Fantic

While reading the first few pages, regarding the "computer people" who are making it difficult for the general public to become acquainted with computers as a useful medium, I was reminded of an old Saturday Night Live skit about just such a computer geek. Nick Burns, "Your company's computer guy," is placed in charge of maintaining the computers for a business. He is not using computers to generate work, like the regular employees -- instead, his confidence is based on his computer expertise, and the fact that the workers have to look to him to solve their problems. It may not be possible to completely eliminate our need for computer experts, but Nelson would probably say that the world would be better if people like the workers in the skit knew enough about their computers so that they could focus on their work rather than having to worry about the media on which they compose it.

The problem is that computers have not been designed by the workers, but by people like Nick Burns. As a result, things like control schemes and default set-ups often get in the way of productivity. For all of the things a computer can do, many of its uses will go to waste if its interface is not intuitive. In a process of what Marx called "alienation," humans created computers, but made the mistake of becoming subject to their own creations. Computers are meant to be tools to simplify our lives, but instead they complicate most things. Now when someone is trying to create a piece of artwork on Photoshop, it could easily turn out that the person has to spend more time dealing with the software's interface, deep menus, unclear icons, and other organizational eccentricities than on the actual artwork.

To me, fantics sounds like the "art" of proper software development, and its something that could still use work, even though many improvements have been made since Nelson wrote the piece. It's not being ignored, though -- whenever I look at job listings for open-source software projects, "User Interface Specialists" are almost always in demand.