USB Flash Drive as Interface
This is a portion of my seminar paper (not quite done).
–Will
“I open the cupboard in my den and take out my PowerPod, the white lead that I use to connect the iPod with the G4. The connection is made, and the iPod begins uploading the new additions to the library, a further 154 songs. A few minutes later the exercise is completed, and my iPod is full–prone but proud. The iPod lies on the desk in front of me, looking a little like a speaker box. It is white, oblong, ergonomic, with perfectly rounded corners and a pale blue two-inch LCD window that lights up superbrightly for exactly two seconds when I touch one of its buttons (I have told it to do this and it does what it’s told).”
—Dylan Jones, iPod, Therefore I am
“Executive Attaché is a multi function USB 2.0 flash drive designed with the business executive in mind. Elegant styling of a fine writing instrument wrapped around state-of-the-art USB flash drive technology makes Executive Attaché the perfect device for the technology minded executive. Working on a presentation and need to take it with you? Simply copy the file onto Executive Attaché, put it in your pocket or briefcase and go. To access your data, simply plug Executive Attaché into virtually any PC or MAC — without the need for bulky cables or adapters. Access your files. Anytime. Anywhere.”
—From the PNY Technologies web site
The interface according to Lev Manovich, from his chapter “The Interface” in The Language of New Media, is a sphere that exists between humanity, computer, and culture. He argues that “we are no longer interfacing to a computer but to a culture encoded in digital form” (70). This argument is contrary to the previous notion of interface as a means of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): where the computer was considered to be a tool for use instead of a “means to store, distribute, and access all media”: a “universal media machine” (69).
Manovich’s cultural interface theory pays particular attention to the graphic user interface, pointing to its role as text, cinema, and human-computer mediator (71). But Manovich’s focus on the narrative of the screen causes him to miss an opportunity to dive into the narrative of the device: What is the physical design of the computer and its various peripheries trying to communicate to the user? How does a user interact with a computer-based device and how does this relationship differ from the user’s relationship with the graphic user interface?
The Universal Serial Bus (USB) Flash Memory Drive—also known as a Flash drive, thumb drive, or key drive—is a device that allows a user to store, transport, and transfer files from one computer to the next. The USB Flash drive is a member of a genre of personal media devices. Other examples include the Apple iPod, the Sony Walkman, the cellular phone, the floppy disk, even the humble notepad and pen. Although the USB Flash drive and other personal media devices occupies physical space rather than cyberspace, the device still contains an understandable user interface and can be analyzed from an interface design perspective in mind—despite the current trend to think of the user interface being solely in the domain of the graphical user interface.
Lev Manovich would most likely categorize personal media devices as being outside the boundaries of interface theory and more inside the boundaries of consumer theory or some other brand of cultural theory outside of the interface. He is not alone in his focus of the interface as an internal, abstract mechanism rather than an external, physical one. Steven Johnson, author of Interface Culture, introduces his thesis by first defining all interfaces as “software” (4). In his discussion of the interface as The Desktop, Windows, Links, Texts, and Agents, he mentions that computer hardware only as it inhibits the capabilities of the graphic user interface:
“Because the computer was by definition so malleable, capable of shape-shifting from one visual metaphor to another, it was theoretically possible for the interface to look like practically anything: a house, a factory, a movie, a diary. But the limitations of seventies technology—minuscule storage devices, sluggish microprocessors, grainy monitors—meant that flights of fancy would quickly bump up against the ceiling of hardware shortcomings.” (45)
Manovich’s and Johnson’s attention is centered on the presentation and semiotics of the internal cyberspace: the aesthetics of web design, the textual space afforded by the screen, and the dynamics of computer cinema. They feel that this arena is both the primary level of user interaction with the machine, but also, as Manovich puts it, liberates media from traditional physical storage into the realm of access, navigation, and manipulation (73). This belief that physical storage is no longer a concern of media theory is the cornerstone of Manovich’s flight away from HCI principles and Johnson’s belief that hardware provides only limitations to interface design.
