computer(-human) interaction.
Another element of the user-screen site of interaction is described by Kathleen Welch (1999) in a provocative commentary, wherein she argues that like television screens, the computer monitor is a Koinos Topos in which users fall into the “Narcotizing Effect of the Computer Screen” (p. 183). Welch’s concern is that the computer screen will become another “drug” – pharmaka – in the growing American arsenal of mind-numbing task avoidance pastimes. But she argues for an Ongian approach to conceptualizing the features she observes on the interactive internet site she uses as a case study. While she does see some crossover of the “narcotizing” effects of the “televisual gaze,” Welch directs our attention to the correspondences among various elements of the web site and nine features of orality (ostensibly, “orality” precedes, and is therefore inferior to, “literacy” or abstraction). While unenthusiastically supporting Ong’s “privileging” of the abstract, Welch makes some prophetic calls for the re-emergence of the classical training of a “citizen student,” who shares with her ancient predecessors a need to develop the skills of Oration. This “addictive televisual gaze” observed by Welch and others is a logical continuation of old screen-interaction habits. Five decades of passive, experiential, perhaps even stupefying televisual consumption cannot be expected to “wear off” quickly, if ever. Where the screen is entirely out of the control of the gazer, there is no real “interaction” at all, but only ingestion. In order to gain a dramatistic perspective, I will move in closer, and narrow the “circumference,” of the critical gaze.
Where the circumference – or focus – narrows is within the particular “computing activities” themselves, and I will argue, in the creative and technical abilities of the designers and coders who create the applications, including the graphical user interfaces with which the human user must interact. Each program emanates from, or moves the user to initiate, a different screen “environment.” Each program application used for particular tasks and activities must include a component for user input and information display, known as the application interface. Each interface has the potential to become a new, visual and functional scene within the computer terminal screen. And with each interface, users are presented with another visual and conceptual construction of “workspace” or “computing environment.” In the last decade of the 20th Century, the most innovative development in the site of computer-human interface has been the Graphical User Interface (GUI: pronounced “gooey”). As Johndan Johnson-Eilola (1998) explains:
GUIs bring to the surface instructions on how to operate the computer, giving users two- or even three-dimensional visual cues; on older, command-line systems such as MS-DOS and BSD UNIX, users were required to memorise [sic] complex verbal commands to type, one letter at a time, into the command line of the interface. In other words, users of graphical interfaces operate in the visual present while users of command-line interfaces operate serially after the long-term learning of hidden system logics. (197)
Dramatistically, the development of the GUI has opened the possibility of a magnificently huge range of possibilities for scenic variety and creativity. What is, and what is not displayed for instant availability and access, what functionalities are clearly marked by symbol or icon, what capabilities are present – all of these and more can be “floated” to the surface, presented for easy selection and use. The possibilities, one would think, are endless. There are two very large, very important things standing in the way of a massive explosion of creativity and a revolutionary emergence of wildly creative new applications and interfaces, new sites for internetworked symbolic action.
The first impediment to any kind of creative explosion is the computer industry itself, particularly the standards imposed (industry insiders would say “required” or “needed”) by operating systems manufacturers on interface and applications designers. Futurist predictions by such industry experts as Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems) and Jef Raskin (co-originator of the Macintosh project) usually look forward to a time not too far off when computer technology development will erupt into larger and better choices of computer technologies, including exponential growth among the possible choices of interface designs and even customization. In the meantime, computer program application and interface design remains entombed within the constrictions of ISO standards. The second impediment, and a possible reason these standards are fast becoming a frustration, almost an insult to newer generations of designers, is that they emanate from what Burke would call a “Representative Anecdote” of 20th Century industrial models of design and production. With the sole exception of computer games – and in economic terms this multi-trillion-dollar industry is no a small exception at all – computer applications marketed to the public and to most businesses as tools for the organization and production of symbolic action, are designed according to the same visual principles, the same industry standards, enslaved to one or two popular operating systems, resulting in a widespread unity of form that has created both the heaven and hell (reminiscent of Burke’s “Helhaven”) of the ubiquitous “windows” computer screen environment (see figure 1). The heaven is a consistent “look and feel,” the sense that one is moving simply from one capability to another within the same environment. And for some users unaccustomed or resistant to “industrial” terminologies and control-panel visual elements, that is also the Hell.
