Exhausted today. I stayed up until 5am — very glad of the result, and very glad to see the Green Party get four seats. Perhaps it was a climate election after all.
Right now, I am sitting looking at the desktop of my admittedly old laptop.
In the the bottom right corner, in the sidebar, is an icon of a metal waste paper basket full of scrunched up paper. That’s the trash.
On the rest of the screen there are dozens of icons of cardboard folders containing numerous icons of cardboard files.
If I click open the web browser, I see an icon of a magnifying glass to indicate where I should input my search. There’s also the icon of the kind of microphone the BBC used during the Second World War, and beside that, a camera that looks a little like a Box Brownie.
Within Substack, the icon for link is a chain, for podcasting is some old-fashioned headphones and for video what looks like the earliest generation of TV cameras.
All these icons are taken from the real world and imported into the virtual world of the computer screen.
For us to be able to recognise them (and recognise therefore the way in which we should use them) they need to resemble very familiar objects.
But what’s noticeable is how retro they all are — how unlike the latest iterations of these technologies.
My point is simple — we hardly notice this. We spend so much of our time in this one-dimensional environment, and yet it’s a weirdly old-fashioned space.
My desktop is more like a junk shop than an Apple store.
Isn’t that odd?
Are there some purely unphysical icons that don’t involve explicit naming?
I love that the "save" button on Office applications is a floppy disk! I haven't used one in ages, although they occasionally turn up in library books which date from the days when extra info could be found on the disk (presumably not very much).
People younger than me who've never used or seen one will know that the square icon with a couple of lines on it means "save" and will one day be amazed when they see a floppy disk - maybe at the computer museum at Bletchley Park - and realise that the square icon is a representation of that.