carlacasilli's media psychology posterous

Information visualization: a new visual language (part 8) Conclusion

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 17:05:00 -0700

In the interests of sparking commentary and kickstarting my nascent "design as cultural imperialism" thought process (and future unbook—because thoughts on social and cultural perception and construction are never complete), I'm excerpting portions of my Media Psychology and Social Change Master's capstone project on this blog. And yes, dear readers, together we have reached the series' conclusion. If you've arrived here by direct link, you can find the other posts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7. As always, read, comment, tweet, retweet, argue, assert, agree: I'm game. And thanks for reading!

Conclusion
The next wave of media communication has arrived in the form of information visualization. Information visualizations are powerful ideological dissemination tools. By design they incorporate visual perception, contextualize data in parsimonious ways, inform cognitive and perceptual fluency, actuate cultural semiotics, and present data in explicit mental shorthand. In the new language of information visualization art and science coalesce to engender new understandings, and, if done really well, tell interesting stories.

During the last seven posts, we've covered the complexities, rewards, and inherent dangers of data visualization. If, as we begin to explore this emerging language, we can simultaneously create and parse the visual neologisms that will arise, we will begin to alter what it means to talk about data, as well as what it means to present data. We may even alter our world in such a way that we will need to create verbal language to discuss this visual language.

The task that lies ahead offers huge opportunities, and as long as we can educate ourselves as to information visualization's potentials regarding perception, persuasion, and interpretation, we can use it without fear of its pitfalls. However, we will need to continually negotiate our way through the propagandistic fields of data, statistics, and graphic representation. The reward will be enrichment of not only human cognition but of human potential. For a new language provides new opportunities to think new thoughts, perceive new worlds, divine new connections, and exceed current mental boundaries.

Information visualizations comprise an intrinsically alluring area of study deserving far greater scientific attention and research from the psychological world than they currently enjoy. Fortunately, despite the current paucity of research, there does appear to be a surge in university programs focusing on the combination of media, communication, theory, design and programming.

In the coming years, the field of information visualization will prove to be a broad and intriguing field. And while psychological research into all aspects of data visualization seems inevitable, I hope these posts will further galvanize interest in studying it sooner rather than later.

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Information visualization: a new visual language (part 7) Potential issues and drawbacks

Fri, 06 May 2011 09:50:00 -0700

In the interests of sparking commentary and kickstarting my nascent "design as cultural imperialism" thought process (and future unbook—because thoughts on social and cultural perception and construction are never complete), I'm excerpting portions of my Media Psychology and Social Change Master's capstone project on this blog. This is Part 7: potential issues and drawbacks. If you've arrived here by direct link, you can find the other posts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6. As always, read, comment, tweet, retweet, argue, assert, agree: I'm game.

Some potential pitfalls of information visualization
As infographics surge in popularity, significantly divergent implementations are occurring in the wild: some of these alleged information graphics and data visualizations fail to pass the usefulness test. Indeed, some are mere eye candy that offer little to no cognitive benefit. In fact, they might be considered artistic or decorative graphics. These impotent efforts both weaken the impact and lessen the value of information visualization overall. The following paragraphs elucidate where and why information visualizations can go wrong. Any and all joking aside, given the significant cognitive power information visualizations can wield, they can be weaponized just as easily. If designed poorly or incorrectly, they can introduce a new spin on the old statistics saw, "lies, damn lies and information visualization."

Subjectivity, cultural bias and aesthetic appeal
For all of the practical, affirmative mental assistance visualizations provide, some potential dangers lurk within them. Data may be considered agnostic but interpretation of it is subjective and therefore biased by personal interest and cultural interpretation, regardless of intent. Consequently so are the visualizations that are created from them. While visualizations aim to contextualize information, they are, nevertheless, one step removed from the statistical data they seek to represent. This divergence, however small, can affect interpretation in any number of ways. For instance, the temptation to succumb to data mining—illustrating only the data that suits the hypothesis or conjecture (Tufte, 1997)—can be great.

Representing information graphically does not magically remove intervening variables, but rather alternatively reorients data in ways that may make intervening variables appear less important or less immediately troublesome. Conversely, visualizations may emphasize content that proffers somewhat less than essential or informative information. Social scientists and designers must beware the siren call of aesthetic inspiration that hinders the clear representation of data: statistical graphics and visualizations are tools "to help people reason about quantitative information" (Tufte, 1983, p. 91). If a visualization complicates data or presents it in a weak or confusing manner, it increases cognitive load and decrements the ability of the representation to bolster the power of human perceptual processing (Norman, 1993).

Next up: Information visualization: a new visual language (part 8) Conclusions

References

Norman, D. (1993). Things that make us smart. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Tufte, E. (1983). The visual display of quantitative information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Tufte, E. (1997). Visual explanations. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

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Information visualization: a new visual language (part 6) Cognitive advantages and fluency

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 08:23:00 -0700

In the interests of sparking commentary and kickstarting my nascent "design as cultural imperialism" thought process (and future unbook—because thoughts on social and cultural perception and construction are never complete), I'm excerpting portions of my capstone project on this blog. You're reading Part 6: cognitive advantages of fluency. If you've arrived here by direct link, you might catch up here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. As always, read, comment, tweet, retweet, argue, assert, agree: I'm game.

Cognitive Advantages
What are the rewards for a bit of cognitive assistance? A mixture of internal and external knowledge affords us the luxury of reflection—modification, manipulation and comparison of mental representations or ideas (Norman, 1993). Visualizations can facilitate the scaffolding of large and complex issues, augmenting the contemplation of complex or previously hidden relationships, and correlating hitherto unrelated or disconnected data. "Representations are important because they allow us to work with events and things absent in space and time, or for that matter, events and things that never existed—imaginary objects and concepts" (Norman, 1993, p. 49-50).

Specifically, diagrams offer computational advantages (Larkin & Simon, 1987) because the information contained within them is indexed in ways that "can support extremely useful and efficient computational processes" (p. 99). Taken a step further, "dynamic visualizations maybe considered as less complex than static visualizations since the depicted dynamics are readily perceivable and do not need to be inferred by the learner" (Schmidt-Weigand, 2009, p. 101). Visualizations can conceptually chunk information through visual grouping further speeding cognitive processing thereby reducing "the need for searching for multiple information elements related to a single idea" (p. 72).

Properly designed visualizations present data in new forms that enhance "the ability to make judgments, to discover relevant regularities and structures" (Norman, 1993, p. 52). This interpretive aspect is important because “it is through metarepresentations that we generate new knowledge, finding consistencies and patterns in the representations that could not readily be noticed in the world” (p. 51).

Since human brains have evolved to think using pictures, and the sequentiality of text may slow or impede cognition, it follows that "presenting information as pictures is the most efficient way to present information to people" (Weinschenk, 2009, p. 115). Ergo, good information visualizations—those that capture the essential elements while excluding extraneous ones—can transform problems into easy experiential tasks. This transformative capacity is valuable because "experiential artifacts thus mediate between the mind and the world" (Norman, 1993, p. 52).

Ultimately, information visualization should encourage message processing through imaginal thinking. Paivio (1975) notes, "imaginal thinking can be characterized by remarkable speed, accuracy, and flexibility of information processing" (p. 161). Moreover, imaginal thinking quickly and synchronously organizes imagery into units that then function essentially as memory storage units (Paivio, 1975). "External visualizations enable cognitive operations that would otherwise have to be conducted internally (e.g., mental imagery)" (Scheiter, Weibe & Holsanova, 2009, p. 75).

Because they can compress huge volumes of data in real-time by providing deep, contextualized information at a glance, visualizations can dramatically reduce cognitive load and increase the human ability to absorb additional information: real wins for cognitive processing, encoding, and retrieval.

Fluency, Familiarity and Visualization
Visualizations also traffic in the psychologically important currency of narrativity (as discussed in part 5) and fluency. Fluency, "the subjective experience of ease or difficulty with which we are able to process information" (Oppenheimer, 2008, p. 237), is "a ubiquitous metacognitive cue that accompanies cognition across the full spectrum of cognitive processes" (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009, p. 232) affecting perception, conceptualization, linguistics, retrieval, encoding, embodiment, decision-making, spatial perception, deduction, generativity, and attention (Oppenheimer, 2008).

The perception of fluency seems to elicit positive reactions toward the subject or experience perceived as fluent (Winkielman, Halberstadt, Fazendeiro & Catty, 2006). Hence, the potential fluency generated by the aesthetic appeal of visualizations may counterbalance some of the more formidable traits of large and complex data sets. Conversely, Reber, Schwarz & Winkielman (2004) theorize that fluency directly influences aesthetic perception. In other words, the more fluent an experience or object seems to a perceiver, the greater the perceiver's aesthetic response. Song & Schwartz (2010) contend that our sense of aesthetics is intertwined with an innate attraction to fluency.

In general, research seems to indicate that fluency repeatedly trumps disfluency: highly fluent statements seem truer, more likable, more frequent, more famous, are better category members and seem to come from a more intelligent source than disfluent statements (Oppenheimer, 2008). Consequently, fluent visualizations are likely to possess those same positive qualities.

Somewhat unexpectedly, disfluency, while initially seeming like an undesirable trait, may be finessed to a communicator's advantage. Simple typographic disfluency in the form of a degraded font led some research participants toward a more "systematic processing strategy" (p. 239) and away from an automatic response. Consequently, the tendency of visual disfluency to affect or shift cognitive methodologies may play an important role in the design and display of controversial or cognitively complex data.

