Running head: SHORT TITLE OF PAPER ​ ​1 Title of Paper Student Name University Course ID—Course Name Module/Week x, Assignment x Instructor Name Date Title of Essay ​Start your first paragraph here. The best way to use this template is to read through the entire document first. Then, delete each section as you fill it in with your essay content. This template is formatted to meet APA’s requirements, so when you delete the sections one at a time, you will see that your work is formatted properly. This is the introduction paragraph. Here you want to introduce your topic and grab the reader’s attention. Your introduction paragraph should be 4–6 sentences long and will include your thesis statement. Remember, the thesis statement states the main focus or main idea of the entire essay and is normally the last sentence in the introduction; however, more importantly, it should be obvious what your thesis statement is. ​Begin the second paragraph here. This is your first body paragraph. Paragraphs should be between 5–12 sentences. Your body paragraphs should begin with the paragraph’s topic, which is the topic sentence. This topic sentence explains the main focus of this paragraph, and should clearly relate to your thesis statement. Next, you will include supporting details. If you are using research (sources), this is where you should include them; most importantly, this is also where you use in-text citations to cite other people’s ideas from your sources (Author, date). Finally, the last sentence of a body paragraph concludes the paragraph and loops back to the paragraph’s main focus. ​Begin the third paragraph here. This is your second body paragraph. Paragraphs should be between 5–12 sentences. Your body paragraphs should begin with the paragraph’s topic, which is the topic sentence. This topic sentence explains the main focus of this paragraph, and should clearly relate to your thesis statement. Next, you will include supporting details. If you are using research (sources), this is where you should include them; most importantly, this is also where you use in-text citations to cite other people’s ideas from your sources (Author, date). Finally, the last sentence of a body paragraph concludes the paragraph and loops back to the paragraph’s main focus. Begin the fourth paragraph here. This is your third body paragraph. Paragraphs should be between 5–12 sentences. Your body paragraphs should begin with the paragraph’s topic, which is the topic sentence. This topic sentence explains the main focus of this paragraph, and should clearly relate to your thesis statement. Next, you will include supporting details. If you are using research (sources), this is where you should include them; most importantly, this is also where you use in-text citations to cite other people’s ideas from your sources (Author, date). Finally, the last sentence of a body paragraph concludes the paragraph and loops back to the paragraph’s main focus. You may ...

1. Running head: SHORT TITLE OF PAPER 1
Title of Paper
Student Name
University
Course ID—Course Name
Module/Week x, Assignment x
Instructor Name
Date
Title of Essay
Start your first paragraph here. The best way to use this
template is to read through the
entire document first. Then, delete each section as you fill it in
with your essay content. This
template is formatted to meet APA’s requirements, so when you
delete the sections one at a time,
you will see that your work is formatted properly. This is the
introduction paragraph. Here you
want to introduce your topic and grab the reader’s attention.
Your introduction paragraph should
be 4–6 sentences long and will include your thesis statement.
Remember, the thesis statement
states the main focus or main idea of the entire essay and is

2. normally the last sentence in the
introduction; however, more importantly, it should be obvious
what your thesis statement is.
Begin the second paragraph here. This is your first body
paragraph. Paragraphs should be
between 5–12 sentences. Your body paragraphs should begin
with the paragraph’s topic, which is
the topic sentence. This topic sentence explains the main focus
of this paragraph, and should
clearly relate to your thesis statement. Next, you will include
supporting details. If you are using
research (sources), this is where you should include them; most
importantly, this is also where
you use in-text citations to cite other people’s ideas from your
sources (Author, date). Finally, the
last sentence of a body paragraph concludes the paragraph and
loops back to the paragraph’s
main focus.
Begin the third paragraph here. This is your second body
paragraph. Paragraphs should
be between 5–12 sentences. Your body paragraphs should begin
with the paragraph’s topic,
which is the topic sentence. This topic sentence explains the
main focus of this paragraph, and
should clearly relate to your thesis statement. Next, you will
include supporting details. If you
are using research (sources), this is where you should include
them; most importantly, this is also
where you use in-text citations to cite other people’s ideas from
your sources (Author, date).
Finally, the last sentence of a body paragraph concludes the
paragraph and loops back to the
paragraph’s main focus.

3. Begin the fourth paragraph here. This is your third body
paragraph. Paragraphs should be
between 5–12 sentences. Your body paragraphs should begin
with the paragraph’s topic, which is
the topic sentence. This topic sentence explains the main focus
of this paragraph, and should
clearly relate to your thesis statement. Next, you will include
supporting details. If you are using
research (sources), this is where you should include them; most
importantly, this is also where
you use in-text citations to cite other people’s ideas from your
sources (Author, date). Finally, the
last sentence of a body paragraph concludes the paragraph and
loops back to the paragraph’s
main focus.
You may have more than three body paragraphs depending on
the requirements of the
essay. This template is formatted for only five paragraphs so if
you add more just begin a new
paragraph and tap the TAB key to indent. The font and margins
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final paragraph is the conclusion paragraph. This paragraph can
be shorter than the others.
Remember to wrap-up the essay for the reader. Also, the
conclusion should not introduce any
new material. Finally, you will want to refer back to your thesis
statement.
References
Author, A. A. (Date of publication). Title of article only first
letter capitalized. Magazine/Journal
Title Capitalized, volume #(issue #), page range.
Author, C. C., & Author, D. D. (Year). Name of course textbook
only first letter capitalized

4. [VitalSource Digital Version]. City, State: Publisher.
University Online. (2010). Course ID: Title of course in
sentence casing: Week X:
Specific lecture not capitalized. Retrieved from
myeclassonline.com
Title of online article w/o author. (Date of publication).
Newsletter/Website Title Capitalized.
Retrieved from URL
About Don
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Don Norman: Designing For People
Nielsen Norman Group
(http://nngroup.com)
Being Analog
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS CHAPTER 7 OF THE
INVISIBLE COMPUTER1 (#ft1note)
Making Sense of the World (#makesense)
Humans Versus Computers (#hvc)
Biological Versus Technological Evolution (#bvte)
The Ever-Increasing Pace of Change (#paceofchange)
Treating People Like Machines (#machines)
The World Is Not Neat and Tidy (#notneat)
Making Sense of the World (#makesenseii)
Human Error (#humanerror)
Humans & Computers as Cooperating Systems (#cooperating)
Chapter 7: Notes (#notes)
We are analog beings trapped in a digital world, and the worst

6. part is, we did it to ourselves.
We humans are biological animals. We have evolved over
millions of years to function well in the environment, to
survive.
We are analog devices following biological modes of operation.
We are compliant, flexible, tolerant. Yet we people have
constructed a world of machines that requires us to be rigid,
fixed, intolerant. We have devised a technology that requires
considerable care and attention, that demands it be treated on its
own terms, not on ours. We live in a technology-
centered world where the technology is not appropriate for
people. No wonder we have such difficulties.
Here we are, wandering about the world, bumping into things,
forgetful of details, with a poor sense of time, a poor
memory for facts and figures, unable to keep attention on a
topic for more than a short duration, reasoning by example
rather than by logic, and drawing upon our admittedly deficient
memories of prior experience. When viewed this way, we
seem rather pitiful. No wonder that we have constructed a set of
artificial devices that are very much not in our own
image. We have constructed a world of machinery in which
accuracy and precision matter. Time matters. Names, dates,
facts, and figures matter. Accurate memory matters. Details
matter.
All the things we are bad at matter, all the things we are good at
are ignored. Bizarre.
MAKING
SENSE
OF
THE
WORLD

7. People are biological animals, evolved to fit within the natural
world. We are flexible and tolerant. We excel at perception,
at creativity, at the ability to go beyond the information given,
making sense of otherwise chaotic events. We often have to
interpret events far beyond the information available, and our
ability to do this efficiently and effortlessly, usually without
even being aware that we are doing so, greatly adds to our
ability to function. This ability put together a sensible, coherent
image of the world in the face of limited evidence allows us to
anticipate and predict events, the better to cope with an
ambiguous, ever-changing world.
Here's a simple test of your memory:
How many animals of each type
did Moses take on the Ark?
What's the answer? How many animals? Two? Be careful: what
about an amoeba, a sexless, single-celled animal that
reproduces by dividing itself in two? Did he need to take two of
these?
Answer: None. No animals at all. Moses didn't take any animals
onto the ark, it was Noah.
Some of you were fooled. Why? Because people hear what is
intended, not what is said. In normal language, people ask
real questions that have real answers and real meaning. It is
only psychology professors and jokesters who ask trick
questions. If you spotted the trick, it because you were
unnaturally suspicious or alert. We don't need such alertness in
normal human interaction. Those of you who were fooled
responded normally: that is how we are meant to be.

