What We T About Whe Talk About
From the very beginning, words were no more than the sounds we made to communicate with one another. The immediate context of the speaker had everything to do with what might have been said, turning even the same rudimentary grunts into any number of distinct thoughts through tone, inflection, body langauge. When civilization developed to a point where we might be capable of needing a way of speak to one another over distance (even death) and time (even the future), words became less of the direct embodiment and instead a shorthand for the ideas we were trying to send. In order to make this new world of “inaudible sounds” manageable, words had to be deconstructed and rebuilt from an alphabet of letters which could be combined nearly infinitely to form syllables, then words, sentences, paragraphs and finally stories. Once written, meaning— disassociated from its source and refactored third- and fourth-hand—now comes less from the speaker than it does through the receiver’s process of reassembling the various bits and pieces.1 1 “There is a recognition that the work is incomplete without the spectator and that its meaning exists externally—in the space of language and culture” Paul Taylor, Art+Text magazine, 1981. p24
2
OOK! Very B.C.
ZEUS
Less B.C.
Godde
Some B.C.
Most Of A.D.
20th Century
21st Century
That much still holds true all these years later. If anything, even analog technology has served to place more and more relays along the line. Sound to word, word to paper, paper to typesetting, typesetting to publication, publication to local distribution, local to global distribution. While the role of the Author has declined (and possibly should) in favor of the Readers’ interpretation,2 Distributed Context has similarly diluted the power of each. Digital technology, embraced for its strengths, has only been able to flex its muscle at the expense of a continued process of disassociation. Incapable of transmitting even a basic character, let alone syllable or word, binary transmission further flattens the imposed modularity of meaning into a series of Ones and Zeroes. The protocol for sending even these tiny impulses of data splits these once again into packets to be sent along network lines only to be reunited at its destination. Even then, the digital successor of the already abstracted source-to-publisher must be reassembled once more by the machine parsing the electronic signal into recognizable characters. Only then can the message be used by the reader.3 2
Roland Barthes, The Death Of The Author, 1967.
3 “In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.� Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media; the extensions of man, 1964. p57
4
Reddy’s Conduit Theory, in a nutshell, proposes that when Digital Information travels, it makes the trip exactly as it left the sender. Such infaliability is accepted as gospel truth and why the digital is sold as the superior alternative to just about anything analog. This is not to say that the digital is all bad. It is simply poorly marketed as the be-all, end-all4 when in fact it’s just a vehicle. If anything, it’s precision is exactly what makes it less ideal. To begin, Reddy’s concept would seem to run contrary to basic physics. Although data is no doubt an entirely other beast than most physical objects, it does rely on tangible electrical particles and so is not outside physical laws. Change, by definition, even temporary, always alters the material at hand, permanently. To deny this of electronic data is to deny either its existence, or the matter of its having travelled. To accept it, is to accept deniable plausibility in its ability to make mistakes. Neither argument suits the public relations’ efforts of technology very well, and so they rely on dogma like Reddy’s to confirm a false security. 4
John Thackara Trust Is Not An Algorithm, 2013. doorsofperception.com/new-economic-metrics/trust-is-not-an-algorithm/
Think of the simply act of heating ourselves. Wood, a physical object, has energy applied to it which causes its chemistry to ignite, resulting in heat and light. The original matter, the wood, is thereby altered, physically, into char and smoke. The energy applied could be considered Change. Like ignition, moving a distance is also a form of change. Travelling, while perhaps less physically invasive than being set aflame, does alter our chemical make up (resulting in dehydration, motion sickness, etc.) as well as our contextuality through the experiences we gain from a new locale. It is not just ourselves being transported great distances of course. From ancient times, the great stories and thoughts were sent out beyond the immediate reach of Plato and Moses through lyric poetry and the written word. With each telling of these stories, and again during their repeated transcription, the ‘travel’ of the original content invariably changed it. 6
Thing + Change ≠Thing
And now our virtual selves, represented by email, letter, tweet and blog post, extend and broadcast the reach of our influence in ways we’re still trying to imagine. It’s appropriate that the original meaning of the word ‘broadcast’ related to manually scattering seeds. Rather than place each plant in a predictable place along a tilled row, broadcasting meant giving up control over the results for the sake of speed and quantity. Technological progression has been an incremental series of sacrificing personal intention and meaning for wholseale effficiency.