And this brings us around to the potential importance of the mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968) in visualization. Although people generally prefer familiar stimuli to new but otherwise identical stimuli (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009), through effective exploitation of the mere exposure effect they can be induced to accept disfluency and even like it if they are exposed to it frequently enough. The processing fluency/attribution model (Bornstein & D'Agostino, 1994) argues a similar point but includes fluency as part of the equation: the greater the frequency of exposure, the more easily the stimuli can be retrieved from memory which leads to positive attribution (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009). Hence, an increase in the frequency of visualizations appearing in media sources could reflexively increase the audience's acceptance and appreciation for this type of data representation.

Next up in Part 7: potential issues and drawbacks of information visualization. Part 8 will conclude our series.

References

Alter, A., & Oppenheimer, D. (2009). Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13(3), 219-235.

Bornstein, R. F., & D’Agostino, P. R. (1994). The attribution and discounting of perceptual fluency: preliminary tests of a perceptual fluency/attributional model of the mere exposure effect. Social Cognition, 12, 103-128.

Larkin, J. & Simon, H. (1987). Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words. Cognitive Science, 11, 65-99.

Norman, D. (1993). Things that make us smart. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Oppenheimer, D. (2008). The secret life of fluency. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(6), 237-241.

Paivio, A. (1975). Imagery and synchronic thinking. Canadian Psychological Review, 16(3), 147-163.

Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: is beauty in the perceiver’s processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364-382.

Scheiter, K., Wiebe, E., & Holsanova, J. (2009). Theoretical and instructional aspects of learning with visualizations. In R. Zheng (Ed.) Cognitive Effects of Multimedia Learning (pp. 67-87). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Schmidt-Weigand, F. (2009). The influence of visual and temporal dynamics on split attention: evidences of eye tracking. In R. Zheng (Ed.) Cognitive Effects of Multimedia Learning (pp. 89-107). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Song, H., & Schwarz, N. (2010). If it's easy to read, it's easy to do, pretty, good, and true. The Psychologist, 23(2), 108-111.

Weinschenk, S. (2009). Neuro web design. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

Winkielman, P., Halberstadt, J., Fazendeiro, T., & Catty, S. (2006). Prototypes are attractive because they are easy on the mind. Psychological Science, 17(7) 799-806.

Zajonc, R. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Monograph Supplement, 9(2), 1-27.

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Information visualization: a new visual language (part 5) Semiotics and narrativity

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:19:00 -0700

In the interests of sparking commentary and kickstarting my nascent "design as cultural imperialism" thought process and future unbook—because thoughts on social and cultural construction are never complete—I'm excerpting portions of my capstone project on this blog. You're reading Part 5: visualizations, semiotics and narrative. If you've arrived here by direct link, you might catch up here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. As always, read, respond, argue, assert, agree: I'm game.

Visualizations and Semiotics
According to Scheiter, Wiebe & Holsanova (2009), visualizations can be sorted into three semiotic types:

realistic—aim to physically resemble their referents;
analogical—seek to represent phenomenal or abstract conceptual analogies;
logical—describe charts, diagrams, and graphs; graphics whose spatial layout conveys information about conceptual relationships.

The same authors also assert that as text adjuncts, visualizations perform five functions:

decorative—enlivening text
representational—making information more concrete
organizational—bringing coherence to data
interpretative—enhancing understanding of data
transformative—endeavoring to recode information into more concrete and memorable form, organizing information through relations, and enhancing retrieval of data by providing systematic means of retrieval.

Worth noting: despite their positive intentions, decorative visualizations can have counterproductive effects on processing and cognition. And of the five functions, the most complex, transformative visualization, shows "the strongest positive effect on learning outcomes" (p. 76).

The Narrative Potential of Visualizations
The depth of information embedded within a visualization permits it to act as both visual and conceptual shorthand, rendering it a sort of cognitive crib sheet. A good one does not necessarily veer into the world of make-believe, yet it can precipitate that process if that is its goal. Narrative functions in the same way, by bundling and transporting complex concepts in memorable ways, "Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context and emotion" (Norman, 1993, p. 129).

Effectively designed transformational visualizations can assume this exact role, acting not just as simple data representations but rather as layered, multidimensional, optical allegories, perceptually equivalent to stories. By tuning in the informational signal and tuning out the useless noise, visualizations create traversable bridges linking logic and narrative, economically presenting meaningful data.

Next up: Information visualization: a new visual language (part 6): cognitive advantages and the role of fluency.
I will address potential issues and drawbacks in Information visualization: a new visual language (part 7).

References

Norman, D. (1993). Things that make us smart. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

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Information visualization: a new visual language (part 4) Definition, design, and cognitive effort

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 13:07:00 -0700

In the interests of sparking commentary and kickstarting my nascent "design as cultural imperialism" thought process (and future unbook) I'm taking the opportunity to excerpt portions of my capstone project on this blog. You're reading Part 4. In this go-round we define what visualizations are, how they're cognitively efficient and why this might be important. Also included: more great references. Go here for Part 1. Go here for Part 2. Go here for Part 3. As always, read, respond, argue, assert, agree: I'm game.

Defining Information Visualization
Visualizations might be considered an extension of our natural proclivity toward notation, but what exactly are they? A very technical description might be, "A specific form of external representation...intended to communicate information by using a visuo-spatial layout of...information...processed in the visual sensory system" (Scheiter, Wiebe & Holsanova, 2009, p. 68). Visualizations provide a type of temporal integration—a simultaneous presentation of "multiple sources of [visual] information" (Ayres & Sweller, 2005, p. 143) that decrease extraneous cognitive load.

Barbara Tversky alleges that well-designed graphics, of which visualizations are a subset, pack a vast amount of information in a relatively small space:

degrees of relationship, such as similarity, salience, or strength, can be suggested spatially by degree of proximity, or pictorially by degree of appearance, color or size for examples. Proportion can be indicated by spatial proportion. Direction is conveniently conveyed by arrows, whether the direction is spatial, temporal, causal, or other. (Tversky, 2002, p. 19)

There’s a lot more to a good visualization than that, though. They're potentially tricky, as Donald Norman (1993) elucidates when he writes,

The critical trick is to get the abstractions right, to represent the important aspect and not the unimportant. This allows everyone to concentrate upon the essentials without distractions from irrelevancies. Herein lie both the power and the weakness of representations: Get the relevant aspects right, and the representation provides substantive power to enhance people's ability to reason and think; get them wrong, and the representation is misleading, causing people to ignore critical aspects of the event or perhaps form misguided conclusions. (p. 49)

The Economics of Good Design in Visualization
In The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte (1983) declares, "Graphics reveal data" (p. 13). This elegantly succinct statement defines Tufte's philosophical ethos and serves as a universal starting point for information visualization. Tufte avers that properly designed statistical graphics make large data sets coherent through parsimonious presentation of data. By exposing multiple levels of detail in a visually simple manner, visualizations encourage data comparison and engender substantive thought. Economy seems to be an essential aspect to visualization. Donald Norman’s appropriateness principle can be applied to visualizations as well: "The representation used by the artifact should provide exactly the information acceptable to the task: neither more nor less" (Norman, 1993, p. 97).

Cognitive Processing: Effortful or Effortless
The way a problem is represented dramatically affects the perception of ease for that task, even though an alternative representation does not technically change the problem itself (Norman, 1993). One of the essential differences between verbal representation and visual representation is sequentiality. In 1987, Larkin and Simon contrasted sentential representations (words) with diagrammatic representations (images) and found that sentential representations are rigidly sequential while diagrammatic representations are indexed by location on a plane. The constraint of temporal sequential delivery affects both perception and cognition. Like physical separation, temporal separation—even moving from one word to another within a paragraph—can be supposed to generate extraneous cognitive load (Ayres & Sweller, 2005). The effort required to process visual material versus verbal information is markedly different: "reading requires word-by-word fixations, lexical access, and syntactic as well as semantic processing while the information depicted by visualizations may be gathered at a glance" (Schmidt-Weigand, 2009, p. 101).

Larkin and Simon concluded that whereas diagrammatic representations display information explicitly, sentential representations do so implicitly, "and therefore [information] has to be computed, sometimes at great cost, to make explicit for use" (Larkin & Simon, 1987, p. 65). They argue,

The major difference in a diagrammatic representation, we believe, is difference in recognition processes. We have seen that formally producing perceptual elements does most of the work of solving the geometry problem. But we have a mechanism—the eye and the diagram—that produces exactly these “perceptual” results with little effort. We believe the right assumption is that diagrams and the human visual system provide, at essentially zero cost, all of the inferences we have called “perceptual.” … It is exactly because a diagram “produces” all the elements “for free” that it is so useful. (Larkin & Simon, 1987, p. 92)

In contrast to language’s sequentiality, visualization can synchronously present multiple layers of information while contextualizing the information it presents. "[G]raphics can be more precise and revealing than conventional statistical computations" (Tufte, 1983, p. 13). From this standpoint, visualizations perform their functions in a parsimonious manner: "spatial relations of objects are automatically implied in a picture and thus do not require any additional symbols, whereas in verbal representation spatial arrangements need to be made explicit" (Scheiter, Weibe & Holsanova, 2009, p. 71).

Next up: Information visualization: a new visual language (part 5) The semiotics and narrativity of visualization.

References:

Ayres, P., & Sweller, J. (2005). The split-attention principle in multimedia learning. In R. F. Mayer (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (pp. 135-146). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press

Larkin, J. & Simon, H. (1987). Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words. Cognitive Science, 11, 65-99.

Norman, D. (1993). Things that make us smart. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Tufte, E. (1983). The visual display of quantitative information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Tversky, B. (2002). Some ways that graphics communicate. In N. Allen (Ed.) Working With Words and Images: New Steps in an Old Dance. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing.

