Review: The Interface Effect by Alexander Galloway

The Interface Effect. Alexander Galloway. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2012. xi + 170 pp

Alexander Galloway’s book The Interface Effect is useful to anthropologists as both a methodological tool for understanding the various interfaces ethnographers might see in their fieldwork and as a reflexive tool for analyzing the role of interfaces within their own ethnographies. Although this book may be challenging at times for those readers without a background in media studies, this is a valuable read for understanding the various ways the social becomes ingrained within media. There are three main threads of particular interest that are spread throughout the book. In the Introduction and Chapter 1, Galloway lays out the object of his study, which he defines as interfaces and their effects. Later, in chapters 1 and 3, he discusses interfaces and their representation, touching on the important anthropological debates on representation in ethnography. Finally, in chapters 1, 2, and 4 and in the Postscript, Galloway describes how the interfaces within media encode the “outside” or, in more anthropological terms, “the social” (p. 42). In this part of the book, Galloway provides an in-depth analysis of the video game World of Warcraft and the TV show 24 that uncovers how our modern political economy is entrenched in these media forms. After discussing these three main themes of the book, I will provide an overview of the book’s analysis of media users, which, I will argue, might be its primary shortcoming.  Instead of a chapter-by-chapter overview if this book, I will present the different themes (which are often recurrent in more than one chapter) and will mention the chapters where they are outlined.

In the first two chapters of The Interface Effect, the author turns from old conceptions of media and interfaces as objects to interface effects that mediate humans with the world around them (such as computer hardware, global events, and so forth). Throughout the book’s five chapters, Galloway explores “not so much about particular interface objects (screens, keyboards), but interface effects (p. vii, emphasis in original). In the Introduction and in Chapter 1, for example, the author explores previous works (especially those of Friedrich Kittler and Lev Manovich), while also introducing the book’s theoretical basis. Rather than focus on media objects, Galloway chooses to incorporate media into their cultural context and understand their political implications. It is in these first chapters that he defines an interface as “not a thing,” but rather as “an effect” (p. 36). By focusing on the effects of interfaces, Galloway thus turns the emphasis on the very processes that make up interfaces, an emphasis that will emerge again throughout the book.

“The ultimate task” of chapter 1 (entitled The Unworkable Interface) is, as Galloway puts it, “to reveal that this methodological cocktail is itself an interface” (p. 30). In this chapter, Galloway unpacks the definition of the interface as more than just a screen, including things like software, computer hardware, and the interaction between users and media. Galloway sees previous theorists as privileging screens over other forms of interfaces. His own approach mostly mimics François Dagognet’s own approach,  seeing the interface as “a fertile nexus” between two worlds (p. 32), and leading Galloway to the question “[w]here does the image end and the frame begin?” and his ensuing analysis of Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait (p. 33). In this analysis, Galloway touches on the question of representation, a familiar discussion to many anthropologists, such as George Marcus and James Clifford (Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, J. Clifford and G. Marcus, eds., University of California Press, 1986) in reaction to Edward Saïd’s call to arms against orientalism. Galloway also discusses the “unworkability” of direct address in art, which opens up broader questions for ethnography. Many anthropologists address their own impact on their research in ethnographies, and this book brings up the question of how prominent the ethnographer’s role should be in his or her ethnography.

Galloway’s critique of representation also applies to anthropology’s recent fascination with Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Bruno Latour, Oxford University Press, 2005). Indeed, Chapter 3 tackles the increasing use of data visualization in society, such as flow charts, graphs, and networks. Although Galloway does not address it directly, this also applies to the emergence of “Big Data” over the past years and the desire to display this mammoth quantity of data in an easily understandable graphic. As Galloway remarks, “[a]mid all the talk recently of ‘data’ and ‘information’ it becomes more and more difficult to know what these terms mean, or indeed to tell them apart in the first place” (p. 81). In addition, the author points out that “the tools and techniques required to create cognitive maps of the information society are scarcely evident even today” (p. 99).

Throughout his book, Galloway elegantly weaves through the connections between the interfaces he analyzes and the ideological apparatuses at work within them. Here again the social becomes an essential component of his analysis, as he investigates how social processes circulate through the media and become embodied within them. The two primary media that he analyzes are the TV show 24 and the video game World of Warcraft. In both these examples, Galloway provides us with some intriguing insights into the neoliberal economy and how it becomes unconsciously embedded within media through the effects of interfaces. Although the author never uses the term “neoliberalism” in this analysis, he describes many of the key themes through the lens of the interface.

In his description of 24, for example, the author shows how the show codifies information as fact through “disingenuous informatics” (p. 112). This gives information an almost drug-like effect, where “immaterial faculties are elevated over its material ones” and “rapidly unexpected and changing narrative states evoke an ‘informatic pleasure’” (p. 112). In this logic, the human body becomes a data source, thereby dehumanizing it and making the data extractable through torture, which Galloway likens to “a query algorithm” (p. 112). These themes relate to recent anthropological explorations of the modern political economy and its focus on abstracting the human and quantifying it. Thus, the focus turns from the needs and desires of humans to their economic value either as laborers or consumers.

Galloway continues this critique of neoliberalism in the postscript on gold farming at the end of the book. In this chapter, he discusses the Chinese gold-farming sweatshops often scorned in the media to show that all users of World of Warcraft are pawns of the neoliberal age, and thus gold farmers themselves. More than simply enjoying the game, they are constantly toiling without pay for the developer’s profit. “In other words, games like World of Warcraft allow us to perform a very specific type of social analysis because they are telling us a story about contemporary life” (p. 44). In this final chapter, Galloway is referring to the ludic labor visible in all aspects of World of Warcraft. As a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft allows its users to roam a virtual world and go on missions with fellow gamers. Thus, the labor of the game’s users creates a social network that becomes a part of World of Warcraft’s appeal.

Although Galloway tries to incorporate the social into his analysis, his treatment of culture leaves a lot to be desired for anthropologists. Although he sets out to engage the “different aspects of interface culture” in the introduction, he defines culture as only “history in representational form” (p. vii, italics in original). This definition separates culture from the human actors within it and reduces it to history. Similarly, his analysis of interfaces focuses on how the social is incorporated within media as an object, but fails to take into account of how people interact with various types of interfaces. The author clearly has conducted ethnography by playing the video games that he describes and by watching the movies that he discusses, but he never mentions his own mediation in the process of writing the book. Galloway’s failure to incorporate the human into his analysis is especially disappointing, as he defines interfaces as processes that mediate between the outside (including the user) and the inside.

Although this book is especially addressed to students and experts of media studies, The Interface Effect is also an excellent resource for anthropologists looking to unpack the ways cultural forms circulate in the media. In addition, this book provides a useful analysis of representation, which complements anthropological explorations of representation in ethnography. Although there are drawbacks in the author’s analysis of the social, particularly in the ways he cuts out the users of media, which might be frustrating to anthropologists, the book’s theoretical exploration of interfaces will be useful for anthropologists interested in science and technology. The book’s basis in media studies and difficult-to-follow prose make it a demanding read for anthropologists, but Galloway’s detailed analysis will provide a rewarding experience to the dedicated reader.

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