💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20190109 captured on 2022-01-08 at 13:46:42.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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When you log into a terminal, you enter the darkness. It's an entirely different experience than surfing the web using a graphical browser. The web is bright. It's flashy. It's full of banners, images, and buttons vying for your attention. It demands no complex thought. You point. You click. You point and click again. And again. And again. You're served content. There are few expectations of you. That's the master pattern of the web. You're a consumer -- of content, of commodities, of experience. You select from a limited range of choices and fit into them. If you produce, you generally do so within prescribed limits, and in an environment that places a great deal of emphasis on appearances, and your role as a consumer, rather than on thought and insight. The terminal is a different environment with a different set of demand characteristics. The sensory overload disappears. The darkness draws you in. It's a contemplative environment. There are no distractions. You think. At the terminal, you're required to make decisions. Where do I want to go next? What do I want to do? No choices are provided. You must dig into your memory and recall the command to undertake the next task, a task of your choosing, an impulse that comes from within. And then you act. You create. Maybe it's a config file, a text document, or a gophermap. If you consume, you consume text. You consume ideas rather than images (for the most part). In the Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan argued that the advent of mechanized printing changed individuals and their societies. Reading and composing written texts trained people to follow chains of logic. The very act of reading, regardless of what they read, transformed them: "'It is certain,' wrote the symbolist Edgar Allan Poe, 'that the mere act of inditing [composing] tends in a great degree to the logicalization of thought.' Lineal, alphabetic inditing made possible the sudden invention of 'grammars' of thought and science by the Greeks."[1] McLuhan also wrote that mass-produced texts resulted in the creation of 'authors' and 'publics' which could not have existed prior to the advent of widely-circulated printed texts. He contended that printing led to communities conscious of their own collective existence, to increased public debate, and to nationalism. So not only individuals, but entire peoples were changed as a result of the typographical revolution. My point here is, as McLuhan famously contended, that the medium is as important as the message. The form is as important as the content. When you choose the terminal -- when you enter the unix-verse rather than the web (a very odd choice in these times, by the way, and you are all peculiar people) you undoubtedly do so because you feel the impact that the terminal has on the way you think. The darkness matters. The textual interface matters. The environment permits quiet contemplation. It begs you to think. It calls on you to create. It makes you a different person. Likewise, the communities that emerge in a pubnix are marked by special characteristics that rarely exist on the web. [1] M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Signet, 1962), 33.