When you log into a terminal, you enter the darkness. It's 
an entirely different experience than surfing the web using 
a graphical browser. The web is bright. It's flashy. It's 
full of banners, images, and buttons vying for your 
attention. It demands no complex thought. You point. You 
click. You point and click again. And again. And again. 
You're served content. There are few expectations of you. 
That's the master pattern of the web. You're a consumer -- 
of content, of commodities, of experience. You select from a 
limited range of choices and fit into them. If you produce, 
you generally do so within prescribed limits, and in an 
environment that places a great deal of emphasis on 
appearances, and your role as a consumer, rather than 
on thought and insight.

The terminal is a different environment with a different set 
of demand characteristics. The sensory overload disappears. 
The darkness draws you in. It's a contemplative environment. 
There are no distractions. You think. At the terminal, 
you're required to make decisions. Where do I want to go 
next? What do I want to do? No choices are provided. You 
must dig into your memory and recall the command to 
undertake the next task, a task of your choosing, an impulse 
that comes from within. And then you act. You create. Maybe 
it's a config file, a text document, or a gophermap. If you 
consume, you consume text. You consume ideas rather than 
images (for the most part).

In the Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan argued that the 
advent of mechanized printing changed individuals and their 
societies. Reading and composing written texts trained 
people to follow chains of logic. The very act of reading, 
regardless of what they read, transformed them:

"'It is certain,' wrote the symbolist Edgar Allan Poe, 'that 
the mere act of inditing [composing] tends in a great degree 
to the logicalization of thought.' Lineal, alphabetic 
inditing made possible the sudden invention of 'grammars' of 
thought and science by the Greeks."[1]

McLuhan also wrote that mass-produced texts resulted in the 
creation of 'authors' and 'publics' which could not have 
existed prior to the advent of widely-circulated printed 
texts. He contended that printing led to communities 
conscious of their own collective existence, to increased 
public debate, and to nationalism. So not only individuals, 
but entire peoples were changed as a result of the 
typographical revolution.

My point here is, as McLuhan famously contended, that the 
medium is as important as the message. The form is as 
important as the content. When you choose the terminal -- 
when you enter the unix-verse rather than the web (a very 
odd choice in these times, by the way, and you are all 
peculiar people) you undoubtedly do so because you feel the 
impact that the terminal has on the way you think. The 
darkness matters. The textual interface matters. The 
environment permits quiet contemplation. It begs you to 
think. It calls on you to create. It makes you a different 
person. Likewise, the communities that emerge in a pubnix 
are marked by special characteristics that rarely exist on 
the web.


[1] M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Signet, 1962), 33.