It could be assumed that when the computer perceives an idea, it has a fairly predictable definition it will attempt to spread. Unfortunately, like their more floral counterparts, some ideas will take root, grow and flower, while others blow away, wilt, or be eaten by birds (figuratively of course). The ‘distance’ from the source will nearly always have some sort of influence on the shape of its presence. This distance—called Indeterminancy—is the state in which the same item may not be experienced equally by any number of spectators, a condition that grows by order of removal.5 5 8
Darren Tofts, tsk tsk tsk & beyond: anticipating distributed aesthetics. 2005. seven.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-039-beyond-anticipating-distributed-aesthetics/
Resisting the Virtual Life, James Brook & Iain A Boal, 1995. p242
Chris Carlsson “True interactivity is what happens between human beings, genuine subjects, individuals with the unique quality of being able to find a nearly infinite range of responses to any situation, as well as the ability to imagine completely new, unanticipated possibilities.”
The natural world is a vast assortment of indeterminate beings doing indeterminate things in indeterminate ways among indeterminate environments. The digital, try as it might, doesn’t stand a chance in controlling this chaos (unless it begins to wholly subordinate it). The precise nature of data isn’t well-suited to handling the unpredictable-yet-natural warping of information through human interaction.6 Digital methods will always try to return indeterminant conditions to a logical mean, even when it has to impose awkward and unnatural limits. The business model of digital communication surely loves the benefits of scale and reach, while hatefully denying the instability of it all. The promise of Digital Objectivity is safe, predictable, and, above all, knowable and thereby manipulable. The digital is great for cataloging and tracking the chaos, but it can never truly understand it. At least for the time being,7 humans continue to work 6
Matthew Galloway, A Kind Of Transmutation, 2011. p3
7 “Our lives have become information processes just because we have put our central nervous system outside us in electric technology” McLuhan, 1964. p52
more naturally than digitally. Our ideas can’t be removed from a person exactly intact, because we each present a unique challenge for the thought to take root. The human condition is that of Distance, with society being our best attempt at reconciling the gap and minimizing the damage the distance can do as it exacts its Change on every interaction.
We learn over time to weigh factors that can’t necessarily be observed visually—especially other people and their own personal set of filters and motivations—so that receiving information is not as much a simple act of consuming data as it is series of subjective judgements.”8 8
10
Kenneth Bullmer, The Art of Empathy: A Manual for Improving Accuracy of Interpersonal Perception, 1975. p1
Louise Sandhaus, Merle Armitage: Daddy of a Sunbaked Modernism, 2012. observatory.designobserver.com/feature/merlearmitage-daddy-of-a-sunbaked-modernism/35878/
Surface And Substance, 2003. p77
1
2
Virginia Postrel “Rather than deny that aesthetics conveys both pleasure and meaning—and, thus, has value to human beings—we need to better understand how pleasure and meaning relate to each other and to other, nonaesthetic values. Utility includes the way they look and feel.”2
Merle Armitage “The attitude that printing must serve only the function of readability is like saying that the only function of clothing is to cover nakedness.”1
Since “most of our abstract concepts are extensions of bodily-based concepts that … then get projected by metaphor onto abstract concepts, we understand through the body.”9 The inconvenient wrench in Reddy’s works, then, is the way in which our off-line, biological senses receive and interpret signals.10 The senses impact our thought processes more, and more quickly, than raw data.11 And it is from the senses that we create emotional context in addition to the subjectivity that we already instinctively color our info with. People make imperfect, illogical decisions as a rule, and they do so almost exclusively as a result of their feelings.
9
George Lakoff, Resisting the Virtual Life (James Brook & Iain A Boal), 1995. p122
10 “Understanding is more than just reception of messages, but entails a construction of meaning and that this meaning is subject to influence from a very large set of factors. Here it is the viewer that decides, according to learnt categories.” Robin Kinross, Semiotics and Designing, 1986. 11 “...normal human speech is one of the prominent means of expressing emotions, and both verbal content and vocal mode are important factors. Unfortunately, a printed text cannot convey vocal mode and, therefore, that factor cannot be considered here.” Bullmer, 1975. p51
The immediate context, combined with the receiver’s socialized experience, can easily warp data, regardless its intent, into an entirely different messge altogether. This much has held true for millenia, and is above all involuntary.12 Context can only be gained over time through sensory experience, so unless (until?) life is 100% sublimated to the digital, some aspects of the natural will remain in opposition to it; creating choice and the room for indeterminant “error.”
12 “Cultural assumptions are not a contextual overlay which we may or may not place upon experience as we choose.” George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By, 2003. p57.
12
Context is one of the most important concepts in communication, subject to very different interpretations. If you simply say, Push The Red Button readers are left to wonder:
it?