8. Your mind interpreted the question meaningfully, making sense
of the information. It may have confused "Moses" with
"Noah," but it was aided by the fact that those names have a lot
of similarity: both are short, with two syllables. Both are
biblical, from the old testament. In normal circumstances, the
confusion would be beneficial, for it is the sort of error that
a speaker might make, and it is useful when a listener can go
beyond superficial errors.
Note that the ability to be insensitive to simple speech errors
does not mean the system is readily fooled. Thus, you would
not have been fooled had I asked:
How many animals of each type
did Clinton take on the Ark?
The name Clinton is not sufficiently close to the target: it
requires a biblical name to fool you . From a practical point of
view, although a speaker might say "Moses" when "Noah" was
intended, it is far less likely that someone would
mistakenly say a non-biblical name such as "Clinton." The
automatic interpretation of the original question is intelligent
and sensible." The fact that the first question can fool people is
a testament to our powers, not an indictment of them.
Once again, in normal life, such corrections are beneficial.
Normal life does not deliberately try to fool us. Take note of
this
example, for it is fundamental to understanding people and,
more importantly, to understanding why computers are so
different from people, why today's technology is such a bad
match.
Why do accuracy and precision matter? In our natural world,
they don't. We are approximate beings: we get at the
meanings of things, and for this, the details don't much matter.
Accurate times and dates matter only because we have

9. created a culture in which these things are important. Accurate
and precise measurements matter because the machines
and procedures we have created are rigid, inflexible, and fixed
in their ways, so if a measurement is off by some tiny
fraction, the result can be a failure to operate. Worse yet, it can
cause a tragic accident.
People are compliant: we adapt ourselves to the situation. We
are flexible enough to allow our bodies and our actions to
fit the circumstances. Animals don't require precise
measurements and high accuracy to function. Machines do.
The same story is true of time, of facts and figures, and of
accurate memory. These only matter because the mechanical,
industrialized society created by people doesn't match people.
In part, this is because we don't know how to do any
better. Can we build machines that are as compliant and flexible
as people? Not today. Biology doesn't build: it grows, it
evolves. It constructs life out of soft, flexible parts. Parts that
are self-repairable. We don't know how to do this with our
machines: we can only build mechanical devices out of rigid
substances like wood or steel. We only build information
devices out of binary logic, with its insistence upon logic and
precision. We invented the artificial mathematics of logic the
better to enhance our own thought processes.
The dilemma facing us is the horrible mismatch between
requirements of these human-built machines and human
capabilities. Machines are mechanical, we are biological.
Machines are rigid and require great precision and accuracy of
control. We are compliant. We tolerate and produce huge
amounts of ambiguity and uncertainty, very little precision and
accuracy. The latest inventions of humankind are those of the

10. digital technology of information processing and
communication, yet we ourselves are analog devices. Analog
and biological.
An analog device is one in which the representation of
information corresponds to its physical structure. In an analog
recording the stored signal varies in value precisely in the same
way as sound energy varies in time. A phonograph
recording is analog: it works by recreating the variations in
sound energy by wiggles and depth of the groove. In a tape
recording, the strength of the magnetic field on the tape varies
in analogous fashion to the sound energy variations. These
are analog signals.
Digital signals are very different. Here, what is recorded is an
abstraction of the real signals. Digital encoding was invented
mainly to get rid of noise. In the beginning, electrical circuits
were all analog. But electrical circuits are noisy, meaning
there are unwanted voltage variations. The noise gets in the
way, mostly because the circuits are unable to distinguish
between the stuff that matters and the stuff that doesn't: it
blindly processes all.
Enter the digital world. Instead of using a signal that is
analogous to the physical event, the physical event is
transformed
into a series of numbers that describes the original. In high-
quality recording of music, the sound energy is sampled over
40,000 times each second, transformed into numbers that
represent the energy value at the time each sample was made.
The numbers are usually represented in the form of binary digits
rather than the familiar decimal ones, which means that
any digit can have only one of two states, 0 or 1, rather than the
ten possible states of a decimal digit. When there are
only two states to be distinguished between, the operation is far
simpler and less subject to error than when it has to

11. determine a precise value, as is required with an analog signal.
Binary signals are relatively insensitive to noise.
As you can imagine, to record and playback a digital
representation of sound waves requires a lot of processing. It is
necessary to transform the sound into numbers, store the
numerical digits, and then retrieve and restore them back to
sound energy. Such rapid transformation wasn't possible at an
affordable price until very recently, which is why the
emphasis on digital signals seems new. It is only recently that
the technology was capable of high-quality digital encoding
of audio and television signals, but the concept is old.
There are a number of common misconceptions about digital
and analog signals. One is that "analog" means continuous
whereas "digital" means discrete. No, although this is often
true, that is not the basis for the distinction. Think of "analog"
as meaning "analogous": analogous to the real world. If the real
world event is discrete, so too will be the analog one. If
the physical process is continuous, then so too will be the
analog one. Digital, however, is always discrete: one of a
limited number of values, usually one of two, but occasionally
one of three, four, or ten.
But the strangest misconception of all is that "digital" is
somehow good, "analog" bad. This just isn't so. Yes, digital is
good for our contemporary machines, but analog might be better
for future machines. And analog is certainly far better for
people. Why? Mainly because of the impact of noise.
Our evolution has been guided by the requirements of the world.
Our perceptual systems evolved to deal with the world.
In fact, if you want to understand how human perception works,
it helps to start off by understanding how the world of
light and sound works, because the eyes and ears have evolved
to fit the nature of these physical signals. What this

12. means is that we interact best with systems that are either part
of the real world or analogous to them: analog signals.
Analog signals behave in ways the person can understand. A
slight error or noise transforms the signals in known ways,
ways the body has evolved to interpret and cope with. In a
digital signal, the representation is so arbitrary, that a simple
error can have unexpected consequences.
If there is some noise in a conventional television signal,
encoded in analogical form, we see some noise on the screen.
Usually we can tolerate the resulting image, at least as long as
we can make sense of it. Small amounts of noise have
slight impact.
The modern efficient digital encodings use compression
technologies that eliminate redundancy. Digital television
signals
are almost always compressed to save space and bandwidth, the
most common scheme being the algorithms devised by
the Motion Picture Expert Group, or MPEG. If any information
is lost, it takes a while before the system resends enough
information to allow recovery. MPEG encoding breaks up the
picture into rectangular regions. Noise can make it
impossible for the system to reconstruct an entire region. As a
result, when the image is noisy, whole regions of the
screen break up and distort in ways the human brain cannot
reconstruct, and it takes a few seconds until the picture
reforms itself.
The real problem with being digital is that it implies a kind of
slavery to accuracy, a requirement that is most unlike the
natural workings of the person. People are analog, insensitive to
noise, insensitive to error. People extract meanings, and

13. as long as the meanings are unchanged, the details of the signals
do not matter. They are not noticed, they are not
remembered.
It is perfectly proper and reasonable for machines to use digital
encodings for their internal workings. Machines do better
with digital encoding. The problem comes about in the form of
interaction between people and machines. People do best
with signals and information that fit the way they perceive and
think, which means analogous to the real world. Machines
do best with signals and information that is suited for the way
they function, which means digital, rigid, precise. So when
the two have to meet, which side should dominate? In the past,
it has been the machine that dominates. In the future it
should be the person. Stay tuned for Chapter 9.
HUMANS VERSUS COMPUTERS
The ever-increasing complexity of everyday life brings with it
both great opportunities and major challenges. One of the
challenges, that the brain does not work at all like a computer,
also provides us with an opportunity: the possibility of new
modes of interaction that allow us to take advantage of the
complementary talents of humans and machines.
The modern era of information technology has been with us but
a short time. Computers are less than a century old. The
technology has been constructed deliberately to produce
mechanical systems that operate reliably, algorithmically, and
consistently. They are based upon mathematics, or more
precisely arithmetic in the case of the first computing devices
and logic in the case of the more modern devices.
Contrast this with the human brain. Human beings are the
results of millions of years of evolution, where the guiding
principle was survival of the species, not efficient, algorithmic

14. computation. Robustness in the face of unexpected
circumstances plays a major role in the evolutionary process.
Human intelligence has co-evolved with social interaction,
cooperation and rivalry, and communication. The ability to
learn from experience and to communicate and thereby
coordinate with others has provided powerful adaptations for
changing, complex environmental forces. Interestingly
enough, the ability to deceive seems to have been one driving
force. Only the most intelligent of animals is able to employ
a sophisticated level of intentional, purposeful deception. Only
the most sophisticated animal is capable of seeing through
the deceit. Sure, nature also practices deception through
camouflage and mimicry, but this isn't willful and intentional.
Primates are the most skilled at intentional, willful deception,
and the most sophisticated primate, the human, is the most
sophisticated deceiver of all.
Note that some deception is essential for the smooth pursuit of
social interaction: the "white lie" smooths over many
otherwise discomforting social clashes. It is not always best to
tell the truth when someone asks how we like their
appearance, or their presentation, or the gift they have just
given us. One could argue that computers won't be truly
intelligent or social until they too are able to deceive.
We humans have learned to control the environment. We are the
masters of artifacts. Physical artifacts make us stronger,
faster, and more comfortable. Cognitive artifacts make us
smarter. Among the cognitive artifacts are the invention of
writing and other notational systems, such as used in
mathematics, dance, and musical transcription. The result of
these

15. inventions is that our knowledge is now cumulative: each
generation grows upon the heritage left behind by previous
generations. This is the good news. The bad news is that the
amount to be learned about the history, culture, and the
techniques of modern life increases with time. It now takes
several decades to become a truly well-educated citizen. How
much time will be required in fifty years? In one hundred years?
The biological nature of human computation, coupled with the
evolutionary process by which the brain has emerged,
leads to a very different style of computation from the precise,
logic-driven systems that characterize current computers.
The differences are dramatic. Computers are constructed from a
large number of fast, simple devices, each following
binary logic and working reliably and consistently. Errors in the
operation of any of the underlying components are not
tolerated, and they are avoided either by careful design to
minimize failure rates or through error-correcting coding in
critical areas. The resulting power of the computer is a result of
the high speed of relatively simple computing devices.
Biological computation is performed by a very large number of
slow, complex devices -- neurons -- each doing
considerable computation and operating through electrical-
chemical interactions. The power of the computation is a

16. result of the highly parallel nature of the computation and the
complex computations done by each of the billions of neural
cells. Moreover, the cells are bathed in fluids whose chemistry
can change rapidly, providing a means for rapid
deployment of hormones and other signals to the entire system,
chemicals that are site-specific. Think of it as a packet-
switching deployment of chemical agents. The result is that the
computational basis is dynamic, capable of rapid,
fundamental change. Affect, emotion, and mood all play a
powerful -- and as yet poorly understood -- role in human
cognition. Certainly all of us have experienced the tension when
logic dictates one course of action but mood or emotion
another: more often than not, we follow mood or emotion.
Whatever the mode of computation -- and the full story is not
yet known -- it is certainly not binary logic. Each individual
biological element is neither reliable nor consistent. Errors are
frequent -- whole cells may die -- and reliability is
maintained through massive redundancy as well as through the
inherently error-tolerant nature of the computational
process and, for that matter, the relatively high error-tolerance
of the resulting behavior.
These last points cannot be over-emphasized. The body, the
brain, and human social interaction have all co-evolved to
tolerate large variations in performance under a wide-ranging