A disregard for hardware and storage technology is understandable. For years, the graphic user interface has been the mechanism that we use to compare computers to all other forms of media, particularly print media, as Johanna Drucker mentions in “Graphesis: Visual knowledge production and representation”:
“A language of usability, rather than compositional form, has appeared in parallel with the growth of graphical user interfaces and the realization that their design principles give the lie to the static nature of print artifacts. Books and graphics, after all, are interfaces through which readers interact with a document to produce a text.” (Drucker, 25)
The computer screen presents text and imagery in new ways and allows user manipulation and dynamic representation of media artifacts; it is, as the saying goes, “where the action is.” When we discuss how the computer is forcing us to examine how we write and how we think about text, we focus in on word processors and how the word processor interface aids us, annoys us, or frightens us as we type. Less focus is paid on the physical keys on the keyboard and the buttons of the mouse as is the text that is appearing on the screen. For example, in his essay “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter,” Matthew Fuller chronicles the effects of Microsoft Word on how text is created. He mentions the keyboard and the mouse only twice, in passing, focusing the rest of his time writing about the graphic user interface and how it affects the writer:
“Word’s graphic user interface is not simply one unremitting grey avalanche. The essential dilemma of a computer display is that ‘at every screen are two powerful information-processing capabilities, human and computer.’” (151)
While this reaction to the graphic user interface as being the “official” interface of the computer is a natural consequence of the immediacy of the screen, the USB Flash drive and other personal media devices clearly do have an interface. But that interface is, again, physical: taking the drive out of your pocket, taking off the protective cover, and inserting the drive into the computer. Only after that sequence of very real events can the user successfully interact with the Flash drive as part of her computer’s graphic user interface (and even then she is pressing on keys and moving the mouse about the table).
Personal media devices such as the Flash drive, however, either contain a screen or are required to be inputted into a computer that will have a screen; the graphic user interface reasserts its primacy and dominance over electronic data manipulation. Devices, keyboards, and control pads cannot allow the user to directly manipulate data in any meaningful or understandable way; there has to be a translator or mediator to convert the language of the machine into the language of the user (Johnson, 4). From there, the user may enter into a separate realm she is free to create her information through the computer, translating that creation into an iconic file, and at last creating the electronic bits and bytes that physically hold that file.
Once we are passed the Real effort of physical interaction, we are lead to the Symbolic effort of the graphic user, finally creating the Imagined cyberspace where the mental processes of the user and the electronic processes of the computer communicate in some metaphysical space inside the user’s mind—only to go pack through the chain in reverse to create the data. So while the interface does include more than the graphic user interface, that portion of the interface is essential. Even the Flash drive, one of the few personal media devices that does not contain any sort of screen of its own (yet) still has an LED light to signal when the memory chip is being written to and when it is being read. We cannot get away from screens: they are everywhere.
Works Consulted
- Drucker, Johanna. “Graphesis: Visual knowledge production and representation.”
- “Executive Attache.” PNY Technologies. 2005. PNY Technologies. 1 June 2005.
- Fuller, Matthew. “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter.” Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn: Automedia. 2003.
- Guillory, James. “The Memo and Modernity.” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 108-132.
- Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. New York: Harper, 1997.
- Jones, Dylan. iPod, Therefore I am. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005.
- Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive.” TEXT Technology 2 (2004): 91-125.
- Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2001.
May 8th, 2006 at 9:26 pm
Will,
This is a great project, one which I’m obviously very sympathetic to. Of course here, though, you’re really only setting up your pins at the far end of the alley. I want to see what kind of pitch you have to throw (to mix metaphors and projectiles). The main paradox I’ve been wrestling with in my own work is that even as the hard drive dissolves into the immaterialities of terabyte-scale storage (which will be infinite for many user’s purposes) devices like Flash sticks and iPods restore storage to the visible, tactile world of consumer accessories. So how do we articulate a theory of storage that can account for both outcomes simultaneously?
I love your point about the LED lights on the sticks. That’s a good bit of “machine reading.” Has anyone done any research (in the consumer sphere) on how people are actually using their Flash devices?