People Interact Through Computers Not With Them

A view of human-human interaction is presented and its implications for human-computer interaction discussed. Two propositions are advanced. The first is that interaction with computer systems is properly seen as mediated discourse, more akin to reading books and notices than interpersonal dialogues. The second proposition is a consequence of this, namely that unconstrained natural language is unlikely to provide an ideal form of interface. An illocutionary act (Searle, 1969), such as the making of a statement, an offer, a promise or the like, is a basic human act of communication, and necessarily requires a speaker and a hearer. The speaker and hearer may not be individuals, or even be distinguishable, but objects for the two roles should be readily discernible. In natural language, the indefinite nature of the illocutionary act and the indeterminacy of realising the force of that act, i.e. the hearer actually understanding what the speaker actually wanted to say, is a phenomenon readily observable in the form of misunderstandings. Thus it is clear that illocutionary acts are not straightforward, for the utterances used to convey meanings do not relate to those meanings in a straightforward way. A given utterance may be used to convey many meanings, and many utterances may be used to convey a given meaning. Thus the speaker must select an utterance from the many available, and the hearer must select a meaning from the many that could be attached to that utterance. The surface sense of an utterance from the speaker may not be actually what the speaker wanted to convey. Thus there is a distinction between what appears to be the meaning, and what the true force of the utterance is. This distinction is important and will be returned to later. In order to guide the available choices, the situation of the discourse must be used to supply clues; indexicals in the utterance, such as pronouns and demon