17. set of environmental conditions. It is a remarkable error-
tolerant and forgiving system. It uses both electrical and
chemical systems of communication and processing. Conscious
and sub-conscious processing probably use different
computational mechanisms, and the role of emotions and affect
is
not yet understood.
Human language serves as a good example of the evolution of a
robust, redundant, and relatively noise-insensitive means
of social communication. Errors are corrected so effortlessly
that often neither party is aware of the error or the correction.
The communication relies heavily upon a shared knowledge
base, intentions, and goals: people with different cultural
backgrounds often clash, even though they speak the same
language. The result is a marvelously complex structure for
social interaction and communication. Children learn language
without conscious effort, yet the complexities of human
languages still defies complete scientific understanding.
Biological Versus Technological Evolution
We humans have evolved to fit the natural environment. At the
same time we have learned to modify and change the
environment, leading to a co-evolution in which we have
changed to fit the world, simultaneously changing the world,

18. thus leading to further evolutionary change. Until recently, this
co-evolution proceeded at a human pace. We developed
language and tools. We discovered how to control fire and
construct simple tools. The tools became more complex as
simple tools became machines. The process was slow, the better
to fit the new ways with the old, the new methods with
human capabilities.
Biological evolution of humankind proceeds too slowly to be
visible, but there is a kind of technological and environmental
evolution that proceeds rapidly. We evolve our human-made
artifacts to fit our abilities. This evolution is similar to, yet
different from biological kind. For one thing, it has a history: it
is Lamarckian, in that changes made to one generation can
be propagated to future ones. Nonetheless, it is an evolutionary
process because it tends to be unguided except by rules
of survival. Each generation is but a small modification of the
previous.
A good illustration of how an evolutionary process shapes our
human-invented artifacts is sports. Sports require an
exquisite mix of the doable and the difficult. Make a game too
easy and it loses its appeal. Make it too difficult and it is
unplayable. The range from too easy to too difficult is huge,
fortunately so. One of our traits is the ability to learn, to

19. develop skills far beyond that which the unpracticed person can
do. Thus, some games, such as tic-tac-toe, which seem
difficult when first encountered, are so readily mastered that
they soon lose their appeal. A successful game is one that
has a wide range of complexity, playable by beginners and
experts alike, although not necessarily at the same time.
Successful games include soccer, rugby, tennis, basketball,
baseball, football, chess, go, checkers, poker, and bridge.
These are multi-dimensional, rich and multi-faceted. As a
result, the beginner can enjoy part of their charm while the
expert can exploit all the multiple dimensions.
Games work well when they do not use too much technology.
The reason is simple: games are suited for human reaction
times, size and strength. Add too much technology to the mix,
and you soon move the game beyond the reach of human
abilities. This is aptly illustrated in war games, the deadly
dueling exercises in which the armies of the world pit
themselves, one against the other. But here, the technologies are
deliberately exploited to exceed human capability, so
much so that it can take ten years of training to be able to
master a modern jet fighter plane, and even then the human
pilot is rendered temporarily unconscious during violent
maneuvers. These are games not fit for people.

20. Alas, the slow, graceful co-evolution of people and
environment, and of the tools, artifacts, and games that we have
designed no longer holds. Each generation benefits from the one
before, and the accumulated knowledge leads to more
rapid change. We benefit greatly with this cumulative buildup
of knowledge, but the price we pay is that each succeeding
generation has more and more to learn. The result is that the
past acts both as a wonderful starting point, propelling us
forward on the shoulders of giants. Alternatively, it can be seen
as a massive anchor, compelling us to spend more and
more time at school, learning the accumulated wisdom of the
ages, to the point that one's motivation and energy may be
depleted before the studies are over.
The Ever-Increasing Pace of Change
Once upon a time it was possible for everyone to learn the
topics of a culture. After all, things changed slowly, at a human
pace. During maturity, children learned of what had gone
before, and from then on, they could keep up with changes. The
technology changed slowly. Moreover, it was mechanical, which
meant it was visible. Children could explore it. Teenagers
could disassemble it. Young adults could hope to improve it.
Once upon a time technological evolution proceeded at a human
pace. Crafts and sports evolved over a lifetime. Even

21. though the results could be complex, the reason behind the
complexity could usually be seen, examined, and talked
about. The technology could be lived and experienced. As a
result, it could be learned.
Today, this is no longer possible. The slow evolutionary pace of
life is no longer up to the scale and pace of technological
change. The accumulation of knowledge is enormous, for it
increases with every passing year. Once upon a time, a few
years of schooling -- or even informal learning -- was sufficient.
Today, formal schooling is required, and the demands
upon it continually increase. The number of different topics that
must be mastered, from history and language to science
and technology to practical knowledge and skills is ever-
increasing. Once a grade-school education would suffice for
most people. Then high-school was required. Then college,
post-graduate education, and even further education after
that. Today, no amount of education is sufficient.
Scientists no longer are able to keep up with advances even
within their own field, let alone in all of science. As a result,
we are in the age of specialization, where it is all one person
can do to keep up with the pace in some restricted domain
of endeavor. But with nothing but specialists, how can we
bridge the gaps?

22. The new technologies can no longer be learned on their own.
Today, the technology tends to be electronic, which means
that its operation is invisible, for it takes place inside of semi-
conductor circuits through the invisible transfer of voltages,
currents and electromagnetic fields, all of which are invisible to
the eye. A single computer chip may have ten million
components, and chips with 100 million components are in the
planning stage: who could learn such things by
disassembly, even were disassembly possible? So too with
computer programs: a program with hundreds of thousands
of lines of instructions is commonplace. Those with millions of
instructions are not infrequent.
Worst, the new technology can often be arbitrary, inconsistent,
complex, and unnecessary. It is all up to the whim of the
designer. In the past, physical structures posed their own
natural constraints upon the design and the resulting
complexity. But with information technologies, the result can be
as simple or complex as the designer wills it to be, and
far too few designers have any appreciation of the requirements
of the people who must use their designs.
Even when a designer is considerate of the users of the
technology, there may be no natural relationship between one
set
of designs and another. In the physical world, the natural

23. constraints of physical objects meant that similar tools worked
in similar ways. Not so in the world of information: Very
similar tools may work in completely different -- perhaps even
contradictory -- ways.
Continued... (being_analog_ii.html)
next page (being_analog_2_of_3.html) >
FOOTNOTE
1. From Norman, D. A. The invisible computer. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press. Copyright 1997, 1998 Donald A. Norman. All
rights reserved. [Return to Top (#ft1src)]
TREATING PEOPLE LIKE MACHINES
What an exciting time the turn of the century must have been!
The period from the late 1800s through the early 1900s was
one of rapid change, in many ways paralleling the changes that
are taking place now. In a relatively short period of time,
the entire world went through rapid, almost miraculous
technological invention, forever changing the lives of its
citizens,
society, business and government. In this period, the light bulb
was developed and electric power plants sprung up
across the nation. Electric motors were developed to power
factories. The telegraph spanned the American continent and
the world, followed by the telephone. Then came the

24. phonograph, for the first time in history allowing voices, songs,
and
sounds to be preserved and replayed at will. At the same time,
mechanical devices were increasing in power. The railroad
was rapidly expanding its coverage. Steam-powered ocean-
going ships were under development. The automobile was
invented, first as expensive, hand-made machines, starting with
Daimler and Benz in Europe. Henry Ford developed the
first assembly line for the mass-production of relatively
inexpensive automobiles. The first airplane was flown and
within a
few decades would carry mail, passengers, and bombs.
Photography was in its prime and motion pictures were on the
way. And soon to come was radio, allowing signals, sounds, and
images to be transmitted all across the world, without
the need for wires. It was a remarkable period of change.
It is difficult today to imagine life prior to these times. At
nighttime the only lighting was through flames: candles,
fireplaces, oil and kerosene lamps, and in some places, gas.
Letters were the primary means of communication, and
although letter delivery within a large city was rapid and
efficient, with delivery offered more than once each day,
delivery
across distances could take days or even weeks. Travel was
difficult, and many people never ventured more than 30 miles

25. from their homes during their entire lives. Everyday life was
quite different from today. But in what to a historian is a
relatively short period, the world changed dramatically in ways
that affected everyone, not just the rich and upper class,
but the everyday person as well.
Light, travel, entertainment: all changed through human
inventions. Work did too, although not always in beneficial
ways.
The factory already existed, but the new technologies and
processes brought forth new requirements, along with
opportunities for exploitation. The electric motor allowed a
more efficient means of running factories. But as usual, the
largest change was social and organizational: the analysis of
work into a series of small actions and the belief that if each
action could be standardized, each organized into "the one best
way, " then automated factories could reap even greater
efficiencies and productivity. Hence the advent of time-and-
motion studies, of "scientific management," and of the
assembly line. Hence too came the dehumanization of the
worker, for now the worker was essentially just another
machine in the factory, analyzed like one, treated like one, and
asked not to think on the job, for thinking slowed down the
action.
The era of mass production and the assembly line, resulted in
part from the efficiencies of the "disassembly line"
developed by the meat packing factories. The tools of scientific
management took into account the mechanical properties
of the body but not the mental and psychological ones. The

26. result was to cram ever more motions into the working day,
treating the factory worker as a cog in a machine, deliberately
depriving work of all meaning, all in the name of efficiency.
These beliefs have stuck with us, and although today we do not
go to quite the extremes advocated by the early
practitioners of scientific management, the die was cast for the
mindset of ever-increasing efficiency, ever-increasing
productivity from the workforce. The principle of improved
efficiency is hard to disagree with. The question is, at what
price?
Frederick Taylor thought there was "the one best way" of doing
things. Taylor's work, some people believe, has had the
largest impact upon the lives of people in this century than that
of anyone else. His book, The principles of scientific
management, published in 1911, guided factory development
and workforce habits across the world, from the United
States to Stalin's attempt to devise an efficient communist
workplace in the newly formed Soviet Union. You may not
have ever heard of him, but he is primarily responsible for our
notions of efficiency, of the work practices followed in
industry across the world, and even of the sense of guilt we
sometimes feel when we have been "goofing off," spending
time on some idle pursuit when we should be attending to
business.
Taylor's "scientific management" was a detailed, careful study
of jobs, breaking down each task into its basic
components. Once you knew the components, you could devise
the most efficient way of doing things, devise
procedures that enhanced performance and increased the
efficiency of workers. If Taylor's methods were followed
properly, management could raise workers' pay while at the
same time increasing company profit. In fact, Taylor's
methods required management to raise the pay, for money was
used as the powerful incentive to get the workers to

