ABSTRACT
The first terminal default setting is interactivity. In order to operate a terminal, users must interact with it in different ways than with most other tools. In addition, the terminal interacts with users by asking them questions, by prompting them to orient themselves to its logic, and by requiring that they act, to which the terminal responds in a potentially endless dialog. Syncing to the terminal requires users to adjust to five interrelated features of its mode of interactivity: ubiquity and necessity, simplification, the sense of urgency, de-realization, and software thinking. This chapter examines how users adjust to those five features, and the consequences of those adjustments for their motor-sensory orientations, perceptions of space and time, cognitive functioning, sense of reality, of agency and of autonomy. It also examines these adjustments in offline experience, and traces parallel trends in hypermodern society and culture.
