Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utcsstat.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utcsrgv!utcsstat!laura
From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.works
Subject: Re: ICONS: Passing Fad or New Found Wisdom?
Message-ID: <715@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 26-Jun-83 02:08:57 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.715
Posted: Sun Jun 26 02:08:57 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Jun-83 04:03:06 EDT
References: <2434@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 75

I am posting this because I dont know how to reach you (Vogehren@OFFICE-12).
If you want to send mail to me, please find out how mail from the
usenet is supposed to be addressed so that it will get to you rather
than come back to me with a nasty message about "attempted break-in
of ARPA security". I have had rotten luck lately with mail, and
if anyone is keeping track I have probably already been labelled as
"dangerous foreign spy with multiple attempts to crack security on
multiple machines" -- and all I want to do is *TALK* to five different
people on the Arpa-net.

Tonight I am in a cynical mood; tomorrow everything may look rosier
--- but i doubt it. The problem with "cute" things is that they
catch on among the illiterate and/or stupid users. If computers
are going out to the masses then I think we are stuck with "cute".
There are a lot of people who cant read; there are even more who
dont want to read. I read that a 1975 survey reported that only
19% of Americans reported reading even *one* non-work related
book a year. If you forget the people whose one book was the
novelisation of the movie hit of the year or a Harlequin romance
you are left with the staggering figure that 9% of the population
of the USA is buying all the books. These figures did not include
magazines or school textbooks, but nonetheless the very magnitude
of the problem is enough to make your blood run cold.

Canada is no better, I am sure. My mother teaches grade 8 and
the single worst thing she can say to her class is "Today we
are going to spend the next 2 hours reading." For the past five
years she has kept a record, and to date she has found only
three or four students who actually admitted to READING for
PLEASURE.

I dont know what one can do about this. When I recognise how
much of everything I do is based on things that I have read I
begin to conclude that anyone who doesnt read just isnt quite
human. Then I remember that it is I who is in the minority; it
is I who is not quite human.

Be that as it may, the conclusion that can be drawn is that people
who do not read do not apreciate "cleanness, conciseness and elegance in
ideas".  Most ideas are found in books -- unless you read or travel
you are imprisoned with the local ideas of your area with only the 
television or the movie theater to bring you other ideas. Most of
tv is dreck, and most watchers of tv arent watching the documentaries
on PBS. TV and movies are both visual media also, and do little or
nothing to present abstract ideas. TV and movies both exploit the
themes of adventure and so-called "human interest" -- it is 
impossible to show on a screen the precise mental glow you get when
your compiler starts generating correct code, or you understand some
of the significance of E=mc**2. You can present the information and
hope that the lights go on in somebody's head, but you cannot do it
for him. How much easier it is to show a shark eating a swimmer...

But what, you may be asking, has this to do with ICONS? Everything.
If you want to sell to the functional illiterates then you are
going to have to be understood by them. I go down to the local
shopping centre and see that most people have difficulty with the
simplest menu-driven "show me where the shoe stores are" type of
computer aid. The have trouble understanding simple commands
like "push the panel beside the type of store you want". What
do they like? The pictures. The silly sleezy drawings that crunch
the CPU so much to draw that those of us who know what we are doing
wish there was some way the touch-panels had "touch-ahead" because
we dont need a picture of a book to know that we want a book store,
and we could do without the wait for the drawing of the various pictures.

ICONS, I am afraid, are here to stay -- at least in devices that
will be made available to John Q. Public. They have to be.
Old JQ thhks that E.T. is a much better movie than "Das Boot".
Cute friendly monsters are "in" now, but "cute" is always in.
Old JQ needs picures because JQ doesnt read -- and any manufacturer
interested in selling to the public understands this and will
continue to sell "cute".

Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura