Twitter and Interface Culture

While reading the new issue of TIME (15 June 2009), I was struck by Steven Johnson's article "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live" and his description of Twitter as providing users with a "terrible first impression" but also having "unsuspected depth" and being "strangely satisfying." All of these comments I've heard uttered from first-time Twitterers. He also points out that "the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of."

With no personal knowledge of his earlier work, I began reading his chapter "Infinity Imagined" in his book Interface Culture (1997). Obviously Twitter was not around when he was writing the book, but some of the language he uses seems to foreshadow Twitter. For example,

"the power of manipulation if the sine qua non of the modern computer" (also like how we've manipulated Twitter to be what we want/need it to be)

In describing the future of interface design, he says (in 1997) that "new interfaces will strive for disorientation ... or ... new ways of orienting, so new that they confuse on first encounter." This is Twitter!! He goes on to explain: "The interface subcultures of the future will offend the traditionalists by being too difficult," or "User-hostile." This flies in the face of usability studies and user-friendly interfaces (too difficult rather than ease-of-use). Twitter may make a terrible first impression, but it is challenging us, and that may be why some of us end up liking it.