Reading Response 2 - Jackson Mote

The assigned reading Computers as Theatre by Brenda Laurel begins with the author describing a computer game created in 1962 called Space War. The word “interface” is defined lightly and the importance of a human’s involvement with the interface is highlighted. The author uses a very interesting example to represent this; the sound of a tree falling in the woods with no one there to hear it. Laurel then continues on to describe the evolution of the interface, as we know it. She writes briefly on some of the computer concepts that we read about in the first reading assignment such as the Teletype and batch processing. I particularly enjoyed the graphical representations of the human, interface and computer. The thought that humans and computers are both thinking highly beyond what is occurring in the present shows the level of complexity between human and machine. The human must understand how to manipulate the computer far beyond what is visually being presented to them. We must understand the available options and file structure to maximize our productivity during usage. The Finzer and Fitzer quote from 1984 illustrates this point highly well about understanding vocabulary and syntax. The ideals of that excerpt can be applied to the human’s use of a computer. The more freeform figure, 1.8, confused me a bit. What kind of objects are the “other shapes” that we see represented in this “virtual environment”? I was not able to conclude on the answer to this question. However, I theorized that these alternate shapes could be varying file types and application, all serving different purposes in the same environment. Overall, Laurel article was a bit stagnant at times. I found that it had an overall reliance on complicated and heavy worded metaphors. The nature of these metaphors is deeply rooted in the theatre aspect of this article. It was interesting to read an article that related human computation to computer processes.