Whitespace Privilege

I'm not gonna sugar coat it. I'm an old guy in a young man's game. Or, for those of you who perceive every noun associated with one gender as a direct insult to the other, I'm an old geezer in a young whipper-snapper's game. Or, if that still offends you,...

I cut my teeth in computer programming on dumb terminals. You remember them. Those "hundred something" pound devices comprised of a CRT and an over-sized keyboard attached with a cable thick enough to pump molasses through. In the event of a tornado, they were very effective in holding your office building down.

Of course, even before that, my freshman year in college to be specific, I suffered through a couple of semesters using an age-old card puncher. That was seemingly a rite of "thinning out the herd" in the University at Buffalo''s school of engineering . Those of us who survived to see our sophomore year got to graduate to dumb terminals. And hence that fabric of my nerd culture was woven.

Dumb terminals of the early 1980's were aptly named. Aside from a brightness knob, their only gadgetry was on the on/off switch, labeled with a 1/0 indicator for posterity. But it was their simplicity that made them elegant. A screen, usually about 13 or 14 inches diagonal, with a black background that became adorned with white characters as you proceeded to type on that over-sized keyboard. Or, depending on the manufacturer, green or orange characters instead of white.

By the mid to late 1980's, dumb terminals with multiple character colors and simple tailoring menus became more affordable to small business. Not to mention the ability to display 132 columns of text instead of the long standard 80. The common denominator was the black background. Easy to read, and just as easy to realize how badly you had screwed up, when the nasty messages spawned by your keying infraction or your syntax errors scrolled one line at a time before your very eyes. But it was a productive tool, whether you were writing COBOL or RPG programs, or punching in vouchers to your accounts payable software.

Actually, the same could be said for the early personal computers that were running DOS and supporting character based applications. So whether your information base was housed on mainframes, midrange systems or even just a desktop Tandy 1000, most of us had a pretty similar experience during business hours - and left that experience at the workplace when we embarked on our return commute. Nothing our eyes couldn't handle.

However, when it comes to technology, all good things come to an end and get replaced by something better. By the time the 90's rolled around, and Windows became the dominant PC environment, applications for that platform traded in their character based legacy for a fully graphical user experience involving both the keyboard and a mouse. And one other thing - a white background with colored text and images instead of black. And on top of that - larger screens, many by then in the 15 to 17 inch range. The new white background was more taxing on the eyes. We didn't notice it at first, but over time, it started to take its toll. So for 8 hours a day (or however long you worked), we had brighter, wider screens assaulting the only pair of retinas we'll ever have.

Funny thing was, it didn't stop there. Because at about the same time, personal computers powered by Windows were becoming a staple in every home. And which color do you think became the de-facto background color for most PC applications and web sites? You guessed it! White. And with each passing day, we were spending more and more of our non-working hours in front of CRT's and eventually flat screens, that were constantly growing in size. And that daily 8 hour assault on the eyes had expanded to 10 or 12, if not more. On a larger scale, to boot!

By that time, working on dumb terminals or character based displays was considered completely passé and obsolete, especially by our junior colleagues. They constantly reminded us geezers about how we needed to let go of the past and embrace the privilege and blessing of the new white screens.

The 2000's brought us smart phones and tablets. Oh, they were smaller screens. But of course the smaller the screen, the closer it has to be to your eyes to be legible. And in the true spirit of the modern digital world, their application backgrounds were...three guesses but you're only going to need one...white!

Fast forward to 2020 (or at least that's what our eyesight used to be). We're still dominated by smart phones, only bigger. Tablets, only bigger. Home based desktops now project to 32" or larger televisions instead of monitors. And we're still obsessed with...wait for it...white!

And I'm still asking, "What was wrong with black backgrounds?". We could still have multicolored text and images on a black screen, you know. Now in all fairness, a few software vendors and website hosts have made their color schemes customizable. But not all of them. And in most cases, the default background color is...wait for it...white!

Which begs the question, "Does anyone over the age of 25 actually write software anymore?". Because if they did, they'd default to a black background, because black is beautiful. Otherwise, by the time they reach my age, they'll be sporting bifocal lenses 3 times thicker than mine. What goes around, comes around.

Not trying to be a technological race baiter here, but why has the digital world soured on color code #000000 and wallowed almost exclusively in its whitespace privilege for so long? It doesn't help that the credit bureaus flood the airwaves with intimidating messages about the "Dark Web" (oooooo...spooky). As phony a buzzword as "The Cloud" (awwww...fluffy). Perhaps website designers feel as though anything short of blinding white background will scare away potential suckers starving for click bait.

But if you go to a gaming website, especially role playing games, you're more likely to encounter dark backgrounds. Mainly because these geeks spend most of their waking hours in front of their 50" monitors, and want to still have working retinas when they hit age 40. So perhaps the marketing geniuses who design commercial websites or the software behemoths who engineer desktop applications should take a page out of the propeller heads' playbook and re-integrate black back into our digital culture.

Because remember, all eyes matter.