27. follow the procedures and work more efficiently. According to
Taylor, everybody would win: the workers would get more
money, the management more production and more profit.
Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? The only problem was that
workers hated it.
Taylor, you see, thought of people as simple, mechanical
machines. Find the best way to do things, and have people do it,
hour after hour, day after day. Efficiency required no deviation.
Thought was eliminated. First of all, said Taylor, the sort of
people who could shovel dirt, do simple cutting, lathing, and
drilling, and in general do the lowest-level of tasks, were not
capable of thought. "Brute laborers" is how he regarded them.
Second, if thought was needed, it meant that there was
some lack of clarity in the procedures or the process, which
signaled that the procedures were wrong. The problem with
thinking, explained Taylor, was not only that most workers were
incapable of it, but that thinking slowed the work down.
That's certainly true: why, if we never had to think, just imagine
how much faster we could work. In order to eliminate the
need for thought, Taylor stated that it was necessary to reduce
all work to the routine, that is all the work except for
people like him who didn't have to keep fixed hours, who didn't
have to follow procedures, who were paid literally
hundreds of times greater wages than the brutes, and who were
allowed &emdash; encouraged &emdash; to think .
Taylor thought that the world itself was neat and tidy. If only
everyone would do things according to procedure, everything
would run smoothly, producing a clean, harmonious world.
Taylor may have thought he understood machines, but he
certainly didn't understand people. In fact, he didn't really
understand the complexity of machines and the complexity of
work. And he certainly didn't understand the complexity of the
world.

28. The World Is Not Neat and Tidy
The world is not neat and tidy. Things not only don't always
work as planned, but the notion of "plan" itself is suspect.
Organizations spend a lot of time planning their future
activities, but although the act of doing the planning is useful,
the
actual plans themselves are often obsolete even before their
final printing.
There are lots of reasons for this. Those philosophically
inclined can talk about the fundamental nature of quantum
uncertainty, of the fundamental statistical nature of matter.
Alternatively, one can talk of complexity theory and chaos
theory, where tiny perturbations can have major, unexpected
results at some future point. I prefer to think of the difficulties
as consequences of the complex interactions that take place
among the trillions of events and objects in the world, so
many interactions that even if science were advanced enough to
understand each individual one -- which it isn't -- there
are simply too many combinations and perturbations possible to
ever have worked out all possibilities. All of these
different views are quite compatible with one another.
Consider these examples of things that can go wrong:
A repair crew disconnects a pump from service in a nuclear
power plant, carefully placing tags on the controls so
that the operators will know that this particular unit is
temporarily out of service. Later a minor incident occurs, and
as the operators attempt to deal with it, they initially diagnose it
in a reasonable, but erroneous way. Eventually, the
problem becomes so serious that the entire plant is destroyed:
the worst accident in the history of American

29. nuclear power. Among the factors hindering their correct
recognition of the situation is that the tags so carefully
placed to indicate the out-of-service unit hang over another set
of indicators, blocking them from view. Could this
have been predicted beforehand? Maybe. But it wasn't.
A hospital x-ray technician enters a dosage for an x-ray
machine, then realizes the machine is in the wrong mode
and corrects the setting. However, the machine's computer
program wasn't designed to handle a rapidly made
correction, so it did not properly register the new value.
Instead, it delivered a massive overdose to the patient.
Sometime later, the patient died of the overdose. The accident
goes undiagnosed, because as far as anyone can
determine, the machine had done the correct thing. Moreover,
the effect of overdosage doesn't show up
immediately, so when the symptoms were reported, they were
not correlated with the incident, or for that matter,
with the machine. When the machine's performance first comes
under suspicion, the company who manufactured
it explains in detail why such an accident is impossible. The
situation repeats itself in several different hospitals,
killing a number of patients before a sufficient pattern emerges
that the problem is recognized and the design of
the machine is fixed. Could this have been predicted
beforehand? Maybe. But it wasn't.
The French air traffic controllers seem to be forever
complaining, frequently calling strikes and protests. American
air traffic controllers aren't all that happy either. And guess
what the most effective protest method is? Insisting on
following procedures. On normal days, if the workers follow the
procedures precisely, work slows up, and in the
case of air traffic control, airline traffic across the entire world
is interfered with. The procedures must be violated to
allow the traffic to flow smoothly. Of course, if there is an

30. accident and the workers are found not to have followed
procedures, they are blamed and punished.
The United States Navy has a formal, rigid hierarchy of
command and control, with two classes of workers --
enlisted crew and officers -- and a rigid layer of formal rank
and assignment. There are extensive procedures for all
tasks. Yet in their work habits, especially in critical operations,
rank seems to be ignored and crew members
frequently question the actions. Sometimes they even debate the
appropriate action to be taken. The crew,
moreover, is always changing. There are always new people
who have not learned the ship's procedures, and even
the veterans often don't have more than two or three year's
experience with the ship: the Navy has a policy of
rotating assignment. Sounds horrible, doesn't it? Isn't the
military supposed to be the model of order and
structure? But wait. Look at the outcomes: the crew functions
safely and expertly in dangerous, high-stress
conditions. What is happening here?
These examples illustrate several points. The world is extremely
complex, too complex to keep track of, let alone predict.
In retrospect, looking back after an accident, it always seems
obvious. There are always a few simple actions that, had
they been taken, would have prevented an accident. There are
always precursor events that, had they been perceived and
interpreted properly would have warned of the coming accident.
Sure, but this is in retrospect, when we know how things
turned out.
Remember, life is complex. Lots of stuff is always happening,
most of which is irrelevant to the task at hand. We all know
that it is important to ignore the irrelevant and attend to the

31. relevant. But how does one know which is which? Ah.
We human beings are a complex mixture of motives and
mechanisms. We are sense-making animals, always trying to
understand and give explanations for the things we encounter.
We are social animals, seeking company, working well in
small groups. Sometimes this is for emotional support,
sometimes for assistance, sometimes for selfish reasons, so we
have someone to feel superior to, to show off to, to tell our
problems to. We are narcissistic and hedonistic, but also
altruistic. We are lots of things, sometimes competing,
conflicting things. And we are also animals, with complex
biological drives that strongly affect behavior: emotional
drives, sexual drives, hunger drives. Strong fears, strong
desires,
strong phobias, and strong attractions.
Making Sense of the World
If an airplane crashes on the border between the United States
and Canada, killing half the passengers, in which country
should the survivors be buried?
We are social creatures, understanding creatures. We try to
make sense of the world. We assume that information is
sensible, and we do the best we can with what we receive. This
is a virtue. It makes us successful communicators,
efficient and robust in going about our daily activities. It also
means we can readily be tricked. It wasn't Moses who
brought the animals aboard the ark, it was Noah. It isn't the
survivors who should be buried, it is the casualties.
It's a good thing we are built this way: this compliance saves us
whenever the world goes awry. By making sense of the
environment, by making sense of the events we encounter, we
know what to attend to, what to ignore. Human attention is

32. the limiting factor, a well known truism of psychology and of
critical importance today. Human sensory systems are
bombarded with far more information than can be processed in
depth: some selection has to be made. Just how this
selection is done has been the target of prolonged investigation
by numerous cognitive scientists who have studied
people's behavior when overloaded with information, by
neuroscientists who have tried to follow the biological
processing
of sensory signals, and by a host of other investigators. I was
one of them: I spent almost ten years of my research life
studying the mechanisms of human attention.
One understanding of the cognitive process of attention comes
from the concept of a "conceptual model," a concept that
will gain great importance in Chapter 8 when I discuss how to
design technology that people can use. A conceptual
model is, to put it most simply, a story that makes sense of the
situation.
I sit at my desk with a large number of sounds impinging upon
me. It is an easy matter to classify the sounds. What is all
that noise outside? A family must be riding their bicycles and
the parents are yelling to their children. And the neighbor's
dogs are barking at them, which is why my dogs started barking.
Do I really know this? No. I didn't even bother to look
out the window: my mind subconsciously, automatically created
the story, creating a comprehensive explanation for the
noises, even as I concentrated upon the computer screen.
How do I know what really happened? I don't. I listened to the
sounds and created an explanation, one that was logical,
heavily dependent upon past experience with those sound
patterns. It is very likely to be correct, but I don't really know.
Note that the explanation also told me which sounds went

33. together. I associated the barking dogs with the family of
bicyclists. Maybe the dogs were barking at something else.
Maybe. The point is not that I might be wrong, the point is
that this is normal human behavior. Moreover, it is human
behavior that stands us in good stead. I am quite confident that
my original interpretations were correct, confident enough that I
won't bother to check. I could be wrong.
A good conceptual model of events allows us to classify them
into those relevant and those not relevant, dramatically
simplifying life: we attend to the relevant and only monitor the
irrelevant. Mind you, this monitoring and classification is
completely subconscious. The conscious mind is usually
unaware of the process. Indeed, the whole point is to reserve
the conscious mind for the critical events of the task being
attended to and to suppress most of the other, non-relevant
events from taking up the limited attentional resources of
consciousness.
On the whole, human consciousness avoids paying attention to
the routine. Conscious processing attends to the non-
routine, to the discrepancies and novelties, to things that go
wrong. As a result, we are sensitive to changes in the
environment, remarkably insensitive to the commonplace, the
routine.
Consider how conceptual models play a role in complex
behavior, say the behavior of a nuclear power plant, with many

