The genius of Alan Kay was to realize that the barriers to entry of the computer into culture were not just computational but also cultural. Computers had to do things that people wanted to do, and in ways that they were used to doing them, initially at least. Hence the strategy of what Bolter and Grusin called remediation, wherein old media become the content of new media form.

If I look at the first screen of my iPhone, I see icons. The clock icon is an analog clock. The iTunes icon is a musical note. The mail icon is the back of an envelope. The video icon is a mechanical clapboard. The Passbook icon is old-fashioned manila files. The Facetime icon is an old-fashioned looking video camera. The Newstand icon looks like a magazine rack. Best of all, the phone icon is the handset of an old-fashioned landline. And so on. None of these things pictured even exist in my world any more, as I have this machine that does all those things. The icons are cultural referents from a once-familiar world that have become signs within a rather different world which I can pretend to understand because I am familiar with those icons.

• McKenzie Wark – “On Manovich“