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Information visualization: a new visual language (part 3)

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 08:12:00 -0700

In the interests of sparking commentary and kickstarting my nascent "design as cultural imperialism" thought process (and future unbook) I'm taking the opportunity to excerpt portions of my capstone project on this blog. You're reading Part 3. This section reviews the problems inherent in human memory and the role visual representations play in it. This one is chock full of delicious references. I recommend investigating them on your own. Go here for Part 1. Go here for Part 2. As always, read, respond, argue, assert, agree: I'm game.

The Trouble With Memory
As for memory, the visual sort wins hands down: the pictorial superiority effect documents our facility for image recall (Nelson, Reed & Walling, 1976). "We remember only ten percent of what we hear or read (without pictures)" (Weinschenk, 2009, p. 115). Moreover, memory is both selective and constructive, meaning that we construct our memories each time we retrieve them, basing our confabulations on original interpretations of meaning and completely disregarding the initial encoding methodology (Anderson, 2005). And while our memories begin their lives replete with particulars, they age poorly: the details that initially define them diminish rapidly. Consequently, despite our extraordinary image processing and retention capabilities, we have faulty memories. "Retrieval from long term memory is apt to be slow and to contain errors. Here is where information in the world is important, to remind us of what can be done and how to do it" (Norman, 1990, p. 191).

Dual Coding and Visuospatial Perception
Equally challenging to keeping a memory is obtaining one. Paivio (1970, 1975, 1991) broke new ground with his foundational dual coding theory that supposed two cognitive subsystems: one related to verbal processing and the other to non-verbal processing. According to his theory the two subsystems work in parallel to address stimuli. Several years after Paivio proposed his dual coding theory, Baddeley & Hitch (1974) hypothesized a three-component model of working memory (or short term memory): it theorized two storage systems, the visuospatial sketchpad and the phonological loop, and one control system, the central executive. In 2001, Baddeley (2003) rounded out his theory of working memory by adding a fourth component—the episodic buffer—the liaison between perception, long-term memory and action.

At first glance, Paivio’s and Baddeley’s theories might be considered competitors, but it’s perhaps more accurate to think of them as alternative interpretations of the same idea. Indeed, the commonality between the two is striking: both Paivio and Baddeley suggest that the mind uses different processing and storage techniques for verbal versus visual stimuli, although Paivio distinguishes between verbal and non-verbal.

Regardless of which cognitive theory you ascribe to, verbal stimuli appear to be differently processed than visual stimuli and seem to require more complex mental manipulation to encode than imagery does.

Groups of words apparently cannot be similarly integrated in memory [like images can]; instead, the units appear to be sequentially combined or concatenated into linear informational structures that take up more storage space and are subject to sequential constraints to a degree not characteristic of images. (Paivio, A., 1975)

"The human mind, for all its powers, is limited in its ability to think deeply about a topic, primarily because of the restricted capacity of working memory" (Norman, 1993, p. 246). Consequently, converting less meaningful material to more meaningful material greatly improves its memorability quotient. Likewise, "Memory for verbal material is greatly enhanced if one can develop visual images corresponding to the material" (Anderson, 2005, p. 108). To this end, representative visualizations can act as memory aids, greatly enhancing working memory capacity by decreasing or even eliminating extraneous cognitive load. External assistance such as information visualization achieves this by "representing an idea in some external medium…free from the limits of working memory" (Norman, 1993, p. 246).

It’s worth remembering, however, that the need for cognitively assisted mental reflection is both subjective and changeable. Low, Jin & Sweller (2009) note that experienced learners—those with some expertise in the area being learned—require fewer modes for learning. The modality effect they found suggests that information redundancy such as diagrams with explanatory text or text accompanied by explanatory diagrams may actually impede cognitive processing. Intelligibility plays a role in processing, too, because "a representation is useful only if one has the productions that can use it" (Larkin & Simon, 1987, p. 70).

Next up: A new visual language (part 4): defining information visualization

References

Anderson, J. R. (2005). Cognitive psychology and its implications (6th ed.). New York, NY: Worth.

Baddeley, A. (2003). Working memory: looking back and looking forward. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4(10), 829-839.

Baddeley, A., & Hitch, G. (1974). Working memory. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory Volume 8 (pp. 47-89). New York, NY: Academic Press.

Larkin, J. & Simon, H. (1987). Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words. Cognitive Science, 11, 65-99.

Low, R., Jin, P., & Sweller, J. (2009). Cognitive architecture and instructional design in a multimedia context. In R. Zheng (Ed.) Cognitive Effects of Multimedia Learning, (pp 1-16). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Nelson, D. L., Reed, V. S., & Walling, J. R. (1976). Pictorial superiority effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory. Vol. 2(5), 523-528.

Norman, D. (1988/1990). The design of everyday things. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Norman, D. (1993). Things that make us smart. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Paivio, A. (1970). On the functional significance of imagery. Psychological Bulletin, 73(6), 385-392.

Paivio, A. (1975). Imagery and synchronic thinking. Canadian Psychological Review, 16(3), 147-163.

Paivio, A. (1991). Dual coding theory: retrospect and current status. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 45(3), 255-287.

Weinschenk, S. (2009). Neuro web design. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

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Information visualization: a new visual language (part 2)

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 08:21:00 -0700

In the interests of sparking commentary and kickstarting my nascent "design as cultural imperialism" thought process (and future unbook) I'm taking the opportunity to excerpt portions of my capstone project on this blog. You're reading Part 2. This section reviews how vision, language and thought are twinned and intertwined. Go here for Part 1. As always, read, respond, argue, assert, agree: I'm game.

The curious relationship between language and vision
Mayer & Massa's (2003) visualizer-verbalizer hypothesis states that some people process words more effectively (verbalizers) and some people process pictorial representations more effectively (visualizers). A closer evaluation reveals that visual-verbal inclinations influence cognitive styles as well as learning preferences. But the methods we use to acquire semantic and visual knowledge are nearly identical.

Just as children acquire rules of grammar without explicit teaching, so, too, do we acquire rules of vision (Hoffman, 1998). Our minds learn to construct the world we see, creating "visual worlds from ambiguous images in conformance to visual rules" (p. 24). Using these acquired rules, that range from interpolating stereoscopic vision to interpreting color, illumination and hue; from inferring distance to estimating motion; from cue integration to figure ground delineation, we learn to visually construct the world around us (Hoffman, 1998). The visual rules we learn are nothing short of astounding. These rules are occasionally misleading as several recent books and articles have pointed out but more often than not, they are absolutely essential to our ability to navigate and understand the world. The well-worn phrase seeing is believing is not far from the truth: what we think we perceive is how we learn to understand the world. Perhaps even more amazing is the extensibility of these visual rules since they "endow us with the capacity to understand countless images, even ones not yet seen by any person at any time" (p. 29). In other words, the rules permit us to parse unknown objects with relative cognitive ease.

Images as thought and communication
Visual rules allow us to perceive images, and coincidentally or not, are a vital component of our cognition. Antonio Damasio (1994/2005) asserts that "regardless of the sensory modality in which they are generated" (p.107), images are most likely the main content of thought whether or not the thoughts are about things, processes, words or symbols. Damasio does allow that words and abstract symbols might be mixed into image-based thought; however, he asserts that imagery remains the germinal cognitive building block because, "both words and arbitrary symbols are based on topographically organized representations and can become images" (p. 106).

Assumptions about image-based thinking notwithstanding, humans do seem innately predisposed to understanding external notational systems even if they are novel: "Cross-cultural studies as well as analyses of historical documents show communality in the way that elements and space are used in communication, suggesting that some graphic devices are cognitively natural" (Tversky, 2002, p. 4). Indeed, it appears that we have evolved to make marks and symbols to assist cognition, "People usually do this naturally: This is not some abstract, academic exercise" (Norman, 1993, p. 47).

References:

Damasio, A. (1994/2005). Descartes’ error: emotion, reason and the human brain. New York, NY: Penguin.

Hoffman, D. (1998). Visual intelligence: how we create what we see. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Mayer, R., & Massa, L. (2003). Three facets of visual and verbal learners: cognitive ability, cognitive style, and learning preference. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(4), 833-846.

Norman, D. (1993). Things that make us smart. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Tversky, B. (2002). Some ways that graphics communicate. In N. Allen (Ed.) Working With Words and Images: New Steps in an Old Dance. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing.

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A new visual language (part 1)

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:32:00 -0700

Throughout history humans have endeavored to communicate their thoughts and feelings through an ever evolving, infinitely multiplying succession of abstractions and representations—in a word, media. From these media have sprung a panoply of social sciences that seek to plumb the social, psychological, and emotional meaning embedded within them. Occasionally, the need to invent an entirely new medium arises when no other will do. Information visualization appears to be one such medium, and it fits comfortably on our expanding communication continuum.

Media have long been the darlings of psychological investigation: print, television, film, and more recently, the Internet have received deep, exploratory research. Vast amounts of research into the realms of cognition and mental imagery exist as well. However, design, as it relates to perception, cognition, and media has not been so lucky. While the visual portrayal of data is not new, widely available access to dynamic real-time data with which to create visual portrayals is. A sprinkling of studies concerning the design and cognitive processing of graphs, diagrams, and moving images (video and film) have been written but few peer-reviewed journal studies concerning design, cognition, and visualization (both static and dynamic) exist. A portion of the literature canvassing design and cognition lacks scientific rigor, is insensitive to the cognitive significance of design, or ignorant of the perceptual value of aesthetics, and some of the research is merely anecdotal. Consequently, in order to address the value of information visualization’s role in cognition and emotion, it’s necessary to cobble together different theories and concepts. Accordingly, the conclusions reached here are more associative than direct or explicit. All in all, it's a mixed bag.