34. systems interacting. A nuclear power plant is large and
complex, so it is no surprise that things are always breaking.
Minor things. I like to think of this as analogous to my home. In
my house, things seem forever to be breaking, and my
home is nowhere near as complex as a power station. Light
bulbs are continually burning out, several door hinges and
motors need oiling, the bathroom faucet leaks, and the fan for
the furnace is making strange noises. Similar breakdowns
happen in the nuclear power plant, and although there are repair
crews constantly attending to them, the people in the
control room have to decide which of the events are important,
which are just the everyday background noise that have
no particular significance.
Most of the time people do brilliantly. People are very good at
predicting things before they happen. Experts are
particularly good at this because of their rich prior experience.
When a particular set of events occurs, they know exactly
what will follow.
But what happens when the unexpected happens? Do we go
blindly down the path of the most likely interpretation? Of
course, in fact this is the recommended strategy. Most of the
time we behave not only correctly, but cleverly, anticipating
events before they happen. You seldom hear about those

35. instances. We get the headlines when things go wrong, not
when they go right.
Look back at the incidents I described earlier. The nuclear
power incident is the famous Three Mile Island event that
completely destroyed the power-generating unit and caused such
a public loss in confidence in nuclear power that no
American plant has been built since. The operators
misdiagnosed the situation, leading to a major calamity. But the
misdiagnosis was a perfectly reasonable one. As a result, they
concentrated on items they thought relevant to their
diagnosis and missed other cues, which they thought were just
part of the normal background noise. The tags that
blocked the view would not normally have been important.
In the hospital x-ray situation, the real error was in the design
of the software system, but even here, the programmer
erred in not thinking through all of the myriad possible
sequences of operation, something not easy to do. There are
better
ways of developing software that would have made it more
likely to have caught these problems before the system was
released to hospitals, but even then, there are no guarantees. As
for the hospital personnel who failed to understand the
relationship, well, they too were doing the best they could to
interpret the events and to get through their crowded, hectic

36. days. They interpreted things according to normal events, which
was wrong only because this one was very abnormal.
Do we punish people for failure to follow procedures? This is
what Frederick Taylor would have recommended. After all,
management determines the one best way to do things, writes a
detailed procedure to be followed in every situation, and
expects workers to follow them. That's how we get maximum
efficiency. But how is it possible to write a procedure for
absolutely every possible situation, especially in a world filled
with unexpected events? Answer: it's not possible. This
doesn't stop people from trying. Procedures and rule books
dominate industry. The rule books take up huge amounts of
shelf space. In some industries, it is impossible for any
individual to know all the rules. The situation is made even
worse
by national legislatures who can't resist adding new rules. Was
there a major calamity? Pass a law prohibiting some
behavior, or requiring some other behavior. Of course, the law
strikes at the easiest source to blame, whereas the situation
may have been so complex that no single factor was to blame.
Nonetheless, the law sits there, further controlling sense
and reasonableness in the conduct of business.
Do we need procedures? Of course. The best procedures will
mandate outcomes, not methods. Methods change: it is the

37. outcomes we care about. Procedures must be designed with care
and attention to the social, human side of the
operation. Else we have the existing condition in most
industries. If the procedures are followed exactly, work slows to
an
unacceptable level. In order to perform properly it is necessary
to violate the procedures. Workers get fired for lack of
efficiency, which means they are subtly, unofficially
encouraged to violate the procedures. Unless something goes
wrong,
in which case they can be fired for failure to follow the
procedures.
Now look at the Navy. The apparent chaos, indecision and
arguments are not what they seem to be. The apparent chaos
is a carefully honed system, tested and evolved over
generations, that maximizes safety and efficiency even in the
face of
numerous unknowns, novel circumstances, and a wide range of
skills and knowledge by the crew. Having everyone
participate and question the actions serves several roles
simultaneously. The very ambiguity, the continual questioning
and debate keeps everyone in touch with the activity, thereby
providing redundant checks on the actions. This adds to the
safety, for now it is likely for errors to get detected before they
have caused problems. The newer crew members are
learning, and the public discussions among the other crew serve
as valuable training exercises, training mind you not in
some artificial, abstract fashion, but in real, relevant situations
where it really matters. And by not punishing people when
they speak out, question, or even bring the operations to a halt,
they encourage continual learning and performance

38. enhancement. It makes for an effective, well-tuned team.
New crew members don't have the experience of older ones.
This means they are not efficient, don't always know what to
do, and perform slowly. They need a lot of guidance. The
system automatically provides this constant supervision and
coaching, allowing people to learn on the job. At the same time,
because the minds of the new crew members are not yet
locked into the routines, their questioning can sometimes reveal
errors: they challenge the conventional mindset, asking
whether the simple explanation of events is correct. This is the
best way to avoid errors of misdiagnosis.
The continual challenge to authority goes against conventional
wisdom and is certainly a violation of the traditional
hierarchical management style. But it is so important to safety
that the aviation industry now has special training in crew
management, where the junior officers in the cockpit are
encouraged to question the actions of the captain. In turn, the
captain, who used to be thought of as the person in command,
with full authority, never to be questioned, has had to
learn to encourage crew members to question their every act.
The end result may look less regular, but it is far safer.
The Navy's way of working is the safest, most sensible
procedure. Accidents are minimized. The system is extremely
safe. Despite the fact that the Navy is undertaking dangerous
operations under periods of rushed pace and high stress,
there are remarkably few mishaps. If the Navy would follow
formal procedures and a strict hierarchy of rank, the result
would very likely be an increase in accident rate . Other
industries would do well to copy this behavior. Fred Taylor
would
turn over in his grave. (But he would be efficient about it,
without any wasted motion.)

39. Human Error
Machines, including computers, don't err in the sense that they
are fully deterministic, always returning the same value for
the same inputs and operations. Someday we may have
stochastic and/or quantum computation, but even then, we will
expect them to follow precise laws of operation. When
computers do err, it is either because a part has failed or
because
of human error, either in design specification, programming, or
faulty construction. People are not fully deterministic: ask a
person to repeat an operation, and the repetition is subject to
numerous variations.
People do err, but primarily because they are asked to perform
unnatural acts: to do detailed arithmetic calculations, to
remember details of some lengthy sequence or statement, or to
perform precise repetitions of actions. In the natural
world, no such acts would be required: all are a result of the
artificial nature of manufactured and invented artifacts.
Perhaps the best example of the arbitrary and inelegant fit of
human cognition to artificial demands contrasted with a
natural fit to natural demands is to contrast people's ability to
communicate with programming languages versus human
language.
Programming languages are difficult to learn, and a large
proportion of the population is incapable of learning them.
Moreover, even the most skilled programmers make errors, and
error finding and correction occupy a significant amount
of a programming team's time and effort. Moreover,
programming errors are serious. In the best circumstances, they
lead
to inoperable systems. In the worst, they lead to systems that
appear to work but produce erroneous results.

40. A person's first human language is so natural to learn that it is
done without any formal instruction: people must suffer
severe brain impairment to be incapable of learning language.
Note that "natural" does not mean "easy": it takes ten to
fifteen years to master one's native language. Second language
learning can be excruciatingly difficult.
Natural language, unlike programming language, is flexible,
ambiguous, and heavily dependent on shared understanding,
a shared knowledge base, and shared cultural experiences.
Errors in speech are seldom important: Utterances can be
interrupted, restarted, even contradicted, with little difficulty in
understanding. The system makes natural language
communication extremely robust.
Human error matters primarily because we followed a
technology-centered approach in which it matters. A human-
centered approach would make the technology robust,
compliant, and flexible. The technology should conform to the
people, not people to the technology.
Today, when faced with human error, the traditional response is
to blame the human and institute a new training
procedure: blame and train. But when the vast majority of
industrial accidents are attributed to human error, it indicates
that something is wrong with the system, not the people.
Consider how we would approach an system failure due to a
noisy environment: we wouldn't blame the noise, we would
instead design a system that was robust in the face of noise.
This is exactly the approach that should be taken in response to
human error: redesign the system to fit the people who
must use it. This means to avoid the incompatibilities between
human and machine that generate error, to make it so that

41. errors can be rapidly detected and corrected, and to be tolerant
of error. To "blame and train" does not solve the problem.
Being Analog, continued.
Page 3 of 3
HUMANS & COMPUTERS AS COOPERATING SYSTEMS
Because humans and computers are such different kinds of
systems, it should be possible to develop a symbiotic,
complementary strategy for cooperative interaction. Alas,
today's approaches are wrong. One major theme is to make
computers more like humans. This is the original dream behind
classical Artificial Intelligence: to simulate human
intelligence. Another theme is to make people more like
computers. This is how technology is designed today: the
designers determine the needs of the technology and then ask
people to conform to those needs. The result is an ever-
increasing difficulty in learning the technology, and an ever-
increasing error rate. It is no wonder that society exhibits an
ever-increasing frustration with technology.
Consider the following attributes of humans and machines
presented from today's machine-centered point of view:
The Machine-Centered View
People Machines
Vague Precise
Disorganized Orderly
Distractible Undistractible
Emotional Unemotional

42. Illogical Logical
Note how the humans lose: all the attributes associated to
people are negative, all the ones associated with machines are
positive. But now consider attributes of humans and machines
presented from a human-centered point of view:
The Human-Centered View
People Machines
Creative Unoriginal
Compliant Rigid
Attentive to change Insensitive to change
Resourceful Unimaginative
Now note how machines lose: all the attributes associated with
people are positive, all the ones associated with machines
are negative.
The basic point is that the two different viewpoints are
complementary. People excel at qualitative considerations,
machines at quantitative ones. As a result, for people, decisions
are flexible because they follow qualitative as well as
quantitative assessment, modified by special circumstances and
context. For the machine, decisions are consistent,
based upon quantitative evaluation of numerically specified,
context-free variables. Which is to be preferred? Neither: we
need both.

