The Mighty Morphin' Desktop

An underling factor found inside Bolter's book, Remediation: Understanding New Media, is that the human mind can hide certain factors of reality right in front of your very eyes. What I'm talking about is the transformation or the "morphing" ability found with in our computer desktops. Our desktops don't just morph into a cat or a dog but into the fragmented realm in which we use to perceive time and space. In doing so it becomes a technique in "making the interface "transparent" and therefore more "natural"" (Bolter, 2000, p32) as well as making it an extension of our minds rather then our bodies.  

The metamorphosis begins with the contextual similarities to a physical object such as "file folders, sheets of paper, in-box, trash basket, etc" (Bolter, 2000, p23). Bolter conveys that this is down to a ramification that we need natural formats to help us understand new concepts. The desktop isn't a new concept but the way in which different software manufactures create their own desktop to help/interfere in the arbitrary nature of your minds. Now this doesn't mean we cant control new formats brought into our lives, more the fact that we need the natural formats to sync with the application in which we can again morph to a better future.

The morphing factor in this text is a symbolic factor that helps show the ideals of change and how we create three forms of marketing our personal woes of this transparent state. Form one is about the change in which the user becomes the desktop, the next form is the actual connection between the user and the desktop. The last form brings the transparency to stop by letting the user aware of it's unnatural state. Bolter has a similar point where he highlight the user is "brought back into contact with the interface" and they learn "to read just as she would read any hypertext" (Bolter, 2000, p33) creating this imbalance of pure and fictional.

This ideal has to become a conjunction of two forms the real and the fiction. If we cannot get over the metamorphosis then we can use our computers and desktops to their full advantage. Just like any form of window is transparent, so most we.

Bibliography:

Bolter, J.D. (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press)