The Interface and The Idiom: Language Diversity in the 21st Century

“The Internet has done an incredible job of bringing the world together in the last few years,” writes Michael Kellogg, creator of the Word Reference online dictionary. “Of course, one of the greatest barriers has been language” (WordReference.com).

Language and communication exchange are both intimately related to control. They are also integral to new media culture and interfaces. Tara McPherson says the Web is the interface that mediates the relationship between humans and machines. Thanks to the shared language of binary code, humans and machines have become adept at communicating with each other. Now that this has happened, we have come full circle. Instead of using the interface to communicate with machines, humans use the interface to communicate with each other.

Word Reference is a site that demonstrates how modern technology controls human communication. When it comes to HHI, or human-to-human interactions, we increasingly rely on technology to bridge the language gaps that divide us. There are three important components of the site: the translator dictionary, the language forums, and the grammar demonstrations. The dictionary demonstrates Galloway’s invisible control protocol, and the forums McPherson’s volitional mobility. The grammar demonstrations, however, go beyond Galloway’s definition of protocol and demonstrate the new way we are using digital resources to find meaning.

Mr. Kellogg’s dictionaries translate words between five language combinations: English and Spanish, English and French, English and Italian, Spanish and French, and Spanish and Portuguese, making it much easier for speakers these five languages to communicate.  But, this ease comes at a cost. Alexander Galloway describes modern society as a dance alternating between control and freedom. This description is exactly what Word Reference does. The site gives us the freedom to communicate across language barriers, but only within the bounds of a predetermined protocol.

Word Reference affords the user freedom within the set boundaries of “conventional rules that govern possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (Galloway 7). These rules are also known as protocol. What follows is an example of WR’s protocol.

A user asks for the Italian equivalent of the word “hello.” According to Word Reference, “ “salve,” “buongiorno,” “buonasera,” and “ciao” all mean “hello” in Italian. Answers are multiple, and, like the Internet itself, “noncentralized, nondominating, and nonhostile” (Galloway 29). However, these choices are complied from exclusively from a list of words already contained within the site’s database. We may feel free to choose, but we’re still on a leash. It just has a bit more slack than it used to.

Galloway illustrates how this type of non-threatening control works, especially in terms of meaning, by employing the example of DNA. “DNA is not simply a translation of language,” Galloway says, “it is language. It governs meaning by mandating that anything meaningful must register and appear somewhere in its system" (Galloway 50). The same thing is true of Word Reference. If the word a user is searching for is not included in the site's word bank, as far as Word Reference is concerned, that word does not exist. Thus, the user is forced to find another word with a similar meaning. However, the new word will not mean exactly the same thing as the original. In this way, Word Reference dictates meaning and communication between human beings. 

Word Reference also has a language forum, a feature where users can post questions about language and other users can respond. In this venue, users are made to feel like they can influence meaning. Tara McPherson calls this simulated feeling of power and influence over Internet content “volitional mobility.” In reality, the user is operating within what Gilles Deleuze calls a control society that is moderated by external forces.       

The forums also provide more evidence for our reliance on technology to mediate communication. The majority of the questions found on the forum ask how to foster and maintain relationships despite a language barrier. Tellingly, the thread with the subject line “I love you” is the most frequented one in the Italian-English forum. It has been viewed 33,919 times.

At the end of his piece on protocol, Galloway argues that protocol is against meaning. He claims that protocol does not engage in interpretation of data, just delivery. Word Reference does function like Galloway’s protocol in that it delivers data. However, WR also offers multiple meanings and the corresponding grammatical contexts for translated words. In this way, Word Reference goes beyond the first definition of protocol. For Galloway, the machine is a servant that fetches information for the user. But in the context of Word Reference, the machine is also the master, providing the proper context for the word and its corresponding grammatical rules.

Word Reference is well on its way to becoming ubiquitous. The site now offers a toolbar feature for your Internet browser, and version of the dictionary for mobile devices like Trios and Blackberries. As the world population continues to grow, human languages become more and more proliferate and diverse (a phenomenon that inspired Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash). At the same time, technology is becoming an increasingly present fixture in our daily lives. In the future, complete dependence on a digital interface to communicate person-to-person is not as outlandish as it may initially seem.

Works Cited

“About WordReference.com.” Word Reference Online Dictionary. 2007. 16 March 2008. 

Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.

McPherson, Tara. “Reload Liveness, Mobility, and the Web.” New Media, Old Media: A History And Theory Reader. Wendy Hui Kim Chun and Thomas Keenan, eds. Cambridge: Routledge, 2006.

A *ed Text

This image is a screenshot from the video game Max Payne. The image is taken from Soren Pold's essay titled Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form.  I chose to star this piece of text for several reasons. Despite it's brevity, this text contains of number of interesting linkages and relations. The most salient theme is the similarity of the computer game in which Max finds himself to the teleos of a reality conceived of on the principles of metaphysics. 

This text is rich in that it contains diachronic connections that move the narrative forward towards a conclusion. At the same time, however, the text also contains synchronic layers of meaning. 