Visualizations sit at the nexus of several independently fascinating fields—psychology, programming, science, and information design. Given the complex and layered communicative nature of information visualization, its role as a useful cognitive aid seems obvious; this in turn would seem to argue for immense and profound scientific interest in it. Yet, surprisingly, this is not the case—very little cognitive or affective research exists in this field. Perhaps research lags because of the relatively recent growth of visualizations as a communication medium on the Internet—a still nascent mainstream media phenomenon itself. Nonetheless, the dearth of psychological investigation in so important an area as information visualization, essentially a new visual language, must be corrected.

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The Internet: a commons of public knowledge?

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 08:17:00 -0800

In a youtube video, nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom (2010) distinguishes between three easily confused concepts: 1) commons, "a wide diversity of private goods" that may include public goods like knowledge; 2) common pool resources, "a technical term [used] to refer to resources where it is difficult to exclude people" also to indicate that resource removal is universally decremental; and 3) the commons that includes "both public goods and common pool resources."

In his book Common as Air, Lewis Hyde differentiates between the commons and what he terms "unmanaged common-pool resources." Using England as a representative historical antecedent of today's commons, Hyde (2010) takes pains to note that true English commons were stinted with communal requirements for both use and contribution. In considering property ownership, he writes that its definition is rooted in the physical manifestation of land "plus the social relations and the traditional organizations that govern its use" (p. 29). For without the stint there is no true commons, but "only things belonging to no one, or pools of resources no one manages" (p. 44).

Hyde (2010) suggests three successive eras led to today's commons: 1) the Saxon age in which the majority of land was held and worked in common by villagers; 2) the post-Norman conquest age in which land typically was associated with a manor house and its attendant lord; and 3) the age of enclosure which heralded the modern concept of private ownership, and "ran from the early eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century" (p. 29).

Each successive era represents significant political and social change that affected and was affected by evolving notions of the commons. In moving from a commons to enclosure, accepted local customs were superceded by written national law. Additionally, the commodification of land significantly rebalanced social relationships by eliminating common shared resources, their associated activities and benefits, while introducing the concept of monetary valuation. This change effectively severed a village's connective tissue: once society members no longer needed to work together to maintain a commons, social obligations shifted from required to optional.

Societies offer a specific kind of value that modern citizens make use of everyday. But from whence does this value arise, for as Hyde asks, "…what exactly is 'property'? The oil in the lamp, the light it sheds, the midnight scholar's flash of insight: can each of these be 'property' and if so, by what ample definition of the term?" (p. 5). Together the combination of property and ownership produces the emergent aspect of value. Does the value lie in the outcome? What about the value of the generative components? And how do we decide what financial value air or water has? Or what the value of collective wisdom might be?

The gift economy of the indigenous people's Potlach rearranges the defining aspects of capitalism in a way similar to how cubism reimagined representational art. In this type of economy, "status is accorded to those who give the most to others" (Pinchot, 1995). Thanks to our seemingly innate reciprocity, gift-giving is self-reinforcing (as both Farmville's designers and players well know).

So, is the Internet a gift economy or a commons (as defined by both Ostrom and Hyde) arising from a loose and informal accretion of public knowledge? What do we want it to be? As vested political interests wrestle with this protean question, we'll soon find out.

To this I say, Citizen, arise!

References:

Collins, K. (Photographer). (2005, December 31). Fence [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevincollins/81418404/sizes/m/

Hyde, L. (2010). Common as air. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

IascCommons. (2010, August 10). Professor Elinor Ostrom interview - 01 [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXzbcgj9F54

Pinchot, G. (1995, 1997). The gift economy. In Context, 41 (49). Retrieved from http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC41/PinchotG.htm.>

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The Natalie Portman effect

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:30:00 -0800

All possible valences of an object, all its ambivalence, which cannot be reduced to any model, are reduced by design to two rational components, two general models—utility and the aesthetic—which design isolates and artificially opposes to one another (Baudrillard, 1981).

Natalie Portman is a lovely girl; there's little to dispute there. However I find that her acting is, how shall I put this, not exactly the most believable. Nearly every time I find myself watching a movie with her in it, I think to myself, "How many other beautiful women are out there who can act? Why didn't the director choose one of them? How much more would I like this film with some other actress in it?" In other words, her luminous beauty isn't powerful enough to distract me from what what she's supposed to be doing—acting.

As I'm watching her I'm not thinking that she's a real character experiencing events that just happen to be on film. No, instead I'm thinking, this is Natalie Portman acting. This represents a vast and important difference. I'm calling this affective transportation/non-transportation difference the Natalie Portman effect.* And it's everywhere in the field of design, particularly interface design. Relying on the attractive to smooth over the ineffective.

We're pretty sure we know what we're getting when we see Ms. Portman's name on a movie marquis: she's tremendously attractive and we're used to seeing her in films. Because she offers us these few choice qualities, and we can mentally route around her emotional translation inefficiencies, we simply do so. Likewise, because producers know that she has an existing audience drawn in by her looks, they continue to select her to star in films. On paper she's a veritable win-win. So why am I complaining and what does this have to do with design? Good question.

Mentally step back. Imagine if we could slot some other doe-eyed ingenue who could believably and persuasively emote into one of Ms. Portman's roles. Someone who could not only visual entrance us, but also emotionally transport us. Imagine if we weren't locked into maximizing our initial investment with as little financial risk as possible. Imagine if we could imagine something entirely different. Then we'd be onto something.

Now take this same idea and translate it to design. If you're an interaction designer, imagine trying an entirely different and more useful interaction that doesn't rely on looks to get by; if you're a game designer, imagine if your game didn't rely on established themes or visual tropes; if you're a product designer, imagine if you could alter your product to last forever. What if you used a video to say what you wanted to say rather than relying on text? What if you provided everything as a podcast? What if you allowed people to leave audio comments rather than text comments? What if you stopped thinking of ways to shift your design towards an attractive norm and started thinking of ways that could radically improve it?

What if the expected norm wasn't the norm? What then?
update 02.13.11: What if we considered the contextualized solution the defining aspect of success rather than how closely it hews to the expected but unexamined norm?

I know that Jaron Lanier has taken some serious shit with regards to his writing style and ability to craft intelligible arguments, but you can't fault the guy for underscoring what he defines as digital collectivism and what I refer to as a series of software cages. Some of us are nicely kitted out in gilded ones, but many of us don't even know we're in one. If this is the world we choose for ourselves, and this increasingly appears to be so, then let's build it out in ways that are creative, dynamic, and beautifully functional. Let's heed the form and function concept and make sure to add the emotional component so often lacking. Let's not rely on the normative appearance of our work so that we can overlook its intrinsic and flawed affective emptiness. Let's move beyond the Natalie Portman effect.

References:

Baudrillard, J. (1981). Design and environment or how political economy escalates into cyberblitz in For a critique of the political economy of the sign, p 188-189. St Louis, MO: Telos Press.

Sirota, P. (2010) [Photographer]. Image of Natalie Portman for Marie Claire. downloaded from http://www.natalieportman.com/npcom.asp?page_number=176&parentId=151830

* I've called it the Natalie Portman effect but feel free to refer to this effect by substituting any extremely attractive but not exactly talented actor/actress of your own choosing.

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The psychology of design: the metaphoric beauty of the small multiple

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:14:00 -0800

We live in a vast world, and the data that swirls out of that world increases every day. It's difficult to stand amidst all of this information activity and maintain a sense of the individual. And seeing the larger picture, well, that's even more complicated. What's happening in our own backyard can seem like more than enough information for us to process. Whirling and twirling, soaring and sailing, information streams around us: we produce it and consume it. Still, getting a broader perspective can be fruitful and surprisingly calming.

How to accomplish this and still maintain some sense of self, some sense of individuality among all the chaos? Enter small multiples. Some Edward Tufte fans may be fully aware of them from Envisioning Information, but for those of you who are not, a quick explanation. Small multiples are aptly named: they are small representations—design principles—repeated to provide a perspectival view.

Small multiples, whether tabular or pictorial, move to the heart of visual reasoning—to see, distinguish, choose…. Their multiplied smallness enforces local comparisons within our eyespan, relying on an active eye to select and make contrasts rather than on bygone memories of images scattered over pages and pages. (Tufte, 1990, p. 33)

Sometimes they represent events over time, sometimes they represent all physical possibilities like this beautiful example from chess. You've probably seen them, or something like them, before; now you know their technical design term. They are your ally in the information trenches. The beauty of the well-designed small multiple is that it is jam-packed with information that you can choose to parse at will.

But let's not stop with chess. Can You Draw the Internet? exploits the idea of the small multiple in terrifically rewarding ways: cognitively, visually, perceptually. The site design advances creativity by presenting loads of it; it provides quick views into personal opinions; it encourages alternative modes of thought through visual variation; and it cadges together wildly differing interpretations of one idea. That's quite an accomplishment for one webpage, even one that seeks to represent the vastness of the Internet.

Let's stretch our imagination a bit further in order to parse what the designers have accomplished. Imagine if that single page presented images sequentially, one after another—the excitement and energy of it would be entirely dissipated. Poof! Gone. Temporal shifts are cognitively taxing experiences. By choosing to use a comprehensive display, the designers invite continued inspection, interaction and participation. They exploit the value of play and social proof. They whisper, "Other people have done it, they've taken on the task of drawing the Internet. Heck, even ten year olds have done it, so, you can, too. It's easy. Give it a try."