43. It's good that computers don't work like the brain. The reason I
like my electronic calculator is because it is accurate: it
doesn't make errors. If it were like my brain, it wouldn't always
get the right answer. The very difference is what makes the
device so valuable. I think about the problems and the method
of attack. It does the dull, dreary details of arithmetic -- or
in more advanced machines, of algebraic manipulations and
integration. Together, we are a more powerful team than
either of us alone.
The same principle applies to all our machines: the difference is
what is so powerful, for together, we complement one
another. However, this is useful only if the machine adapts
itself to human requirements. Alas, most of today's machines,
especially the computer, force people to use them on their
terms, terms that are antithetical to the way people work and
think. The result is frustration, an increase in the rate of error
(usually blamed on the user -- human error -- instead of on
faulty design), and a general turning-away from technology.
Will the interactions between people and machines be done
correctly in 50 years? Might schools of computer science
start teaching the human-centered approach that is necessary to
reverse the trend? I don't see why not.
CHAPTER 7: NOTES
Being analog. Omar Wason suggested this title at the conference
"Jerry's Retreat," Aug. 19, 1996. The instant I heard it I
knew I wanted to use it, so I sought his permission which he
graciously gave.
Sections of this chapter originally appeared in Norman, D. A.
(1997). Why it's good that computers don't work like the
brain. In P. J. Denning & R. M. Metcalfe (Ed.), Beyond
calculation: The next fifty years of computing. New York:

44. Copernicus: Springer-Verlag. Many of the ideas made their
original appearance in Norman, D. A. (1993). Things that make
us smart. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
I apologize to readers of my earlier books and papers for this
repetition, but what can I say: the argument fits perfectly
here, so in it goes.
It requires a biblical name to fool you. Erickson, T. A. &
Mattson, M. E. (1981). From words to meaning: A semantic
illusion.
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20, 540-552.
The paper that started the quest for understanding why
people have trouble discovering the problem with the question,
"How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the
Ark?"
Reder and Kusbit followed-up on the work and present
numerous other examples of sentences that show this effect.
Reder, L. M. & Kusbit, G. W. (1991). Locus of the Moses
illusion: Imperfect encoding, retrieval, or match? Journal of
Memory and Language, 30, 385-406.
Humans versus computers. This section was originally printed
as Norman, D. A. (1997). Why it's good that computers
don't work like the brain. In P. J. Denning & R. M. Metcalfe
(Ed.), Beyond calculation: The next fifty years of computing.

45. New York: Copernicus: Springer-Verlag.
The one best way. Kanigel, R. (1997). The one best way:
Frederick Winslow Taylor and the enigma of efficiency. New
York:
Viking.
The question is at what price. For an excellent, in-depth
analysis of the price paid in the name of efficiency, see Rifkin,
J.
(1995). The end of work: The decline of the global labor force
and the dawn of the post-market era. New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons.
His book, The principles of scientific management. Taylor, F.
W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. New
York: Harper & Brothers. (See note 7.)
Taylor stated that it was necessary to reduce all work to the
routine. Taylor's work is described well in three books. First,
there is Taylor's major work: Taylor, F. W. (1911). The
principles of scientific management. New York: Harper &
Brothers.
Second, there is the masterful and critical biography of Taylor,
one that illustrates the paradox between what Taylor
professed and how he himself lived and acted: Kanigel, R.
(1997). The one best way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the
enigma of efficiency. New York: Viking.

46. Finally, there is Rabinbach's masterful treatment of the impact
of changing views of human behavior, the rise of the
scientific method (even when it wasn't very scientific), and the
impact of Taylor not only on modern work, but on political
ideologies as well, especially Marxism and Fascism: Rabinbach,
A. (1990). The human motor: Energy, fatigue, and the
origins of modernity. New York: Basic Books.
Also see "Taylorismus + Fordismus = Amerikanismus," Chapter
6 of Hughes, T. P. (1989). American genesis: A century of
invention and technological enthusiasm, 1870&emdash;1970.
New York: Viking Penguin.
A repair crew disconnects a pump from service in a nuclear
power plant. This is an oversimplified account of some of the
many factors of the Three-Mile island Nuclear Power accident.
See Kemeny, J. G., et al. (1979). Report of the President's
Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island. New York:
Pergamon. Rubenstein, E. (1979). The accident that
shouldn't have happened. IEEE Spectrum, 16 (11, November),
33-42.
A hospital x-ray technician enters a dosage for an x-ray
machine, then realizes it is wrong. See Appendix A, Medical
devices: The Therac-25 story, in Leveson, N. G. (1995).
Safeware: System safety and computers. Reading, MA:
Addison-

47. Wesley. This book also includes nice appendices on The
Therac-25 story (x-ray overdosage), the Bhopal chemical
disaster, the Apollo 13 incident, DC-10s, and the NASA
Challenger. And the various Nuclear Power industry problems,
including Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
There are better ways of developing software. See Nancy
Leveson's book Safeware: System safety and computers.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley (1995). For a scary discussion
of the failures of system design, see Neumann, P. (1995).
Computer-related risks. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
If the Navy would follow formal procedures and a strict
hierarchy of rank, the result would very likely be an increase in
accident rate. See Hutchin's analysis of crew training and error
management in ship navigation: Hutchins, E. (1995).
Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. See also La
Porte, T. R. & Consolini, P. M. (1991). Working in practice
but not in theory: Theoretical challenges of high-reliability
organizations. Journal of Public Administration Research and
Theory, 19-47.
These issues are well treated by Robert Pool in both his book
and the excerpt in the Journal Technology Review:
Pool, R. (1997). Beyond engineering: How society shapes

48. technology. New York: Oxford University Press. Pool, R.
(1997).
When failure is not an option. Technology Review, 100 (5), 38-
45. (Also see http://web.mit.edu/techreview/).
Attributes of humans and machines taken from today's machine-
centered point of view and a human-centered point of
view. From Norman, D. A. (1993). Things that make us smart.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
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the electronic version of

50. The Virtual
Community
by Howard Rheingold
"When you think of a title for a book, you are
forced to think of something short and
evocative, like, well, 'The Virtual Community,'
even though a more accurate title might be:
'People who use computers to communicate,
form friendships that sometimes form the basis
of communities, but you have to be careful to
not mistake the tool for the task and think that
just writing words on a screen is the same
thing as real community.'" - HLR
Introduction
Chapter One: The Heart of the
WELL
Chapter Two: Daily Life in
Cyberspace: How the
Computerized Counterculture Built
a New Kind of Place
Chapter Three: Visionaries and
Convergences: The Accidental
History of the Net
Chapter Four: Grassroots
Groupminds
Chapter Five: Multi-user
Dungeons and Alternate Identities
Chapter Six: Real-time Tribes
Chapter Seven: Japan and the Net
Chapter Eight: Telematique and
Messageries Rose: A Tale of Two
Virtual Communities
Chapter Nine: Electronic Frontiers

51. and Online Activists
Chapter Ten: Disinformocracy
Bibliography
Chapter Two: Daily Life in Cyberspace:
How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind
of Place
I was still toting around my 1969 edition of the Whole Earth
Catalog when I
read an article about a new computer service that Whole Earth
publisher
Stewart Brand and his gang were starting in the spring of 1985.
For only $3
an hour, people with computers and modems could have access
to the kind of
online groups that cost five or ten times that much on other
public
telecommunication systems. I signed up for an account. I had
previously
suffered the initiation of figuring out how to plug in a modem
and use it to
connect to computer bulletin-board systems, or BBSs, and the
Source (an
early public information utility), so I was only a little dismayed
that I had to
learn a whole new set of commands to find my way through the
software to
the people. But established WELL users were extraordinarily
helpful to
newcomers, which more than made up for the bewilderment
caused by the
software. I started reading the conferences and began to post my
own
messages. Writing as a performing art! I was hooked in minutes.
Over a period of months, I fell into the habit of spending an

52. hour or two every
http://www.rheingold.com/howard
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http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/biblio.html
http://www.well.net/mwec/frontmatter/foreword.html
http://www.well.com/user/sbb/
day gazing in fascination at this window into a community that
was creating
itself right in front of my eyes. Although the system was only a
few months old,
the air of camaraderie and pioneer spirit was evident among the
regulars. Those
three-dollar hours crept up on me in ten- to thirty-minute
minivisits during the
workday and hourlong chunks in the evening. Still, my daily
telecommunicating
expenses were less than the price of a couple of drinks or a
double capuccino.
The cumulative economic impact of my new habit came home to
me when my
first month's bill was over $100.
As it happened, a friend of mine had to deliver some artwork to
the Whole Earth

53. Catalog people, at the Sausalito office where the WELL also
was located. So I
went along for the ride. When we got to the rambling series of
ancient offices in
one of the last bohemian enclaves of the Sausalito houseboat
district, I asked for
the WELL. I was led to a small room and the staff of one,
Matthew McClure. I
talked with Matthew about the possibility of diminishing my
monthly bill by
starting and hosting a conference about the mind.
Hosts are the people who serve the same role in the WELL that
a good host is
supposed to serve at a party or salon--to welcome newcomers,
introduce people
to one another, clean up after the guests, provoke discussion,
and break up fights
if necessary. In exchange for these services, WELL hosts are
given rebates on
their bills. I was worried that my hosting duties might take up
too much of my
time.
Matthew smiled at my question. I know the meaning of that
smile now, although
it puzzled me then. He recognized what was happening to me.
He judged it to be
a good thing to happen to me, and to the WELL. He was right.
But it was still
Mephistophelian. He said, "Some hosts get away with less than
an hour a week."
That was the fall of 1985. By the fall of 1986, the WELL was a
part of my life I
wasn't willing to do without. My wife was concerned, then

54. jealous, then
angry. The night we had the climactic argument, she said,
referring to the small,
peculiar, liberal arts college where we first met: "This is just
like Reed. A
bunch of intelligent misfits have found each other, and now
you're
having a high old time." The shock of recognition that came
with that
statement seemed to resolve the matter between us.
The WELL is rooted in the San Francisco Bay area and in two
separate cultural
revolutions that took place there in past decades. The Whole
Earth Catalog
originally emerged from the Haight-Ashbury counterculture as
Stewart Brand's
way of providing access to tools and ideas to all the
communards who were
exploring alternate ways of life in the forests of Mendocino or
the high deserts
outside Santa Fe. The Whole Earth Catalogs and the magazines
they spawned--
Co-Evolution Quarterly and its successor, Whole Earth Review-
-seem to have
outlived the counterculture itself, since the magazine and
catalogs still exist after
twenty-five years.
One of Whole Earth's gurus, Buckminster Fuller, was fond of
using the analogy
of the tiprudder--the small rudder on very big ships that is used
to control the
larger, main rudder. The tiprudder people who steer the
movements and

