For many Americans, a great deal of contemporary life is mediated by interfaces, including laptop, smartphone, and television screens. That this perpetual mediation so often goes unexamined speaks to the importance of Alexander R. Galloway’s new monograph The Interface Effect. Galloway’s ambitious book aspires to be not only a theory of interfaces but also a broader rethinking of the field of “new media studies,” an academic discipline with precursors in the media theories of Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams in the 1960s that emerged properly with scholarship produced alongside the rise of web culture of the 1990s.
