You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
The most profound change ushered in by the digital revolution will not involve bells and whistles or new programming tricks. It will not come in the form of a 3-D Web browser or voice recognition or artificial intelligence. The most profound change will lie with out generic expectations about the interface itself. We will come to think of interface design as a kind of art form -- perhaps the art form of the next century. And with that broader shift will come hundreds of corollary effects, effects that trickle down into a broad cross section of everyday life, altering our storytelling appetites, our sense of physical space, our taste in music, the design of our cities. Many of these changes will be too subtle or gradual for most people to notice -- or rather, we'll notice the changes but we won't perceive their relationship to the interface, because the various elements will appear to belong to different categories, like so many aisles in a grocery store. But the history of technolculture is the history of such interminglings, the unlikely secondary effects of new machines rippling out to transform the society that surrounds them.Wow.
Instead of commenting on this (which I'll reserve for another time), I would like to inform everyone that in response to my mother's recommendation, I have also added a glossary to the site. I will try to define any words that I think are less than usual there. If you run into anything you want defined, please just let me know. Thanks.