In addition to persuading you to interact, the designers have given you the gift of the alternative view: by seeing unanticipated interpretations you are placed outside of the bounds of typical social understandings of the Internet. You're free to create. Some of the other creators have used this opportunity to take a humorous poke at memes and ideologies derived from the Internet itself. Consequently, the small multiples are not only universally meta—in that together they present a total view—but they're also individually meta in their specific interpretations of a larger idea.

This is the small multiple's innate beauty: recursiveness on a grand scale made accessible through the power of numerous individual representations. A bit like culture, itself.

Reference:

Tufte, E. (1990). Envisioning information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press

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The snowflake and the social cascade

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 09:35:00 -0700

"God bless the meek hydrogen bonds responsible for the cohesion of water molecules."
– Anon #10 (Mar 18, 2010) http://boingboing.net/2010/03/18/bioacoustician-berni.html

Over the last few years, people seem to have migrated en masse toward Facebook as a primary social interaction spot. With its seemingly inexorable rise to the top of the social media heap, it's sparked me to consider the counter side of social media success: how many users/consumers/participants must depart to destabilize the system? At what point does a one-by-one departure become a cascade? Is there a magic number? What causes a social system to become upset? What are the potential exogenous perturbations in a complex system like a social media platform?

These are only the tips of much larger, deeply submerged questions such as, Is there some inherent aspect of software that causes diasporas? Are humans destined to colonize and overwhelm one area, only to move on to another? From what and from where do trends arise? (Such immense and thrilling questions fall far outside the purview of a mere blog post; nevertheless, let's keep them in mind as we continue our discussions on this blog.)

Even with the pared down question of social cascades, we need to narrow our focus and define our concepts. What constitutes a social system? Groups and individuals. Simple enough—except that the basic unit, the individual, is herself a complex system. Thus, at close range our simplification turns out to be only so simple.

Still, let's consider how, or where, we fit into a system. What should we consider as variables? I must repeatedly remind myself that I'm not a typical user of most software, or technology, or really most anything for that matter. You, my dear reader, are most likely not, either. We're typical in many ways for US citizens—ways that some politicians, software developers, corporate honchos, design experts and research academics might claim are vitally significant—but in many others we're markedly different. So, where do we fit into research? What traits are the important ones? Are they the same for everyone? If everyone is averaged out, where do we lie on the scale? What is the scale?

Although this technique swims against the tide of what's considered appropriate social science research, since my question directly confronts the issue of standard categorization, I offer myself as a research example. I have already noted that I'm not a typical user of most things despite having successfully attained both the average height and average shoe size for a typical woman living in the United States. (w00t!) But, as my father would say, this information is neither here nor there, so let's consider some other, slightly more intriguing, and different statistics.

I have a Master's degree and my family consists primarily of advanced degree holders;
I have historically earned an income that puts me in the upper reaches of earners;
I have a passing familiarity with a few languages;
I have traveled outside the United States;
I have lived outside the United States;
I routinely vote;
I participate in online discussions;
I donate to what I imagine are good causes; and
I regularly volunteer in my community.

Viewed at an atomic level, these traits are not all that distinguishing or special. But collectively—molecularly—these traits coalesce into rarer and rarer chemical compounds, placing me in smaller and smaller groups of like ilk. If a scientist, or a politician, or an economist examines me trait by trait, then they might miss what makes me Carla Casilli: the totality that identifies me in the larger sense. As Whitman noted, we are large and we contain multitudes.

So what about folks like me or you? Sure, we're not the dreamily imagined snowflakes of our childhood: each individually perfect and beautifully unique, each equally important. No, we're much more of a collective mishmash: some of us gorgeous and complete; some of us with broken crystals and erratically formed edges; some of us much more socially powerful than others. Still, we have our snowflake-like uniqueness, right? Sort of. While I've been declaiming the singular value of being Carla Casilli, I'm compelled to observe that there are at least two other Carla Casilli's in the world right now.* And as if that weren't enough, it pains me to say that you might be hard pressed to recognize the vast, chasm-like differences between one Carla Casilli and another on paper (neither of which is me). The odds of that uncomfortable fact definitely troubles the perception of uniqueness.

So, how much of our lovely individuality gets jettisoned when we engage ourselves in examining the human as subject? What happens to our personally reassuring just noticeable differences when we're being evaluated by science? In other words, when all of the pretty snowflakes are piled together in a pristine bank of statistics, of potentialities, of likelihoods, what exactly are we noting? Indeed, what might cause some of us to start slowly melting, changing from one form into another, developing entirely different cohesion properties along the way? Is it as simple as naming this process social adaptation or emergence? Could some of us simply be as yet unnoticed black swans? Maybe we're not looking at the right things: our ability to mistake perception for reality appears to be limitless.

And so our discussion circles back to individual variables and imagined change agents. We fool ourselves into thinking that we're discretely driven social actors when indeed, our actions are predicated on the networked actions of others in our social groups. Social cascades occur because of complex behaviors that arise from dyadic or multi-party interactions that then repeat and multiply across groups, resulting in increasingly complex behavior patterns. According to Fowler & Christakis (2010), their research on behavior cascades suggests

that one fundamental justification for the existence of elaborate social ties in the form of social networks may be that these ties may allow humans to benefit from the actions of widely distributed others and also may allow humans to spread beneficial strategies widely enough to benefit others on whom they depend. (p. 4)

Additionally, Fowler & Christakis note that "behavior cascades may be a crucial part of an explanation for how small changes in human institutions…can yield large changes in a group's behavior" (2010, p. 4). They conclude that

behavior can spread from person to person to person via a diverse set of mechanisms, subject to certain constraints, and as a result, each person in a network can influence dozens or even hundreds of people, some of whom he or she does not know and has not met. (p. 4)

Thus, my network value arises precisely from my individuality—from my odd, rare combination of attributes; indeed they constitute my ability to exert exogenous perturbations in the field. And that somewhat counterintuitive bit of network math is deeply reassuring to this individual.

* Facebook reveals some very interesting information, albeit in ways I doubt they anticipate or track. Let's say the words qualitative research together, shall we? Qualitative research. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

References:
Fowler, J., & Christakis, N. (2010). Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks. PNAS 2010 107 (12) 5334-5338; published ahead of print March 8, 2010, doi:10.1073/pnas.0913149107/pnas.0913149107.

Magill, A. (Photographer). (2009, December 23). Snowflake [Photograph]. Retrieved October 18, 2010 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/amagill/4223790595/#

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The battle between personal algorithms and social software

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:39:00 -0700

danah boyd's work has influenced my thinking toward social science, toward graduate school, and toward Microsoft, of all things. I respect the woman. So I read her tweets and her papers knowing I'll learn something new. (That's a word that will come back to us again and again.) But there's been something sticking in my brain—something forcing me to circle back, to rethink, to reconsider—with regards to her thoughts on racial divides in social media. Taking into account many, if not all of the potential self-deluding fallacies (e.g., fundamental attribution error, etc.) that might be plaguing me, I am still resolute in thinking that there's an alternate explanation for the alleged race and class-based flight* occurring within social media.

What if we examine danah boyd's observations from a different vantage point? What if we're not seeing users running from some sort of person but instead moving toward something? What if it's not so much white flight as it is different rates of adoption and abandonment? What if it represents a simple response to opportunity? Or perhaps opportunity isn't quite accurate, perhaps it's response to novelty—to newness. I choose this ungainly word to express the importance of the aspect of the new, something the word novelty does, but does not clearly underscore the current obsession with the new. (A few years ago there was a paper mill promotion that suggested that we needed a new word for "new." It was satire then, now it seems almost prescient.)

Is this just semantics? A nice word game to distract us from a larger cultural movement? Or some positive psychology spin on a meaningful and socially problematic undercurrent? Perhaps my opinion flies in the face of current psychological and sociological research. I am okay with that—for now. The conversation is open: further inquiry may reveal a new interpretation. Below I consider an alternate interpretation of user flight from social networks.

Let's park our preconceived notion of previously gathered real life socially derived data; let's not map it onto the Internet, yet. Instead, let's turn our attention to focus on the influence of software.

First, a personal anecdote: I don't know if I respond to race in some different manner when I'm online than when I'm off. When I am online, the people I seek out are those who have similar interests to my own, or those who might expand my world a bit more. If others are experiencing their online world in a way that's similar to my own, is race the only correlating factor? What about people from Pennsylvania or folks from Indonesia? Can our theories encompass such large parameters?

I'm much more comfortable saying that social actions are attributable to culture—our U.S.-based culture focused on the value of the individual, replete with personal interests but derived from macro-influences. Human belief systems are complicated. Therefore, it's difficult to say X consistently influences us in Y way. This is where the "correlation is necessary but not sufficient for causation" argument steps up and declares its value. Traits and experience don't necessarily conclude in standard patterns of behavior.

And yet, I don't want to let the role of a vital variable slip by unnoticed. Leave out the role of software design in this argument and you miss the elephant in the room. Let's bring it front and center because it controls the parameters that help to define our actions.

Most software is a box: a box into which we (generally) willingly place ourselves. And software has had some really good marketing wins: its how we got to the moon, and how we scan the brain, it drives the engines in our cars, and its what permits me to write this on a computer. Software has permitted us to accomplish some pretty grand stuff. Subsequently, our perception of it doesn't often coincide with its limitations. Its boxiness escapes attention until we stop to realize that our choices are limited by the intentions of the software, by the financial decisions that drove its creation, by the desires and influences of the people who created the box.