55. http://www.well.com/user/mmc/
http://www.reed.edu/
http://www.bfi.org/
disciplines that steer society--the editors and engineers,
scientists and science-
fiction writers, freelance programmers and permaculture
evangelists, grassroots
political activists and congressional aides--continued to need
new tools and
ideas, even though they were no longer a counterculture but part
of the
mainstream. These cultural experimenters continued to feed Co-
Evolution
Quarterly and then Whole Earth Review through decades when
magazines died
by the thousands. Even the idea that you could publish books on
the West Coast
was a revolution when it happened; in 1992, when Publishers
Weekly ran an
article on the history of West Coast publishing, it started with
the Whole Earth
Catalog. The first Whole Earth Catalog was the first idealistic
enterprise from
the counterculture, besides music, that earned the cultural
legitimation of
financial success.
The Whole Earth Catalog crew, riding on the catalog's success,
launched a new
magazine, The Whole Earth Software Review, and, after the
WELL was started,
received a record-breaking $1.4 million advance for the Whole
Earth Software
Catalog. It was time for the string of successes to take another

56. turn: the WELL
was the only one of the three projects to succeed. The Whole
Earth Review is
what survived in print; the WELL did more than survive.
The inexpensive public online service was launched because
two comrades from
a previous cultural revolution noticed that the technology of
computer
conferencing had potential far beyond its origins in military,
scientific, and
government communications. Brand had been part of the faculty
at an online
institute devoted to stretching the imaginations of business
leaders--the Western
Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI)--which introduced him to
the effectiveness
of computer conferencing. WBSI was also where he connected
with Larry
Brilliant.
Brilliant and Brand shared a history at the center of several of
the most colorful
events of the 1960s: Brand was "on the bus" with Ken Kesey
and the Merry
Pranksters (Kesey's pot bust, as described in Tom Wolfe's
Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test, happened on the roof of Brand's apartment; Brand
was one of the
organizers of the seminal Trips Festival that gave birth to Bill
Graham Presents
and the whole rock concert scene). Brilliant had been part of the
Prankster-
affiliated commune, the Hog Farm (which had organized the
security
arrangements for Woodstock around the judicious use of cream

57. pies and seltzer
bottles and had whipped up "breakfast in bed for 400,000").
After his Hog Farm
days, Brilliant became a doctor and an epidemiologist and ended
up
spearheading the World Health Organization's successful effort
to eliminate
smallpox.
Brilliant was involved with another health-care effort aimed at
curing blindness
in Asia, the Seva Foundation, and he had found that Seva's far-
flung volunteers,
medical staff, and organizational directors could meet and solve
problems
effectively through computer conferencing. When a medical
relief helicopter lost
an engine in a remote region of Nepal, the organization's online
network located
the nearest spare parts, gained key information about ways to
cut through local
bureaucracies, and transported the needed parts to the crippled
aircraft. Brilliant
became one of the principles of NETI, a business that created
and licensed
computer conferencing systems. After they met via WBSI's
conferencing
http://www.well.com/user/larry/
http://www.peak.org/~clapp/kesey/images/further2.jpg
http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/People/KenKesey.html
http://www.dragonet.es/usuarios/markbcki/wolfe.htm
http://www.webcom.com/~enoble/diggers/trips.html
http://www.mhs.mendocino.k12.ca.us/MenComNet/Business/Ret
ail/Larknet/adventures1#hog
http://www.who.org/

58. http://www.seva.org/
system, Brilliant offered Brand the license to Picospan (the
WELL's
conferencing software) and the money to lease a minicomputer,
in exchange for
a half interest in the new enterprise. The new enterprise started
out in the Whole
Earth Review's charming but ramshackle office, leased a dozen
incoming
telephone lines, installed what was then a state-of-the-art
minicomputer, and set
up modems, and in 1985 the WELL was born.
Brand and Brilliant both hoped the WELL would become a
vehicle for social
change, but instead of trying to mold it in a specific image, they
wanted to see
the vehicle emerge spontaneously. The WELL was consciously a
cultural
experiment, and the business was designed to succeed or fail on
the basis of the
results of the experiment.
The person Stewart Brand chose to be the WELL's first director-
-technician,
manager, innkeeper, and bouncer--was Matthew McClure, not
coincidentally a
computer-savvy veteran of the Farm, one of the most successful
communes that
started in the 1960s. Brand and McClure started a low-rules,
high-tone
discussion, where savvy networkers, futurists, intelligent
misfits of several kinds
who had learned how to make our outsider status work for us in

59. one way or
another, could take the technology of CMC to its cultural limits.
When McClure
left a year and a half later, another Farm veteran, Cliff Figallo,
took over. While
Figallo managed the business, yet another Farm veteran, John
"Tex" Coate, was
charged with building the community.
The Farm veterans had tried for more than a decade to create a
self-sufficient
colony in Tennessee. At the Farm's height, more than one
thousand people
worked together to try to create their own agricultural society.
It still exists and
is still surprisingly self-sufficient. They homebirthed and
homeschooled, built
laundries for washing hundreds of diapers, grew soybeans, and
even extended
their efforts to other countries--Cliff Figallo had spent years in
Guatemala on
behalf of Plenty, the Farm's international development arm,
helping Maya
villages install hygienic water systems. Matthew and Cliff and
John and their
families, including eight children, left the Farm after twelve
years, partially out
of disagreement with the way it was governed, partially out of
weariness. Self-
sufficiency is very hard work.
Brand thought the Farm alumni were perfect choices for their
jobs at the WELL.
Matthew was the only one with prior computer experience, but
what they knew
from the front lines of communal living about the way people

60. reach decisions
and create cultures collectively--and the ways people fail to
reach decisions and
create cultures--more than made up for their lack of computer
savvy. By 1992,
the WELL staff had grown to fifteen, the original minicomputer
was long gone,
and all the Farm veterans had moved on to other enterprises.
By the time I had been esconced in the WELL for a year, it
seemed evident to
me that the cultural experiment of a self-sustaining online salon
was succeeding
very well. At that point, as I was becoming convinced that we
were all setting
some sort of cultural precedent, I interviewed online both
Matthew McClure and
Kevin Kelly, who had been part of the original group that
founded the WELL.
One of the advantages of computer conferencing is the
community memory that
http://www.sfsu.edu/~helpdesk/docs/using/picospan.htm
http://www.well.com/user/mmc/
http://www.thefarm.org/
http://www.sfgate.com/~tex/
http://www.hotwired.com/People/Staff/kevin/
preserves key moments in the history of the community. Sure
enough, although I
had not looked at it in years, the online oral history was still
around, in the
archives conference. The responses were dated October 1986.

61. Matthew McClure recalled that "Stewart's vision was very
important in the
design." The vision that McClure and Brand agreed on involved
three goals:
to facilitate communications among interesting people in the
San Francisco Bay
area, to provide sophisticated conferencing at a revolutionary
low price, and to
bring e-mail to the masses. To reach a critical mass, they knew
they would need
to start with interesting people having conversations at a
somewhat more
elevated level than the usual BBS stuff. In Matthew's words,
"We needed a
collection of shills who could draw the suckers into the tents."
So they invited a
lot of different people, gave them free accounts, called them
"hosts," and
encouraged them to re-create the atmosphere of a Paris salon--a
bunch of salons.
Brand, a biologist, insisted on letting the business grow instead
of artificially
stimulating it. Instead of spending money on glossy advertising,
they gave free
accounts to journalists.
McClure recalled two distinct growth spurts. First, the word
about the WELL
spread among the more adventurous members of the bay area's
computer
professionals, and the free journalist accounts paid off as
WELLites began to
write and publish articles about the WELL. Brand went to
Cambridge to write a
book, and the hosts seemed to have the run of the place.

62. "The next major event," McClure recalled, "was the
organization of the
Deadhead conference and subsequent promotion via interview
and occasional
remarks on local radio. Suddenly we had an onslaught of new
users, many of
whom possessed the single characteristic that most endears a
user to a sysop
[system operator: ratchet jaws [habitual talkativeness. The
Deadheads came
online and seemed to know instinctively how to use the system
to create a
community around themselves, for which I think considerable
thanks are due to
Maddog, Marye, and Rosebody. Not long thereafter we saw the
concept of the
online superstar taken to new heights with the advent of the
True Confessions
conference. . . . Suddenly our future looked assured. . . ."
Kevin Kelly had been editor of Whole Earth Review for several
years when the
WELL was founded. The Hackers' Conference had been his
idea. Kelly recalled
the original design goals that the WELL's founders had in mind
when they
opened for business in 1985.
The design goals were:
1) That it be free. This was a goal, not a commitment. We knew
it wouldn't be
exactly free but it should be as free (cheap) as we could make
it. . . .
2) It should be profit making . . . After much hard, low-paid

63. work by Matthew and
Cliff, this is happening. The WELL is at least one of the few
operating large
systems going that has a future.
3) It would be an open-ended universe . . .
4) It would be self-governing . . .
5) It would be a self-designing experiment. . . . The early users
were to design the
system for later users. The usage of the system would co-evolve
with the system as
it was built. . . .
6) It would be a community, one that reflected the nature of
Whole Earth
publications. I think that worked out fine.
7) Business users would be its meat and potatoes. Wrong. . . .
"The system is the people" is what you see when you log into
TWICS, an
English-language conferencing system in Tokyo. The same
turned out to be true
for the WELL, both by design and by happenstance. Matthew
McClure
understood that he was in the business of selling the customers
to each other and
letting them work out everything else. This was a fundamental
revelation that
stood the business in good stead in the years to follow. His
successor, Farm
alumnus Clifford Figallo, also resisted the temptation to control

