Interface In Our Culture

These types of experiments created by Aaron Koblin and his teammates speak a lot about our world connections and about visual art.  The first image of the flight of airplanes across the United States gives an interesting technological visual that shows just how much we all cross each other every day.  The visual representation is appealing to the eye and brings in people to view and assess information in a whole new way.  Instead of reading the number statistics about the amount of SMS’s sent from Amsterdam, a bright, lively visual representation is much more intriguing and comprehensive for a viewer.  

The website experiments prove how the internet is a very important factor in today’s culture to connecting people from all over the world.  With “The Johnny Cash Project,” people from the UK, California, Belgium, Spain and more contributed their interpretation through a digital drawing to make a whole music video dedicated to Johnny Cash.  This project brought together people from different cultures and backgrounds with a similar fondness for one man and allowed them to create a little piece of something bigger than themselves.  

Human’s social needs are, in today’s culture, largely satisfied by communicating with others in a technological way.  Interface not only satisfies social needs but can contribute to humanitarian aspects.  On Mechanical Turk, Koblin and his associate asked people to replicate parts of a one hundred dollar bill, which eventually was put together and people could swap real 100 dollar bills for fake ones and make a contribution to the One Laptop per Chile Organization.  But will interface in the 21^st century replace face-to-face human contact and socialization? As shown in the video clip where Charlie Chaplin is having troubles adjusting to the new industrialization era, there will be problems with this new era that is consuming our culture.