Interface and Virtuality

‘Virtuality’ is a word with an etymology so promiscuous as to be downright obscene. The rivalling explanations for the original reason for the word’s current usage with reference to new technology are plentiful and can be disorienting. What might be even more surprising, however, is that the historically defining introduction of the term into computer studies is rarely mentioned, much less examined in detail.

As far as I can tell, the systematic use of the term to refer to realities or rivals to reality created by digital media hails from Ted Nelson, who is perhaps more famous for coining the terms ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypermedia’. (By the way, both terms are practically co-emergent and go back to 1963; remember this when you hear people in media studies claiming that they are ‘extending’ an established concept of ‘hypertext’ to cover ‘all hypermedia’, as if coping with a new development of multimedia computing.)

Nelson conceives of virtuality as a term that is useful to describe a feature of software, but its usefulness does not come about because it is specific to software; on the contrary. ‘Virtuality’ is, for Nelson, a term that rivals the term ‘interface’; the latter is a misunderstanding in most cases precisely because it acts as if software develops a new quality previously unheard of, whereas virtuality is something that most things have. It is, Nelson says,

the seeming of a thing, anything. Most things have both a reality (nuts and bolts) and a virtuality (conceptual structure and feel). A building and a car have a physical reality and a virtuality– a conceptual structure and feel. The only thing that doesn’t have a virtuality is something you’re not supposed to know about or feel – like a fishhook (till it’s too late).

Obviously, Nelson’s use of the term did not win out. But I think that his perspective is immensely valuable. Reminding ourselves of this use of ‘virtuality’ immediately draws attention to two pertinent aspects of any interaction with a computer: One, it points out that all interface is about forming the functions of the software as its seeming, as its doxa, if you will, comparable to the seeming of real things. And second, perhaps more importantly, it immediately poses the question of what is hidden by refering to that virtuality as an interface instead. In Nelson’s words:

We don’t usually design software interfaces, we design software virtuality. The only time you design a software “interface” is when a program already exists with very specific functions, and you are just deciding how that function is to be shown to the user. But if you are designing or deciding that function – which is more usually the case – then you are designing its conceptual structure and feel, or its virtuality.

Interface thinking, then, naturalizes the facts of the program in the very act of distancing the user from them. Virtuality thinking, on the other hand, assumes that what a software does is or should be what it presents and how it represents its functions — should actually be its presentation, not represented in its presentation. (Yes, I am fastening onto a semiotic reformulation of the problem. That’s what I am here for.)

In stark contrast to Nelson’s concepts, we use the word ‘interface’ all the time to refer to the seeming of software, and we use the word ‘virtuality’ in a more emphatic sense, to describe something that usual objects of the world do not have, something offered instead of their usual realness. So perhaps the distancing effect of interface thinking is also what distances, in our imagination, virtual realities from immediate seeming. If so, the common fantasy of a virtual reality to rival reality is very much dependent on interface thinking; it redoubles virtuality into one half on this side of the interface, the unnamed virtuality of nuts and bolts and cars and houses and discovered fishhooks; and another virtuality beyond the interface that is above all defined by being a world beyond.

So much for theory, at least for now. Comments, criticism, pointers are very welcome. Next up in virtuality week: Three concrete examples.