When you log into a terminal, you enter the darkness. It's
an entirely different experience than surfing the web using
a graphical browser. The web is bright. It's flashy. It's
full of banners, images, and buttons vying for your
attention. It demands no complex thought. You point. You
click. You point and click again. And again. And again.
You're served content. There are few expectations of you.
That's the master pattern of the web. You're a consumer --
of content, of commodities, of experience. You select from a
limited range of choices and fit into them. If you produce,
you generally do so within prescribed limits, and in an
environment that places a great deal of emphasis on
appearances, and your role as a consumer, rather than
on thought and insight.
The terminal is a different environment with a different set
of demand characteristics. The sensory overload disappears.
The darkness draws you in. It's a contemplative environment.
There are no distractions. You think. At the terminal,
you're required to make decisions. Where do I want to go
next? What do I want to do? No choices are provided. You
must dig into your memory and recall the command to
undertake the next task, a task of your choosing, an impulse
that comes from within. And then you act. You create. Maybe
it's a config file, a text document, or a gophermap. If you
consume, you consume text. You consume ideas rather than
images (for the most part).
In the Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan argued that the
advent of mechanized printing changed individuals and their
societies. Reading and composing written texts trained
people to follow chains of logic. The very act of reading,
regardless of what they read, transformed them:
"'It is certain,' wrote the symbolist Edgar Allan Poe, 'that
the mere act of inditing [composing] tends in a great degree
to the logicalization of thought.' Lineal, alphabetic
inditing made possible the sudden invention of 'grammars' of
thought and science by the Greeks."[1]
McLuhan also wrote that mass-produced texts resulted in the
creation of 'authors' and 'publics' which could not have
existed prior to the advent of widely-circulated printed
texts. He contended that printing led to communities
conscious of their own collective existence, to increased
public debate, and to nationalism. So not only individuals,
but entire peoples were changed as a result of the
typographical revolution.
My point here is, as McLuhan famously contended, that the
medium is as important as the message. The form is as
important as the content. When you choose the terminal --
when you enter the unix-verse rather than the web (a very
odd choice in these times, by the way, and you are all
peculiar people) you undoubtedly do so because you feel the
impact that the terminal has on the way you think. The
darkness matters. The textual interface matters. The
environment permits quiet contemplation. It begs you to
think. It calls on you to create. It makes you a different
person. Likewise, the communities that emerge in a pubnix
are marked by special characteristics that rarely exist on
the web.
[1] M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Signet, 1962), 33.