W
ss
hi
re
ch
Ip
re
ld
d
ou
bu
sh
tto
n?
n he
W
W th
S bu hou tto ld ns I p af res te s rw m ar or ds e ?
ha ap ns
pe if Ip s
s re it?
Mark Baker, On The Web, Context Is Vital, 2013. everypageispageone.com/2013/12/11/on-the-web-context-is-vital/
With credit due for the advancements in Collaborative Economy (Social Pairing, Shared Transport and Micro Financing especially13) that the Digital has made possible, there are three unavoidable ways in which digital communication fails us. Coincidentally, each of them are directly attributable to a computer’s lack of the subjective in one way or the other.
13 PSFK Labs, Why People Are The Most Valuable Urban Resource, 2013. psfk.com/2013/10/citizen-sourced-future-of-cities.html
Theses on Distributed Aesthetics. Or, What a Network is Not, 2005. seven.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-040theses-on-distributed-aesthetics-orwhat-a-network-is-not/
2
1
How to Honor Your Most Important Relationships, 2013. ducttapemarketing.com/ blog/2013/12/02/important-relationships/
Geert Lovink “Networks are not glued together by software and software does not make us social. Networks are not resolvable into zoomable details that must fit the window of a browser. It’s impressive but useless to know that your social network puts you in connection with 371,558 “friends”. 1 + friends is simply an effect of a network, not its constituent relations.”2
John Jantsch “An important relationship requires love and grace. Without attention, care and service it’s hard to build something as real as an authentic relationship. That gets even harder due to the potentially distributed nature of many of our most important relationships. When you rarely sit across the desk from an important person in your life it’s harder to stay in touch.”1
4
3
Diary Of Anaïs Nin, Vol 4.: 144-1947, 1946 (Maria Popova, 2012). rainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/24/ anais-nin-global-village/ Thackara, 2013.
John Thackara “Social trust — unlike the algorithmic kind — is based on embodiment, context, and colocation. These proximity assets could support all manner of socially-useful services.”4
Anais Nin “We believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people… This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us.”3
5
Metahaven, Autoreply: Modernism, (Print magazine, Issue 65.5), October 2011. p55
Metahaven “The online environment (is) ultimately an individualistic, isolated experience, despite the promise of “being connected.” It also makes most online activity a somewhat unadventurous affair, as you only will be confronted with the stimuli that are algorithmically curated for you.” 5
Group
Family
16
The first failure is that a computer can’t properly parse “image schema” relationships. Sure, technology has made it so that chromosomes can be read, then used to match DNA relationships. But this data can hardly communicate what differentiates ‘woman’ from ‘mother.’ The digital also can’t handle subjective categorization. The extent to which taxonomies and ‘tagged keywords’ can do is begin to label these sorts of relationships, but at the core, these are user-generated. It’s the human doing the categorization, merely using the computer as an elaborate filing cabinet. Verbal cues like emphasis and tone14 are the digital’s real nemesis. Anyone on the butt end of a heated email exchange gone wrong knows all too well the limitations of digital transmission of regular forms of post-verbal communication. Sadness and sarcasm are two important emotions that fall especially flat in the digital. Lastly, the digital largely denies the existence of the emotional component that underpins human interaction.15
14 “Tone is all-important, then—an absolute imperative for understanding, for the accurate communication of meaning. ” Mindy Kahn, Living In The Mess (Collage Culture, Rose, Kahn, Roettiger), 2011. 15 “Objectivity can be dangerous because it misses what is most meaningful. Science is of no use when it comes to the most important things.” Lakoff, 2003. p188
An entirely digital communications channel —“Total Experience Management”16—has all the charms of an automated answering service. Of course, the most Frequently Asked Questions will be answered efficiently: at off-hours and without the inconvenience of training, or staffing, staff. Yet also without feeling and predominantly without question or recourse. There are no exceptions to the digital rule. Opinions become boiled down to the binary and the boolean. There can be no room for a subjective maybe. Its a process of bringing the lustre of civil bureacracy— itself a technical development that attempts to deploy binary-thinking on a massive social scale—to every social intersection. Control is found via policies that live outside subjective dynamic reality. And while we see how well this works every time we’re asked to press 5 or wait in one of a dozen lines at the DMV, we continue to become ever more immersed in the all-digital-everything buffet of impersonality.17
16 “Every task must be subsumed into something with all the procedural thrills of a tax form” Matthew Fuller, Everyone Is A Designer In The Age Of Social Media, (BIS) 2010. 17 McLuhan, 1964. p69
Why Design Matters theschooloflife.com/blog/2013/06/why-designmatters-by-alice-rawsthorn/
Alice Rawsthorn “Design is frequently…being trivialised and misinterpreted. If we are to make the most of design’s strengths, and avoid its dangers, we need to use it intelligently, not least because none of us can avoid being affected by it.”