Let's acknowledge that software is a tool with its own agenda. In other words, as users, we don't create its parameters. The appreciation we have for a piece of software depends on how we perceive this box—can we run for miles without finding the edge, or hold out our arms and touch the walls, or do we barely have enough room to breathe? Is it reflecting us or providing a window for us? When you sit at your desk or walk around using a smartphone, do you find yourself wishing your software did things differently? I'll bet you have; I know I have. What you've found is the hard edge of that particular software: you've brushed against its inherent boxiness.

Social media software is a series of boxes, some large, some small, some that feel comfortable and some that don't. But the dimensions of it are culturally mediated by its designers. In effective software design, the users are the proverbial fish asked about the temperature of the water. What's water?

Ineffective software design reminds us that while it may look like we can see the entire world around us—that our tank appears to be limitless—we can't get to where we want to go. Sometimes, software flight can be explained by the software itself. Freud was right, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. When we leave some social network, we're not leaving the culture, we're leaving the cultural parameters that the software predefined. Getting tired of or bored with software is something entirely different from getting tired of or bored with the people the software allows you to interact with. When you get bored with the experience of a piece of software, you're getting bored with the reality that the software has boxed you into.

I didn't take to Facebook all that well for reasons that will make sense to some private, introspective folks. I don't anticipate everyone will understand that decision and that's perfectly okay with me. But I feel it's necessary to declare that I didn't leave Facebook because I began to see more varied people on it. On the contrary. I left Facebook because its algorithms didn't suit my own. I didn't like their box.

So I chafe a bit at reading that flight is occurring from websites in a fashion reminiscent of suburban white flight. I don't want my actions bunched in to some larger, more generalized, racially-derived movement. If that happens then the delicate, nuanced, multidimensional experience of the individual gets lost in the shuffle, and in this instance, that individual is me. If we do that, then we've placed too much emphasis on the software's declaration of what constitutes culture and missed the personal human interpretation of it.

*If we're insistent on using race as the fulcrum for this discussion, then let's unpack what we mean when we talk about race or class, because I'm not sure we're all speaking the same language. Do we mean that race is physiological or physical? Or that it's culturally derived? Does ethnicity play a role? Is class clearly defined? Or are these generally accepted terms?

Additional reading:

Boyd, D. (Forthcoming). White flight in networked publics? how race and class shaped american teen engagement with myspace and facebook. In L. Nakamura & P. Chow-White (Eds.) Digital race anthology. New York, NY: Routledge. http://www.danah.org/papers/2009/WhiteFlightDraft3.pdf

Boyd, D. (2008). None of this is real. In J. Karaganis (Ed.) Structures of participation in digital culture. New York, NY: Social Research Council http://www.danah.org/papers/NoneOfThisIsReal.pdf

Boyd, D. (2008). Facebook's privacy trainwreck: exposure, invasion, and social convergence. Convergence 14(1) . http://www.danah.org/papers/FacebookPrivacyTrainwreck.pdf

Ito, M., et al. (2010). Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pdfs/Hanging_Out.pdf

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Ants, art and empathy

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:25:00 -0700

Last night a round of tweets blew by mentioning a science story in the New York Times about a Brooklyn-based artist's piece containing McDonald's foodstuffs and ants. Some tweets proclaimed "now this is art!" and referred to it as both "neat!" and "Art." That's right Art with a capital A, not just little a art.

World, I beg to differ.

Art reveals and rewards, it is occasionally difficult and painful but at its best it tells us something about what it means to be human. Killing things (including dogs, butterflies, and ants) in order to dramatize the horror/beauty/banality of our allegedly super-special, statistically improbable existence is not part of what is included in the world of Art—at least not in my book. Let's leave killing-as-an-art-form to the dictators, eugenists, and sociopaths of the world.

Frankly, I'm amazed at the casual violence being perpetrated on Pogonomyrmex badius by this artist and her New York Times / Twitter audience. "For one month, the ants, which usually thrive on seeds, are being fed a steady diet of McDonald's Happy Meals" (Prakash, 2010). Fed a steady diet is somewhat of a misstatement, because the ants are granivores. So, after watching the Pogos feast on the few sesame seeds scattered atop a cheeseburger bun, the viewing audience is privileged to observe the weeks-long starvation of a group of ants.

How ingenious! How witty! How artistic!

I'm not sure to what end they collaborated, but Ms. Demaray (who holds an undergraduate degree in cognitive psychology from UC Berkeley) "worked hand in hand with Dr. Christine Johnson, a scientific assistant at the Museum of Natural History who specializes in ant research" (Prakash). What to make of this partnership? Surely, Dr. Johnson was aware that lack of a proper diet would eventually starve the ants to death. If this was the desired outcome, why reference science at all? Doesn't the collaboration with a scientist who studies ants make their slow death seem a bit more premeditated? What if I added this tidbit of information: "This exhibit lacks a queen and brood, so the workers are leading a life devoid of its fundamental purpose" (Prakash). If slowly expiring under the eye of the occasional, dispassionate gallery visitor weren't torture enough, Ms. Demeray & Dr. Johnson have ensured that the ants are in essence dancing for us by performing aimless functions: the ant's existence is defined by its role as part of a larger collective that includes these aspects.

But, hey, it's Art! And a scientist was involved! Don't be so bourgeois: isn't it obvious that their discomfort parallels the human condition? That their limited diet highlights the horrors of the mediated agribusiness-based corporatocracy in which we live! Sacrifice away, they're just ants!

Yes, it's true, they are just ants. So, why get upset about this short-term exhibit in a small gallery in Manhattan?

Because those ants actually are a stand-in for the human condition: at the very least, they highlight our cavalier attitude toward everything that isn't us. Koyaanisqatsi. Those little living things have been bought and sold, and shipped to a foreign location in order to be exploited by someone in a position of power. Sound familiar? They're needlessly languishing because someone has decided that it's in her best interest that they suffer.

As for the McDonald's reference point, it's been done before with people, so now it stands the chance of being called the most damning word in the Art world today—derivative. But this is neither here nor there. Where we find our reward in Ms Demaray's work is in its social commentary analogy, but probably not in the manner she intended. Because her piece doesn't point a bony finger at the audience, it skewers its creator. Here's the surprise: it's not the ants that are on display here, it's the humans. In fact, it's Ms. Demaray herself who is on display.

In the end though, her work misses the mark because it titillates with cultural artifacts and then kills without heart. This sort of conceptually-derived but ultimately throwaway work misapprehends the beauty of our interconnected web of life. Purposely killing ants because they invade our homes and eat our food is one thing (and that thing is accurately called extermination); watching them slowly die of starvation because someone thinks it would make a good exhibit piece is something else entirely (and it's not art). This act selfishly attenuates the beauty of the natural ecological balance.

If we are willing to watch in amusement as living things are sacrificed before us in useless and perverse acts of enforced alienation and starvation, what other acts might we find ourselves capable of watching, or worse yet, of inflicting—especially if we attempt to placate ourselves with the notion that it's okay because someone calls it art.

We are notoriously bad at seeing our own faults: this exhibit is an example of our continually rationalized self-blindness. Small deeds such as these limn our worldview; they help to define what we find acceptable. So, I ask again, is our lack of empathy for something as small as a group of ants really so bad?

"At the gallery last week, many of the ants were dead" (Prakash).

References:

Nobile, A. (Photographer). Pogonomyrmex badius [Photograph]. © California Academy of Sciences, 2000-2008. http://www.eol.org/pages/599429?image_id=927571
Prakash, S. (2010). Desert dwellers on a fast food diet. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/science/24ants.html

Additional reading:

de Waal, F. (2009). The age of empathy. New York, NY: Crown.

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Ghosts of our former selves: originality, art, science & memory

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:17:00 -0700

I don't expect to find resonance in prefaces or author's notes, but the first few pages of two quite different books—Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff and Gödel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (GEB) by Douglas Hofstadter—provided me with deep, unanticipated pleasures. Before the books had even begun, I found myself wondering at Wolff's candor, marveling at Hofstadter's clarity of thought, reminded of the rewards of art and science, profoundly entangled with the mystery that is time.

Wolff starts Our Story Begins, a compendium of new and previously published fictional work, with "A Note From the Author"; Hofstadter begins GEB, a twentieth anniversary reissue of his earlier non-fiction work, with a new, twenty-three page preface. Both authors' words dance about the pages and are such delightful pieces of writing that I wonder if I shouldn't begin a longitudinal study examining authorial prefaces to old work. Wouldn't that make for a fascinating class: "Studies in authorial aging—representations of self through time." (If this course already exists, someone alert me; I want to sign up. If not, I'd like to teach it.)

To further my own selfish interests, I'll somewhat inelegantly lump both of these books into the reissue column (although admittedly Wolff's book does contain previously unpublished work). I perform this seemingly arbitrary classification in order to observe two alternate realities. Because what does a reissue engender but the grand and unusual opportunity to fix what's wrong, to clean up the slightly off-kilter assumptions the ensuing years have revealed, to refresh stale writing and revisit old ideas: to rewrite personal history.

