EDITORIAL

摘要

Public organizations tasked with the delivery of universal service in communications (e.g. broadcasting) and social welfare (e.g. health services) have been redesigning their service delivery through digital transformation for almost two decades now. Digitalization increasingly brings together public and private/privatized service provision, from transport to health and social care, with policy domains traditionally associated with communications such as news, publishing and entertainment provision via broadcast media. At the centre of these systems and processes are digital interfaces, which enable the flow of information and data between organizations and their 'publics' or 'customers' and access to services for end users, while generating data on service use(rs). Originating in engineering to describe a face of separation between substances (Bottomley 1882), and, later, places or surfaces where two bodies or systems come together (OED 1990; McLuhan 1962), the concept of the interface enters common use in new media studies at the turn of the century to denote mediations between human and computer, between computers, or between humans.