Marc Bousquet // Murray, Affordances of the Digital MediumMedia Studies 208, Emory University

Digital Media and Culture

o Why is Murray insisting on “the digital” as a singular medium, rather than the plural, media?

o How does the concept of “interaction design” position creativity in “the digital medium”?

o The designer designs procedurally, employing the computer’s “ability to represent and execute conditional behaviors”

o Programmers abstract and generalize to manage complexity. Are there consequences to this feature?

o What are “legacy media”? Is linearity a common characteristic of them? How have different media either embraced linearity or modified it?

o Do you think the differences between mechanical and digital reproduction are important?

o Simulations are attempts to represent complex natural or social systems, which have many independent actors

o Coding now “more like the ecology of a pond than the command structure of an army”

o Human-machine interaction as a sense of participation, scripted by programmers on both sides

o Is scripted interaction a feature only of computing? o Can you distinguish between “interaction” and

“participation”?

o Is all social interaction “participatory”? Is “communication” intrinsically participatory or even dialogic?

o What are some of the social, political and economic consequences of computer-mediated communication?

o Murray describes the computer’s participatory affordance as a risk of fraud, surveillance identity theft and intellectual property crime. Is this “mental model” at odds with other models you have for computer-mediated interaction?

o What happens when humans use the computer in ways other than the designers intended?

o How can ethnographic research improve design?

o Computing affords encyclopedia on a previously unimaginable scale, but also with unprecedented potential for access

o Prior mediations of the encyclopedic impulse are retained in computer interaction design

o What are some of the challenges for managing all of these digital artifacts?

o How do decisions regarding taxonomy, granularity, segmentation affect accessibility?

o How does spatialization improve the user interface? What was the interface like before WIMP?

o What does the term “cyberspace” mean to you?o How would you go about paper testing a game idea?