Welcome to Ethan’s Turtles - I’m Ethan (spoiler) and I write this newsletter to explore the relationship between digital design and critical theory.
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For the makers of digital platforms, new features can be incredibly useful:
They provide increased ‘value’ to a platform, potentially allowing you to raise prices
They offer onboarding ‘guardrails’ - implicitly suggesting both why to use the platform, and who the platform is for
What this implies is that the only path to offering users ‘more’ in a certain platform, is by increasing the number of features available in said platform.
But what if this wasn’t the only way to offer users more from a platform?
We tend to see platforms in a business-focused context - how can this platform solve a certain problem? How can it solve it better, for more people? This context lends itself to a feature-heavy product.
But a platform and a business are not synonymous. A business owns a platform, but a platform itself is a structure within which we can read and write words, media, art and more. A platform is, first and foremost, a text.
As something that can be read and written, it follows that there is a kind of literacy that is associated with a specific platform. Or rather, an electracy.
Electracy
Coined by Gregory Ulmer, his most succinct description of electracy explains that it “is to digital media what literacy is to print.”
At its core, electracy deals with the idea that there is an element of artistic practice in the creation and reading of digital media that extends beyond the purely rational, scientific literary systems - specifically the alphanumeric system of written language (words and numbers).
Ulmer utilised the concept to explore a new kind of pedagogy (methods of teaching) that could promote a more diverse and inclusive learning experience. This pedagogy allows students to construct objects of digital media as an expression of their learning, breaking out from the traditional academic framework of exams and essay-writing.
Rather than exploring the learning experience, I want to consider electracy in communicative practice - reading and writing.
I want to consider how the artistic practice of digital platform design can revolutionise written language.
Liberating words
Ulmer’s electracy was inspired by Jacques Derrida’s concept of grammatology.
I know, I know - who wants to read the word ‘grammatology’? At least ‘electracy’ had some zing to it. Bear with me, we’ll be back to digital platforms in just a moment.
In Derrida’s Of Grammatology, he proposes a controversial, yet fascinating idea about the relationship between speech and the written word.
Derrida critiques 19th century thinker Ferdinand de Saussure, who defined the relationship between spoken and written language hierarchically - spoken language was the primary form of language, and written language exists purely as a representation of the spoken.
Derrida, however, took objection to this. He argued that in fact written language did not purely exist to represent spoken language, but that the form and structure of writing influenced the knowledge and ideas we have. According to Derrida, writing has its own, unique, communicative value, separate from speech.
I find this decoupling fascinating because it offers designers of digital platforms a much broader reach of how they can ‘wrap’ written language in a digital space - by breaking away from an expectancy to represent spoken language, we can explore and experiment with structures of written language that is not only possible with written language alone, but only possible with written language in a digital space.
A new way to offer more
Returning to the very start of this article, there is a common notion that the only way to offer users of a platform ‘more’ - be it value, variety etc - is through adding new features.
But it can also have the opposite effect.
As mentioned, one of the values new features provide is this idea of a ‘guardrail’ - an implicit explanation of why to use a platform, and who it is for.
But, as you add more features, this implicit explanation creates more specific why’s, and more specific who’s. The process begins to have a narrowing effect, rather than an expansive one.
Electracy offers us a different avenue. Focus instead on creating a simple, core set of features. We could even step back and look at an analogue example: a paper and pen.
With this core set of features, explore and define human-driven systems for how we can use these features to create objects of expression that can be read by others. A book, a poem, an essay.
The more we create these systems, the more they can evolve: writing and grammar, poetry and meter, essays and paragraphs - and diversify: cut and paste, interactive reading.
By allowing users to find their own systems of electracy, and exposing others to those systems, a platform could have a near-infinite diversity of uses without a single extra line of code.
Well, maybe a bug fix or two.
Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research - for this article, and beyond…