 

Diachronic:  

In the first frame, Max is presented with a problem. In the second frame, Max identifies the attributes of the world he is in, and then claims he has found the answer. In the third frame, Max reveals his moment of illumination to the reader about the world in which he finds himself, providing teleological closure to this text segment. 

Synchronic:

All at the same time, this comic strip also brings to mind programming reveal code, the process of realization of the Matrix Neo goes through in the film The Matrix, and the religious revelation that a numinous divine power that rules and orders The Universe.   

The linear linkages and references in this text also share follow a pattern consistent with that of a philosophical construct called The Game.

The Game is "an abstract concept. It involves no tangible objects, nor is it played on any physical medium. It exists in the minds of those who play it, and it never ends." (Definition courtesy of ILostTheGame.org). 

I include a reference to The Game because, based to its description, The Game sounds awfully similar to cyberspace. Like cyberspace, The Game is a utopia that is at once nowhere and anywhere one wants it to be, whenever one wants to invoke it. The Game is also shares an attribute with hypertext in that playing it emphasizes what Stuart Moulthorp  identifies as "the intertexuality of all life" (Hassan qtd. in Moulthorp para. 3) bringing us back again to the references embedded in the Max Payne screenshot. 

The codes I will use to star the allusions in this text are as follows: 

META to highlight the religious, metaphysical connotations

MATR for the cinematic implications

TECH for the correlations to technical programming 

THRY for the connections between the text and various intellectual theories regarding the digital age and the internet 

Panel #2

"The

truth was a burning green crack through my brain."

*The first thing Max talks about in this panel is “the truth” with all of its references to religious revelation and “seeing the light,” corroborated by the fact that he describes the truth as “burning green.” It should also be noted that the color motif of green is repeated throughout the film The Matrix and is generally associated with the digital world and with cyberspace. Green is associated with binary code, and binary code is the most essential (both in terms of what is most basic and also what is vital) to computer operation. Everything else, what we see and hear when we interact with computers, is a representation of that series of ones and zeroes that provides the backbone for all operations. As Katherine Hayles points out in As Katherine Hayles points out in My Mother Was a Computer, code reveals what is really going on beneath the surface (Hayles). The “truth” then, is the finality of technology and digitalization of the human experience. Also, not only is the truth green, it is also inside Max’s brain, which makes Max part man part machine- a cyborg. (TECH, MATR, & META binary code)  

“Weapon statistics hanging in the air, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. Endless repetition of the act of shooting, time slowing down to show off my moves. The paranoid feel of someone controlling my every step.”

**This description is a perfect illustration of the union of man and machine through the medium of a video game. A later passage in Haraway’s essay describes perfectly describes the scenario we see playing out in this panel description: “[it is] a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space” (Haraway).

This quote, which brings together teleology, cyborgs, and the isolated image of “man in space” (or, as it were, cyberspace) touches on all of the major themes and ideas going on within this three screen sequence. Max is in a computer game he can "beat," he is a combination of man and machine, and he must find his way alone through a hostile and unfamiliar world.  (THRY: cyborg, irony) 

 And what of the sentence “The paranoid feel of someone controlling my every step?” This sentence has some interesting implications. If Max is in a computer game, the person controlling his every step is the player, thus putting that player in the glorified position of a deity. However, there is also the authority figure that reveals the situation to Max. Who then, is really in charge? Is the player merely a puppet that carries out the plans of the authority figure that cannot itself intervene? William Gibson also touches on this theme in his novelNeuromancer. The Artificial Intelligence Wintermute cannot appear to Case, the protagonist, without first assuming a form Case is already familiar with, or, as Wintermute calls it, a “spokesperson” (Gibson 116). (META: player/controller dynamic) 

Panel #3

“I was in a computer game.”

*Michel Foucault’s term “heterotopia” can be easily applied to the world of a computer game. The world is all about “a relation among sites” (Foucault) which is what Foucault claims is the dominant theme of the modern era. The notion of time is thrown out the window completely as the character moves from room to room, space to space, level to level, world to world. In a computer game world, the entire concept of time vanishes. Players can take as much time as they need to beat a game, and even if the game is time sensitive, the player can redo the level as many times as it takes to advance to the next space. However, the irony is that there is a linear, diachronic progression of all games towards a teleological end at which point the player stops, leaves the game, and time resumes again. The spatial and linear are emphasized while they cannot necessarily exist together. (THRY: heterotopias, time/space divide) 

“Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.”  

**According to the way Max characterizes the computer game, as ironic and horrible, he seems to be describing a dystopia, a world that is undesirable in every way. The question as to why this world is undesirable is somewhat answered by the content of the previous two panels. The displeasure at the mechanization of humanity and the unpleasant feeling of being deprived of agency and freewill are both sentiments Max describes in the second panel. Humans associate Hell with powerlessness, and resist the idea of a fate that is inescapable. (META: hell, dystopia, fate and freewill)