figure 1 microsoft standards
Extension of the Burkean System:
Madsen’s Methodology for the Representative Anecdote
In choosing the Burkean method of “representative anecdote” as a critical tool for commentary on graphical user interfaces used for internetworked symbolic action, I rely heavily upon Arnie Madsen’s (1993) system of requirements for using the anecdotal approach to rhetorical analysis. Madsen limits discussion to the strict analysis of texts (in specific, he analyzes a set of speeches by President George Bush), and so in a sense I will be extending one more layer beyond Madsen’s “Extension” of the Burkean system, by treating the graphical user interface itself as “text.” My purpose is not epideictic; I do not wish to bemoan or to praise the current standards of interface design. Nor is it judicial, to pronounce as good or bad the development of these design standards and the products that employ them. In choosing to bring close critical analysis first to the “physical” or visual graphical interface features, before turning to the psychological, or virtual, “place-ness” of the human-computer agent-scene site of interaction, I propose only that by extending Burkean frames of perceiving and thinking about the environmental issues surrounding internetworked symbolic action, we can find ways into participating, into entering the “next generation” of software design, of finding our own voice, should we choose to speak, in the process of conceptualizing and creating new screens, and new electronic “scenes.”
Madsen’s carefully constructed guidelines for employing the anecdotal approach to rhetorical analysis consists of six requirements: 1) The anecdote must be synecdochic – truly representative of the primary subject; 2) the anecdote must have a fixed circumference; 3) it must contain an act within a larger body of acts and/or a form appearing throughout a sample; 4) it must be able to serve as a precept to guide rhetors and critics; 5) it must be able to function as a corrective to the critic’s own analysis; and 6) the representative anecdote must provide a means for evaluating itself, over time. Against these guidelines for constructing a representative anecdote, we can test one of our own.
On the subject of the computer interface, the visual scene with which users must interact, I propose that a growing problem that both creative and passive computer users will sooner or later have to grapple with, is the insinuation of what I call the “anecdote of 20th Century industrial models and methods of production.”
First, according to Madsen, the representative anecdote must be truly representative in the Burkean sense, in that it “provides a synecdochal analysis of a text, rather than a metonymic reduction of the text” (225). The industrial model satisfies this requirement, for the development of program applications and user interfaces is not only synecdochic in a symbolic sense, often referred to as “the software industry,” but is truly in a literal sense a part of the entire, economic project of “industry” in the large sense, on a national and on a global basis. Software, albeit a symbol-system and electronic-information system, is still a commodity, a product, a quantifiable (if not entirely tangible) product. While software design may on some levels, and in some circles be considered a craft, even an art, it is still for the most part a commercial art, and a very real part of American industry.
Second, Madsen observes that “any representative anecdote has a fixed circumference” – we need not insist that a representative anecdote which applies to a “thing contained” necessarily expand to encompass the “container” as well. Thus, while the industrial method of production goes deep and wide as a descriptor of the principles and features of software interfaces available for internetworked symbolic action – for written discourse and dialogic interchange on the internet – the same industrial anecdote does not serve handily in critical analysis of computer games. Even though these games are produced by the “game industry,” or even the “toy industry,” the standards (or lack thereof) ruling interfaces and applications design principles emanate from a different cultural, social, and commercial “space.” We might even align them with what has come to be known ironically (oxymoronically) as the “entertainment industry.” The industrial anecdote works as long as we maintain the anecdote as representative of interfaces common to applications which in some way elicit “work” from users, interfaces that that evoke what Donald Norman (1993) refers to as “reflective cognition” – thought processes which require,