Except that this option doesn't tempt everyone. Of the two authors, only Wolff chooses to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by time, "The truth is that I have never regarded my stories as sacred texts. To the extent that they are still alive to me I take a continuing interest in giving that life its best expression" (Wolff, 2007). In order to arrive at this well-reasoned conclusion, though, Wolff takes the time to atomize the question of originality:

It might be said that I am no longer the man who wrote a story published twenty-five, or ten, or even two years ago, and that I should be a respectful executor and do the actual now-vanished writer the honor of keeping my mitts off his work. But there's a problem here. What would the "original form" of a story be? The very first draft of what may have been as many as twenty drafts? Surely not—nobody would want to read that. Do we mean the story as it made its debut in a periodical? Or as published in the first edition of the collection it belonged to? (Wolff, 2007)

Hofstadter, on the other hand, after considering and rejecting several straw men arguments, decides to take a pass. Referring to the publishing of GEB as a "statement of my religion" (Hofstadter, 1999, p. P-23), the twenty-years-older Hofstadter salutes the "labor of love" (ibid) created by his twenty-years-younger self. In "To Tamper, or to Leave Pristine" his gentle but gimlet-eyed reflection on his earlier scientific work, he pauses to consider the diffusive properties of the artistic statement:

As for the idea of revising the text, however, that is more complex. Where would one draw the line? What would be sacrosanct? What would survive, what would be tossed out? Were I to take that task on, I might well wind up rewriting every single sentence—and let's not forget, reverse-engineering old Mr. T… (Hofstadter, 1999, p. P-23)

It is a conundrum. Messing about with the past can unearth complexities and paradoxes; the editing pen can be a surgeon's scalpel or a murderer's shank. Knowing how much to edit and when to stop is downright difficult. Revision is a complex notion: at what point does it end and re-imagining begin? The current neuroscientific and psychological understandings of memory indicate that what we think we remember is merely the latest blurry photocopy of the first confabulation we concocted when we sought to remember. Is editing so much different?

Like these reissued books, we, too, have earlier incarnations. Yet, when do we take the opportunity to reflect on their meanings; examine how an earlier persona led to the person we are today; or, attempt to decode the cryptic message of our past motives? When we look back at the early scribblings on our personal palimpsests, can we do so with detached benevolence? Do we choose to edit or accept?

No matter how benignly we examine our past selves, we each suffer in one peculiar way. Our ability to see ourselves clearly is limited by our own perspective. What a disturbing sensation, never to be fully aware of our entire self: to be constrained by the pinhole of our own view; compelled to patchwork together a likeness from the scattered reflection of family, friends, enemies, lovers. Given this necessarily rough-hewn bricolage, do we photoshop that smudgy copy into some clean, new, aestheticized versions of ourselves à la Wolff, or like Hofstadter, do we acknowledge and accept our past perfectly-imperfect selves? Does art trump science?

Psychological research seems to indicate we will pick and choose our most attractive features to construct a self-image; we'll edit continually, and most likely, we'll be completely, blissfully unaware that we're being creatively selective. It will seem to us that we're simply accurately representing ourselves. In this sense, science may not trump art, but rather work hand in hand with it in order to permit the species to continue. The human mind is a wonder of both science and art.

Imagine: the impetuous, youthful me always blew by the seemingly endless pages of author's prefaces and notes on my way to the meat of a book. After this post, I'm left wondering, who was that person? She seems vaguely familiar.

References:

Berteig, R. (Photographer). (2010). Lefty clock [photograph]. Original image by Ross Berteig retrieved August 16, 2010 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/rberteig/177100826/sizes/m/ .
Hofstadter, D. (1999). Gödel, escher, bach: an eternal golden braid. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Wolff, T. (2007). Our story begins. New York, NY: Random House.

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When online comments go too far: the wonderland of the internet

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:00:00 -0700

When a writer troubles to put down thoughts on a page, what is the responsibility of the reader? Can anything be expected of him? If we put aside the humanities arguments about deconstruction, authorship and ownership, It seems the answer is no. It's no most likely because what we've published we've probably published on the Internet. And like death, taxes and spam, eventually the Internet delivers trolls. That's not to say that it doesn't provide beautiful, thoughtful, soul-searching and sublime work, too—but It's a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale every time, beautiful but bittersweet. Because in the hollows, corners and shadows the trolls are waiting.

And so our story begins, gentle readers, with a recent piece entitled "Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine" by Jonah Lehrer. This thoughtful, lengthy piece of writing examines Robert Sapolsky's work with baboons and his scientific assumptions regarding brain chemicals released during stress. It also addresses the long term effects these chemicals have on our physical health. It concludes by considering the possibility of a genetically complex vaccine that would work against an overabundance of glucocorticoids, the chemicals Sapolsky believes have long term deleterious effects to health.

Now, some science is not only complex but complicated; some science defies clean encapsulation or simple explanation—the science in "Under Pressure" falls into that category. Obvious observation—this article is long—perhaps too long for the average reader. For the media interested in covering this article (we are at the meta or "curation" stage of journalism) it's worthwhile to rewrite, rearrange, and smooth out the larger complexities so that they might be more easily understood by a lay audience; that way they'll soundbite better and a pullquote can be pressed into service where a long series of paragraphs previously existed. This sequence of events is what happened to Mr. Lehrer's article, it happens to articles every day—that and much more. In two days it had been pruned, pinched, and tucked into something altogether different from its original 5700 words. Because, gentle reader, as in many Hans Christian Andersen tales, things are not what they seem. A science story is not simply a science story, especially if it's in Wired, it's the beginning of a conversation and an open invitation for mayhem, misinformation, and malice from the readers. Welcome to the Wired comments section: hate-mongers, trolls, and conspiracy theorists welcome.

Now, the problem of hate-mongers, trolls and conspiracy theorists isn't new. But its fissioning does seem to be expanding. The culture of trolling has finally become a thing unto itself. The comments section on any site is a messy tangle of people who want to respond positively to your writing, people who have an honest beef with your thinking, and people who feel free to rip it up because they can—and some of them do it for the lulz. This is the Internet; this is the Internet on 4chan.

Ultimately, it's a clash of cultures: one serious and didactic, the other also serious but antiestablishment in their aim to disrupt the dominant culture. 4chan operates in the realm of provocation and perturbation, agitation and aggravation, griefing and goading. Lisa Nakamura's talk at the Berkman Center is particularly enlightening with regards to the 4chan problem, "Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game." She has given this burgeoning phenomenon a good deal of thought, and I strongly recommend viewing the video of her speech.

Doing and saying obnoxious things for teh lulz is considered a normative practice within 4chan and this action has evolved enough to resolve into its own kind of culture. Now, gentle reader, I'm a little match girl on the outside of 4chan looking in. I don't look in too often but when I do, I see a sort of funhouse with crazy, distorting mirrors that reflect a society that looks sort of recognizable but is actually a type of alternate universe. If you're acquainted with the episodes, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," and "The Alternative Factor," from the original Star Trek series, you'll have some idea of the complex nature of this new culture. It seems familiar because it co-opts ordinary themes, ideas, words, techniques, etc., but part of its ethos is chaos so this world ultimately bends toward deviance. Yet, this interpretation depends on which side of the looking glass you are. When you're on the side of the self-organizing group Anonymous as they wreak havoc with Scientology, they seem like a group of merry pranksters. When you're on the other side of the attack as Mr. Lehrer and Mr. Sapolsky have been, all of a sudden they seem like a group of dangerous, unhinged hooligans.

So, what to do? Is there a solution to the comment trolls? When a comment board is overrun—like Wired's has been for years—how do you separate the real comments from the fake? Ms. Nakamura gives us a hint in the title of her talk: hate the game. Commenting is one of the games that constitutes the Internet, so we have to change the game in order to change the outcome. Let's begin by asking the question, what's the point of having a comments section? Do we need one? What do we hope to gain from it and do we lose anything by not having one? Can we achieve the goal of interaction in some alternate way? If we have blindly accepted that a comments section is the norm without considering its goals or ramifications then maybe we haven't considered our own communication methodology very well. I'm not suggesting a wholesale reversion to a general broadcasting technique, but maybe every online article or blog doesn't need a comments section.

As for Wired, their attempt to represent the Internet culture binds them to all aspects of it, including 4chan. In this instance, I'm sorry to say, their comments section is probably not going to have a happy ending—ever.

Reference:

A journey round my skull (photographer), 2009. H.C. Anderson, here lies the serpent of knowledge, agnete lind picture book, 1855 [photograph]. Retrieved August 5, 2010 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajourneyroundmyskull/3307507567/in/photostream/

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Institutional memory, status quo, hierarchy, content & design

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:57:00 -0700

While listening to a Rebooting The News segment with a partner of arc90, I realized that design has fallen prey to the same gremlin that plagues other professions—professional amnesia. We temporarily forgot how to simplify the reading experience because we were caught up in the next new tech tool and so relied on the familiar—reinforcing the status quo of text-based design.

Luckily for us, other fields have retained some institutional memory and they continue to inform the future of the Internet. In the last few weeks Dave Winer has rewritten his blog code from the ground up. His new work is, in some ways, revolutionary. In a nutshell, he modified his information hierarchy by altering its visual presentation. What does that mean? Check out Scripting News 2.0 for yourself.

The primary idea underpinning Dave Winer's design structure seems obvious: content organized within levels of hierarchy. Full-blown, in-depth content is not something everyone wants or needs. How to address this issue and maintain readership? Subtext. Hide information that might be somewhat off-topic or too detailed for the casual reader until the reader decides to access it. Dave was inspired by Nicholas Carr's post and book as well as arc90's wonderful Readability bookmarklet.

Unlike Readability, which seeks to quiet the Internet-wide visual cacophony assaulting the reader, Mr. Winer has enjoyed the luxury of simplifying the visual representation of ideas for his own blog. Both Readability and @davewiner's blog redesign explore the scaffolding possibilities surrounding content comprehensibility and information hierarchy.

It's important to recognize that Mr. Winer's visual display of content hierarchy (not typographic hierarchy) places editorial depth decisions into the hands of the reader. Readability can help render a website more visually legible; Mr. Winer's choices help the reader to become more self-actualized. Wittingly or unwittingly, he's opened the door to greater complexity in idea presentation, strengthened the argument for journalistic breadth, and provided improved contextualization for online writing.