64. the culture
instead of letting it work out its own system of social
governance.
People who were looking for a grand collective project in
cyberspace flocked to
the WELL. The inmates took over the asylum, and the asylum
profited from it.
"What it is is up to us" became the motto of the nascent WELL
community.
Some kind of map of what "it" is can help you to understand the
WELL. Here is
a snapshot of the WELL's public conference structure. Keep in
mind that each
conference can have as many as several hundred different topics
going on inside
it (like the Parenting conference topic list in chapter 1), and
each topic can have
several hundred responses. For the sake of space, this listing
does not include
sixteen conferences on social responsibility and politics, twenty
conferences on
media and communications, twelve conferences about business
and livelihood,
eighteen conferences about body-mind-health, eleven
conferences about
cultures, seventeen conferences about place, and seventeen
conferences about
interactions.
List of Public Conferences on the WELL
----------
ARTS AND LETTERS

65. ----------
Art Com Photography (g pho)
Electronic
Net
(g acen) Poetry (g poetry)
Art and
Graphics
(g gra) Radio (g rad)
Beatles (g beat) Science (g sf)
Books (g books) Fiction (g sf)
Comics (g comics) Songwriters (g song)
Design (g design) Theater (g theater)
Jazz (g jazz) Words (g words)
MIDI (g midi) Writers (g wri)
Movies (g movies) Zines/Fanzine (g f5)
Muchomedia (g mucho) Scene
NAPLPS (g naplps) Scene
RECREATION
----------
Bicycles (g bike) Games (g games)
Boating (g boat) Gardening (g gard)
Chess (g chess) Music (g music)
Cooking (g cook) Motoring (g car)

66. Collecting (g collect) Pets (g pets)
Drinks (g drinks) Outdoor (g out)
Flying (g flying) Recreation
Sports (g sports)
Wildlife (g wild)
ENTERTAINMENT
----------
Audio-
videophilia
(g aud) Movies (g movies)
Bay Area
Tonight
(g bat) Music (g music)
CDs (g cd) Potato! (g spud)
Comics (g comics) Restaurants (g rest)
Fun (g fun) Star Trek (g trek)
Jokes (g jokes) Television (g tv)
EDUCATION AND PLANNING
----------
Apple Library Environment (g environ)
Users (g alug) Earthquake (g quake)
Brainstorming (g brain) Homeowners (g home)
Biosphere II (g bio2) Indexing (g indexing)
Co-Housing (g coho) Network
Design (g design) Integrations (g origin)

67. Education (g ed) Science (g science)
Energy (g power) Transportation
(g
transport)
Whole Earth (g we)
Review
GRATEFUL DEAD
----------
Grateful Dead(g gd) Tapes (g tapes)
Deadlit (g deadlit) Tickets (g tix)
GD Hour (g gdh) Tours (g tours)
Feedback (g feedback) Tours (g tours)
COMPUTERS
AI/Forth/Realtime(g real Mac System7 (g mac7)
-time) MIDI (g midi)
Amiga (g amiga) NAPLPS (g naplps)
Apple (g apple) NeXt (g next)
Arts and Graphics(g gra) OS/2 (g os2)
Computer Books (g cbook) Printers (g print)
CP/M (g cpm) Programmer's(g net)
Desktop (g desk) Net
Publishing Scientific (g scicomp)
Hacking (g hack) computing
Hypercard (g hype) Software (g sdc)
IBM PC (g ibm) Design
Internet (g inter- Software/ (g soft-

68. net) Programming ware)
LANs (g lan) Software (g ssc)
Laptop (g lap) Support
Macintosh (g mac) Unix (g unix)
Mactech
(g mactech)
(g mactech)
Virtual (g vr)
Mac Network Admin(g macadm) Reality
Windows (g windows)
Word (g word)
Processing
THE WELL ITSELF
----------
Deeper
technical
(g deeper) Hosts (g host)
view Policy (g policy)
MetaWELL (g meta- System News (g sysnews)
well) Test (g test)
General
technical
(g gentech) Public (g public)
WELLcome and

69. help
(g well) programmers (g public)
Virtual (g vc)
Communities (g vc)
SOME POPULAR PRIVATE CONFERENCES ON THE WELL
Mail the hosts listed for information on their criteria for
admission.
BODY - MIND - HEALTH
----------
Crossroads (g xroads)
mail rabar for
entry
Gay (private) (g gaypriv)
mail hudu for
entry
Men on the WELL (g mow)
mail flash for
entry
Recovery (g recovery)
mail dhawk for
entry
Women on the WELL (g wow)
mail reva for
entry

70. Sacred Sites
Int'l.
(g ssi) mail rebop or
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COMPUTERS, COMMUNICATIONS
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Populations
The Whole Earth crowd--the granola-eating utopians, the solar-
power
enthusiasts, the space-station crowd, immortalists, futurists,
gadgeteers,
commune graduates, environmentalists, social activists--
constituted a core
population from the beginning. But a couple of other
populations of early
adopters made the WELL an open system as well as a specific
expression of one
side of San Francisco culture. One such element was the
subculture that had
been created by a cultural upheaval ten years after the
counterculture era--the
personal computer (PC) revolution.
"The personal computer revolutionaries were the
counterculture," Brand
reminded me when I asked him about the WELL's early cultural
amalgam.
Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had traveled to India in search of
enlightenment;

72. Lotus 1-2-3 designer and founder Mitch Kapor had been a
transcendental
meditation teacher. They were five to ten years younger than the
hippies, but
they came out of the zeitgeist of the 1960s, and embraced many
of the ideas of
personal liberation and iconoclasm championed by their slightly
older brothers
and sisters. The PC was to many of them a talisman of a new
kind of war of
liberation: when he hired him from Pepsi, Steve Jobs challenged
John Sculley,
"Do you want to sell sugared water to adolescents, or do you
want to change the
world?"
http://www.apple.com/
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Jobs.html
http://www.gii-awards.com/kaporbio.html
Personal computers and the PC industry were created by young
iconoclasts who
had seen the LSD revolution fizzle, the political revolution fail.
Computers for
the people was the latest battle in the same campaign. The
Whole Earth
organization, the same Point foundation that owned half the
WELL, had honored
the PC zealots, including the outlaws among them, with the
early Hackers'
conferences. Although the word hacker has taken on criminal
overtones in the
popular parlance, restricting it to urchins who break into other
people's computer
systems, the original hackers were young programmers who

73. flouted
conventional wisdom, delighted in finding elegant solutions to
vexing technical
problems, and liked to create entire new technologies. Without
them, the
Department of Defense's ARPA research never would have
succeeded in
creating computer graphics, computer communications, and the
antecedents of
personal computing.
The young computer wizards and the grizzled old hands who
were still messing
with mainframes showed up early at the WELL because the guts
of the system
itself--the Unix operating system and "C" language
programming code--were
available for tinkering by responsible craftspersons. The
original hackers looked
around the system for security holes and helped make the WELL
secure against
the darkside hackers. Making online tools available to the
population, rather than
breaking into other systems, was their game.
A third cultural element making up the initial mix of the WELL,
which
otherwise has drifted far from its counterculture origins in many
ways, were the
Deadheads. Books and theses have been written about the
subculture that has
grown up around the band the Grateful Dead. They had their
origins in the same
milieu that included the Merry Pranksters, the Hog Farm, and
the Whole Earth
Catalog. The Deadheads, many of whom weren't born when the

74. band started
touring, have a strong feeling of community that they can
manifest only in large
groups when the band has concerts. Deadheads can spot each
other on the road
via the semiotics of window decals and bumper stickers, or on
the streets via tie-
dyed uniforms, but Deadheads didn't have a place.
Then several technology-savvy Deadheads started a Grateful
Dead conference
on the WELL. GD, as it came to be known, was so
phenomenally successful that
for the first several years, Deadheads were by far the single
largest source of
income for the enterprise. Because of the way the WELL's
software allowed
users to build their own boundaries, many Deadheads would
invest in the
technology and the hours needed to learn the WELL's software,
solely in order
to trade audiotapes or argue about the meaning of lyrics--and
remain blithely
unaware of the discussions of politics and technology and
classical music
happening in other conferences. Those Deadheads who did "go
over the wall"
ended up having strong influence on the WELL at large. But
very different kinds
of communities began to grow in other parts of the
technological-social petri
dish that the Deadheads were keeping in business.
Along with the other elements came the first marathon
swimmers in the new
currents of the online information streams, the professional

75. futurists and writers
and journalists. Staff writers and editors for the New York
Times, Business Week,
the San Francisco Chronicle, Time, Rolling Stone, Byte,
Harper's, and the Wall
Street Journal use the WELL as a listening post; a few of them
are part of the
http://www.point.org/
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/command?stat+tom+tools+8
http://www.dead.net/
http://www.well.com/conf/gd/
community. Journalists tend to attract other journalists, and the
purpose of
journalists is to attract everybody else: most people have to use
an old medium
to hear news about the arrival of a new medium.
Persons
One important social rule was built into the software that the
WELL lives
inside: Nobody is anonymous. Everybody is required to attach
their real
userid to their postings. It is possible to use pseudonyms to
create alternate
identities, or to carry metamessages, but the pseudonyms are
always linked in
every posting to the real userid. The original PicoSpan software
offered to the
WELL had an option for allowing users to be anonymous, but
one of Stewart
Brand's few strong influences on system design was to insist
that the anonymity
option should not be offered.

76. Two of the first WELLites I met were Dhawk and Mandel. Like
new recruits or
rookies in any ongoing enterprise, we found ourselves relating
to each other as a
kind of cohort. A lot of that early fraternization was
necessitated by the
confusing nature of the WELL's software. The development of
human-user
interfaces for CMC was in the Pleistocene era when PicoSpan
was designed. It
isn't easy to find your way around the WELL, and at first there
is always the
terrifying delusion that everybody else on the WELL can see all
the mistakes
you make as you learn your way. The WELL's small staff was
available to help
confused newcomers via telephone, but the more computer-
savvy among the
newcomers were eager to actively encourage others. David
Hawkins had worked
as an engineer and electrician, and found that he quickly learned
enough about
the WELL's software to act as an unpaid guide for many of us
who joined
around the same time he did.
David Hawkins was studying to be a Baptist minister, and he
was
recently married to Corinne, a woman he had met at the
seminary. He was
from the Deep South. I had never known a Baptist minister or a
good old
boy. David changed his original career plans to enter the
ministry, and
Dhawk spent more and more time online, helping the lost,