Americans are obsessed with “choice”. When we order a coffee, we want to have a huge list of options. We are not content to choose from one or two options for colored sugar water (aka soda aka pop aka soft drinks), we want at least six choices. Who could be satisfied with only a handful of options for toothpaste or toilet paper, Americans need to contemplate at least 20 variations of each.

Growing up, I believed that this was a great state of affairs, probably like most Americans. When I was a teenager, we hosted a woman from the Soviet Union. We wanted to show her the bounty of the United States, so we took her to a grocery store. In our heads, we had the stereotypical image of Communist stores with empty shelves and long lines. She was indeed awed by the selection, but not at all in the way we expected. Her strongest impression was, “why do you need so many different kinds of toothpaste?”. To her, it was absurd. That response shook my understanding of the world.

In Austria and Spain, two places I’ve spent quite a bit of time, when you want a beer, you order “a beer”, and they bring you a beer. There is no questioning of which kind of beer. Often times there are one or two other options, which you can ask for by name, but you need only ask for “a beer” to get a beer.

I often times think of New York City as a different country than the rest of the United States. Perhaps it better reflects the way that the United States was before the vast suburbanization of the country. In the regards to the issue of choice, the part of New York City that I live in seems closer to Austria or Spain than the rest of the U.S. Here it is typical to order “a slice” (a slice of cheese pizza) or “a regular coffee” (coffee with milk and sugar).

I’ve been a member of the Park Slope Food Coop since 2002. It is a very successful (almost 14,000 members) grocery store where you have to work 3 hours a month in order to shop there. It is also somewhat democratically run. Compared to something like Whole Foods, this store is pretty small. Yet I never have found it lacking things I want. When I think about it, it does lack a lot of things that I never buy.

I was recently in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I was reminded of more typical American culture. I saw a “greek hummus” sandwich on the menu, and thought it sounded good, and the description looked complete. When ordering this sandwich, I was surprised by the number of questions before I could get my sandwich: “would you like white, wheat, rosemary, or rye bread”, “what kind of cheese, we have american, cheddar, swiss, and provalone”, and of course “to stay or to go”.

The most ironic part of this American obsession with choice is that we so often settle for a number of choices within a really small range. So many restaurants only have soft drinks as options, but there is of course a range of soft drinks. Soft drinks give you the illusion of choice, you can choose between 5 different kinds of sugar water. They really are all the same thing with different flavor syrups added. Compared to the differences between wine and horchata, two common Spanish drinks, the choice of soft drinks looks pretty ridiculous.

Another example are the two political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. They really are quite close in the political spectrum. Sure, there are some differences, but you can see how close they are by how the vast sums of corporate donations swing from one side to the other quite easily. Those doners want to give money to the winner, since they’ll have the power, but they are too worried about some drastic change. Seeing a political campaign in Austria really opened my eyes to this. The range of views expressed there was very wide. The Communists were saying “drugs should be legalized” (Drogen soll frei geben). This does not mean medicine, it means things like cocaine and marijuana. The Freedom Party was saying something on a more paranoid side of the spectrum: “Immigrants. We understand the worries of the Viennese”. As in the immigrants are causing problems. That is a pretty stark range of choices.

Moving windows has always felt a bit odd on an unconscious level. You are moving a very stiff, pretty sizable thing, according to our eyes, but yet the effort on the mouse is no different than moving just the tiny pointer. On some systems, the shadow around each window makes it look even heavier since it makes us perceive it as something thicker than a sheet of paper. If you moved a perfectly rigid 20×25cm flat material that was 5mm thick, which is about what one of my browser windows looks like, it would have some inertia and air resistance to it, yet I feel no difference in my hand. I can easily feel it when moving a physical sheet of paper around in the physical world, yes this visably more massive sheet of paper on my screen has zero weight, inertia or air resistance.

The perception of touch in our hands is strongly tied to our visual perceptions of the things we see in our hands. When these two perceptions don’t match up, there is a feeling of numbness, perhaps unconscious but present nonetheless. At this point, we are so used to this feeling that we don’t really ever think about it.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy, which has some Compiz effects enabled by default. Compiz is software that allows a wide range of visual manipulations of all sorts of elements of the GUI. The most common one is the “rubber” windows. Basically, it makes the normally stiff window into a rubbery thing. When I first saw this, I thought it was very nifty, but merely eye candy that I would shortly turn off once the effect became annoying. I was very much surprised to discover that instead of it becoming annoying, it was the stiff windows that bothered me. I started to find the errant few windows that were not rubbery where the annoying ones.

I think there is a similar thing going on with sound design for computers. When computers got sound, both Windows and Mac OS X were plastered with interface sounds. Almost everyone found them really annoying and quickly turned them off. So they were mostly removed as a default thing. But some sounds have crept back in. Like the mail-sending and trash-emptying sounds in Mac OS X. When such effects are carefully considered and used judiciously, they are actually quite useful.

Jonathan Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet has been getting quite a bit of attention for its discussion of “tethered” devices, or devices that are remotely controlled by someone besides the owner of the device. I have started reading the book myself, and it has some interesting analysis so far.

Richard Stallman responded to the book, in this article and in his style cuts right to the core issues of the problem at hand. When the owner of the device has full access and rights to the software, source code and all, then the owner can do everything she needs to ensure that the people who sold it to them are not doing malicious things to them. Read the article for more info.

http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/stallman.php