Amazingly, he's accomplished this dynamism without eliminating simplicity. Skimming remains possible and happily, so does close reading. Brilliant. Design excels when it seems obvious, intuitive, and psychologically assistive (See Donald Norman's work for more information in this area). Mr. Winer's endeavors do that with online information.* We think like this, why shouldn't we read like this, too?

But let's get back to my assertion regarding professional amnesia. Information designers already know how to imply hierarchy: typography, placement, and color have been our tools of choice for hundreds of years. So, how have we missed out on the idea of cloaking text until it's valuable or necessary? Well, we haven't. Consider this: stretchtext, another ingenious idea for online information presentation has been around since 1967! Here is a more current interpretation of it.** Additionally, the rise of javascript and other coding advancements fathered all sorts of hidden hierarchical tree menus. The meme has been in the air for quite some time, it's just that designers didn't seem to make the leap to structuring content in this manner. Or if we did, we were soon distracted by the shiny things popping up elsewhere. Thank goodness someone reminded us of its intrinsic value. Let's not make the mistake of forgetting it again.

* I have purposefully avoided addressing the visual design of Mr Winer's blog: the increased hopskotch-ability now embedded within Scripting News would lead me to slightly different design choices. I applaud him for questioning the status quo: his ideation is a wonderful reconsideration of structured information.

** Thanks to Leslie Michael Orchard for pointing me toward stretchtext.

Reference

Raforrest (Photographer), (2005). Scaffold [Photograph]. Retrieved June 14, 2010 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/raforrest/77596703/

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The gift of the reader comment

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:33:00 -0700

Having recently traversed the path of graduate school after spending a long while in the business world, I learned quite a few new things, not the least of which were ideas about writing. One of the most influential (and most difficult) lessons I learned was this: what you're writing isn't necessarily what other people are reading. When you write a paper, submit an essay, or post on your blog, you're putting yourself out there, hoping that people will read your work. You hope they not only read your work, but get it, absorb it, grok it, feel your ideas resonate at the very depths of their souls.

Except that other people are not exactly like you. Their minds work differently than yours; they have different experiences that contextualize their thoughts. Hence, your content is up for radical (re)interpretation once it leaves your hands. Where you saw a straight line, your reader might see a serpentine path—or no path at all. Consequently, some of your readers might not get what you're trying to say through no fault of their own. They might not comprehend your message because you didn't provide them with enough context. In fact, they might think that you're way off base and they might be right. It's no surprise then that some of them will inform you of that, right there on your paper, essay, or blog. Good for them.

Your initial reaction to this experience might be one of confusion, anger, superiority, or disappointment. You might find yourself saying something along the lines of "I don't think you've understood me," or "You really don't get it, poor fool," or "What do you know?" The first statement accurately evaluates the situation. But the other two thoughts are problematic. Why? Because the individual who wrote to you has made a conscious effort to open a dialogue with you. You did connect with them, just not in the way you had anticipated.

Congratulations. You have happily arrived at a learning moment. Because although comments about your work can seem painful or harsh, they are gifts—nice little packages of constructive criticism thoughtfully wrapped up just for you by your reading audience. You are lucky to get them even though it may not feel that way at first.

As we gain greater and greater experience in the working world, especially if our professions are creative, or based in PR, or coaching, or consulting, we begin to imagine that we have aced "the great communicator" badge. But here's the rub: the true master is always a student. A critical comment provides you the opportunity to grow as a thinker, writer, and communicator. It invites you to become an explorer of other realities and belief systems; to examine more closely ideas that you hold dear; and to release yourself from the chains of egocentrism.

So, the next time someone disagrees with you about your writing (or thinking) and takes the time to share that with you, pause for a moment to consider what sort of gift that person just might be trying to give you.

Reference

Karel, B. (Photographer). (2008) Apple (red) [Photograph]. Retrieved June 9, 2010 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/beta_karel/403903441/sizes/m/

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Once upon a time: the objective and subjective

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:09:00 -0700

"If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten." ~Rudyard Kipling

In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell reminds us that once upon a time we told each other stories around a campfire, passing on collective knowledge through narrative. While we don't sit around campfires relating history to one another all that much anymore, we still tell stories, and the Internet has amplified our ability to do so.

Narrative psychology contends that humans not only process information in the form of stories, but think and remember using them, too. Narrative psychologists theorize that in our efforts to understand our world we tie events and ideas together inventing connections so that there is cause and effect, action and reaction. So, regardless of a narrative's density or length, if it has a beginning, middle and end, the human mind has a greater likelihood of remembering it because of its structure.

On the other side of the communication spectrum, science seeks to keep information clean and sterile, limiting interpretation to verifiable data. To that end, most scientists endeavor to write research reports objectively—sans judgment, sans opinion—noting only "facts." Science writers, on the other hand, are not bound by this constraint. They are free to write subjectively, to tell fascinating stories about data, to make analogies, and to highlight information by examining indirect relationships. In other words, they are permitted to relate information in ways that the mind readily understands: through stories. Here is where paradigmatic writing (science research) and narrative writing (interpretation of research) part company. And here is where the public disconnect so often occurs.

When we're not rending ourselves asunder arguing about religion, United States' citizens love to love science. In some ways, we have been hypnotized by scientism—the idea that science can explain everything. We have developed a wariness of qualitative data and an addiction to quantification. And yet despite our faith in quantitative theories, events like the economic crisis and the BP oil diasaster continue to occur. The black swan continues to appear. What to do?

Good narrative science journalism can help the public to recognize that science has limits. It can help snap us out of the blindered view that quantitative data can answer every question and hard science can anticipate every need. Indeed, science does not promise universal knowledge, it promises entirely the opposite. It suggests that there will always be questions. Certainly, our scientific knowledge grows yearly but our understanding of the world is still breathtakingly small. Consider that atoms were, at one point, the smallest known unit in the universe, or that genes were supposed to be the answer to our health and mental questions but then human biology proved more complicated than our theories. We ask questions that when answered lead to other questions.

We will asymptotically approach complete scientific knowledge. Gödel's incompleteness theorem, although based in mathematical logic, is nevertheless apropos here: we will never be able to prove everything within our current axiomatic structure. What we don't know will branch fractally into infinity.

Does this mean that we should rely on the spiritual to explain the unknown world? Not at all, but we should remember that dry facts can be made much more palatable for human consumption when they appear in the guise of individual stories. In the midst of our vast universe, a universe that most of us cannot grok because of its sheer immensity—in addition to not being good with remembering or integrating dry facts, we're not so great with large numbers, either—the tight little package of a story goes a long way. Stories allow us the luxury of interpretation and reflection. We can liken their emergent properties to consciousness arising from a series of interconnected atoms: the parts are interesting but combined they deliver an amazing, unexpected, and sublime range of personalities, emotions, and thoughts. So, while your objective facts may seem to you to be intrinsically interesting, even fascinating, if you want the public to remember them or act upon them, weave them into the fabric of human memory by writing them as a story.

References

Burgin, J. (Photographer). (2008). Pile of kilim [Photograph]. Retrieved June 8, 2010 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jburgin/2981590118/

Campbell, J. (1949/1968/2008). The hero with a thousand faces. Novato, CA: New World Library.

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Facebook and the coming storm

Thu, 20 May 2010 10:05:00 -0700

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin, 1940).

Facebook is about to experience some stormy weather from people like me: people who don't want to "like" things in our journeys across the Internet. People who don't want to go to Facebook, period. I don't feel the need to mark my territory—excuse the colloquialism—by metaphorically pissing on every tree in my proverbial neighborhood. I don't need to declare pseudo-ownership of a webpage to know who I am or where I've been. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who will like Facebook's "like." It's just too binary for me.

I join social networks because I like the people who are on them. I'll say that again: I like the people. My reward—and let's be cognizant that people are online for some reward—comes from interacting with other folks, not from some hyper-focused, allegedly individualized-social-network-aware ad. Not at all. My reward is this: emotional connection to other people.

So what does this mean for the companies who have expended the energy and resources in reasoned attempts to align themselves with social networks? You're about to have to rework that idea, that's what. There's no one-size-fits-all with people or social networks. Remember your business mantra, know your audience. Don't compel your users/consumers/participants/friends to go to Facebook in order to interact with you or your company. You will undoubtedly lose potentially valuable users/consumers/participants/friends this way. Don't tether yourself or your company to one legally capricious corporate behemoth when there are so many social media options to choose from.

In a recent post, danah boyd made an excellent point about Facebook attempting to become a utility. She gets at the heart of the matter with her discussion of monopolistic organizations: they engender revulsion because they limit options. If you and your company can afford that, go ahead with the decision to make Facebook your one social media portal.

In the last few months, there's been a lot of discussion about branding and whether or not the long-held corporate consultant assumption of the power of branding will survive the onslaught of the material manifestation of online social networks. I'll tackle this idea in a later post. But in the interim, hedge your bets. The reign of the predominant social network has been, to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, rather nasty, brutish and short (e.g., MySpace and Friendster).

The upside? We're still in the early stages of the social media era, having just emerged from the stone age. We're whipping through the copper age and the bronze age is nearly upon us. We've accomplished so much, so fast. We will learn to fashion new, improved tools from the ashes of our social media pasts. Socially aware tool adaptation—now that's something I could learn to not just like but love.

References

Benjamin, W. (1940). On the concept of history. (Originally: Über den Begriff der Geschichte). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin

Klee, P. (1920). Angelus Novelus [Painting]. Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Retrieved from http://leflaneur.tumblr.com/post/135385508/angelus-novus-1920-paul-klee-water...

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