Brenda Laurel’s “Six Elements” hearkens to Aristotle’s Poetics as its touchstone. This is nothing particularly new. Aristotle is a cultural monolith, and academics refer to his work ad nauseum and, it seems, ad infinitum. For Laurel, the use of Aristotle makes her work accessible.
But her particular use of Aristotle does more than to provide an access point. Poetics becomes a metaphor for how to view human-computer interactions. The monitor is the stage for human thought, where computations written by humans happen. The human is a character in the production insofar as his/her inputs are characters. The inputs, then, work out a dramatic performance according to the script.
This is all metaphor, of course. And the computer world is riddled with them–desktops, folders, and files are all parts of the office culture of the personal computer. More widespread, though, was the idea that the computer works like a brain.
Metaphors shift, though. Our computer desktops rely on us searching, reflecting the loosely organized spaces where we work. Now, the brain often works like a computer, a clear reversal of an earlier comparison. How long, then, until we act out the scripts written by the computers?
But just as a metaphor.