Setting larger accusations of a growing ‘cognitive imperialism’18 aside, let’s instead consider that we may be expecting quite a bit more responsibility from The Digital than is reasonable. Our blind friend is usually the last one we ask about how the sunset looks, yet we don’t hesitate to let something with no senses at all to help us understand each other and the world around us. What is needed then, is a mediator between precise and intangible. Design plays that role. As the primary arbiter, aesthetics become a powerful tool for influencing message. By engaging multiple senses— no doubt an even stronger component in the multimedia environment—pure data is re-combined with subjective, emotional context necessary to truly communicate effectively. The process is not perfect, nor entirely controlled, but considerably diverted and directed.
18 Design & Geoploitics: The Alterglobal, Soft Power and Distaster Capitalism” (Interview w/ Benjamin Bratton), Print magazine issue 65.5, October 2011. p64
19
Despite its usefulness, Design plays a guarded role for technologists. While they may accept design’s role in the success of their products, they fundamentally don’t understand it. the disconnect makes them unable to objectively validate its existence in a dollars-and-sense kind of way. Technology, at least the privately-funded bulk of it, is driven by objective numbers and spreadsheets from the financial world, and tends to take sides. Like so many other things, especially in the United States, the answer to shortcomings is to keep adding more. If its broken, make it faster. To cope, Biz-tech is infatuated19 with ways to automate and quantify the creative process through templates, algorithms and “apps for that.” Despite recent advances in so-called “natural language processing” to digitize subjectivity, the best that can be hoped for is more ‘accurate’ mathematical probabilities extracted from enormous data sets.
19 “The idea that the myth of creativity can be domesticated, and perhaps told how to behave — in terms at once ‘scientific’ and ‘verifiable’ — seems always to fascinate those who feel somehow denied by the myth, or outside its provenance.” Norman Potter, What is a designer?, 1980. p46
Wouldn’t it be nice-- : --wishful thinking in art and design, (Emily King et al.) 2008. p165
Dunne & Raby “If everything is determined by the market we will live in an impoverished, flattened world meeting only the lowest levels of culture, need and desire.”
While algorithms may present an average of common behaviors over time for the group, but these methods lose credibilty the more pointed and personal their application. And, per usual, these tools are used to describe commercial behavior (like predicting book sales20) but fails to describe if a book is actually any good. Confounded at almost every turn, and regardless (or because of) its efforts, even crowdsourcing still requires a human ‘crowd’ to complete the cycle. Digital managed to remove the publishers from the equation in order to dominate distribution, but have yet to consider how they’ll maintain the human element when stories don’t write themselves.
20 Ashok, Feng & Choi, Success With Style: Using Writing Style To Predict The Success Of Novels, 2013. aclweb.org/anthology/D/D13/D13-1181.pdf
21
Design decisions, made by people, for people, are what empowers effective communication, regardless the medium. The further our messages become removed from direct collection by multiple, analog senses, the more essential design becomes. If human qualities become divoreced from both sides of a transmission, we will be left to simply exchanging bits and datasets, and no longer speaking to one another. In the end, a designer is best positioned to use the digital as it was intended, and not the other way around. It is a designer’s obligation to defend their position as mediator of the message in the digital range to its benefit, maybe even in spite of it. 
1
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 1982. p85
Marshall Berman “…whatever Faustian bargains are made—or not made—we have not only the right but the obligation to be in on their making.”1
Dieter Rams “You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people.”
2
How To Inspire The Future Thrpugh Design, 2013. psfk.com
Jill Nussbaum “As designers, we need to formulate a method to help think about technology-inspired scenarios and how to express those ideas; one that is based in human experience, visual expression, and good storytelling.”2
3
Ampersand, 2012. p202
Ryan Gander “The most prominent value system related to my work is in its storytelling. The objects aren’t really artworks as much as ... receipts or by products of thinking. The thinking is in fact the artwork.”3
4
Potter, 1980. p111
Norman Potter “The quality of a design will grow out of the richness of response that a designer can bring to the opportunities confronting him, and this is a very personal matter; involving the designer’s enthusiasm in the process. Spirit and attitude are worth the larger part of logical method, in design practice.”4
Talk en We t Talking.