Informatics411 Sandbox

The Psychology of Information: Beyond the Turing Test

2011-08-20T11:51:00.000-07:00

I. Finding the Self in Psychology

(Version 6r1 in 3 sections; status: final; will work out "neurological limitations" concept, which opened up in v5r8, in newer entry; added Foucault citations from Order and Madness; removed "belief" and ad hominen sections) – I've been reading an intellectual history of Freudian psychology, Revolution in Mind, by George Makari. If you care about the influence of Freudian thought on Western societies, Makari has written an indispensable reference. This Informatics411 entry has the book as its cause, but references only half-a-dozen out of hundreds of important ideas, so check it out at the library or buy it, if you haven't yet (it came out in 2008).

The illustration (above) comes from my collaboration with "street philosopher" Jon-Henri Damski, who, in his 23 years as a columnist in Chicago's LGBT press, when the occasion arose, spared little in attacking Freud. To generations of individuals in the Western world, the treatment of gays and lesbians by Freudian psychology (e.g., source of "it's a phase") – and official psychology – left deep scars. We were lumped in with narcissists, criminals, degenerates, etc. such that some endured shock therapy and worse under the guise of treatment – and this was from sympathetic folks (a depressingly enigmatic example will follow before this entry closes). Far worse, of course, one can remember the Holocaust's pink triangle, the past year's Ugandan death-to-gays legislation – or from recent decades recall the brutal killing of Matthew Shepard in the American west. There's nothing new about "ex-gay" therapies – choose the intellectual realm, and there exists an idea from it that can be used to question the very right of another group of humans to exist, utilized to target a specific individual or specific individuals. One might say, with regret, this is "only being human."

Over the history of the last 250 years, since the "individual" as a unique entity came into being – that is, separate from family, geography, tribe, dynasty or religion – we've been insisting that we are all individuals, while simultaneously limiting how different any person can be (more, below). We want the rights of an individual, but the herd is never far, as the recent film Children of God shows, with devastating effects. "Giving people something to hate brings them together" says the married, closeted Bahamian priest, after being grilled about hypocrisy by his bathroom companion, before they enter into communion.

Emphasizing "Freud Did Not Read Freud" (above) attempts to return us to equal ground, reminding us that we too easily over-rely on experts, sometimes to our individual detriment (we and others also tend to rely on experts expressly for this reason; freedom is tough, thinking for yourself is difficult, always). This does not mean to disparage the professional work done by so many in fields related to brain, mind and spirit. Yet "Freud Did Not Read Freud" warns all of us (even experts) because we too easily forget that the same kind of basic human technology possessed by everyone alive – the human brain – is what gave rise to one field of psychology.

George Makari makes it clear who Freud read; anyone who thinks they can attack him as a straw man, after Revolution in Mind, will be sorely disappointed. As even Makari admits, by the 1920s, there were at least five or six versions of psychoanalysis from Freud's pen, alone.

Sigmund Freud changed dramatically during his lifetime and we can be grateful that, mostly, he never forgot what it was to be an outsider, or became so-afraid of the new idea (or treatment) that he stopped taking theoretical risks. While this at times ended in dramatic failures, and short-term announcements of new successes which were to fade, one of the hallmarks of Freud's thinking was his ability to recover from mistakes (usually admitting them), and continuing to search for better answers (though this often included taking ideas from contemporaries without giving them credit).

When Freud's story encounters the lights of psychology, located in Paris during the late-19th century, he came under the influence of Jean-Martin Charcot, who had been running the largest institution for the poor, homeless and mentally challenged in France, the Salpêtrière Hospital.

Freud would have great sympathies with Charcot, the "father of neurology": Sigmund had worked in a neurology research lab for six years before the loss of continued work forced him on his own; in Paris, he quickly became part of Charcot's inner circle (to Pierre Janet's later discontent). Like Charcot's forerunners in brain science, he had been reluctant to take up the vagaries and subjective experiences he assumed to be part of thinking about mental disease when it was unhinged from diseased brains. Keeping research attached to brains and related to heredity helped maximize quantifiability. But Charcot began to change his mind. Charcot, along with his students like Janet and another clinician, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, made observations which identified more than a half-dozen mental diseases, observations which continue to hold-up 100 hundred-plus years later (The Boondock Saints spoofs Tourette's syndrome here). This emboldened the Parisians to believe that other troubling mental conditions might be trackable utilizing the scientific method: isolation of symptoms, experimental testing of observations which were repeatable, with quantifiable results.

Which takes us to the Paris group's important work on hysteria, a mental condition of interest to doctors for two thousand years. Charcot and his team believed they had isolated four symptoms of hysteria which, via hypnosis, could be demonstrated and cured. The demonstrations regarding this cure were so powerful that they quickly became public events attended by people beyond medical students. After witnessing such lectures, himself, Freud became convinced of the Paris groups' methods and of the use of hypnosis in aiding mental health.

At the end of his stay, Freud returned to Vienna with concrete methodologies to utilize in his practice for diseases of the mind – and, importantly, after securing an agreement with Charcot to be his German-language translator. It would guarantee his place as an expert on hysteria and hypnosis.

In Human-Computer Interaction Design, we talk about being "user-centered," and "people-centered." This means that we never assume that just because we design a system which an end-user breaks (joke), that it is their fault. More positively, we always assume that the end-user has crucial insights about how to improve what we design. This was a lesson not lost on Sigmund Freud, who innovated time and time again during his life of psychological theorizing often because of interactions with patients, combed, scoured and rethought. Though he did occasionally succumb to believing that "patient-error" was "user-generated" (as do most designers for a time), he also never stopped believing in his own fallibility. Yet he also never stopped pushing: in some ways, psychology, like products in human-computer interaction, is never finished.

As Freud led the hypnotism movement in Vienna, with reactions of shock from his supporters there (this reviewer will not go into the difficult history of hypnosis), he worked on the translation of Charcot's work. In the midst of this, back in France, the work on hysteria and hypnosis started unraveling. A rural country doctor named Hippolyte Bernheim had produced studies which showed that hypnosis did not aid in hysteria, and further showed that the four symptoms of the Paris crowd were, in fact, imposed on the patients. The Paris team of new psychologists had not paid enough attention to the power of suggestion in using hypnosis; the hysteric patients had, in today's parlance, been coached into producing the four symptoms (on cue); and the cures this produced were temporary. Bernheim, having discovered that the basic precepts of the Paris group failed to show up in his studies of hundreds more people, completely undermined Charcot's work on hysteria and hypnosis. It was an important turning point in psychology's history, one which underscored the field's determination to be scientific.

Freud wasted no time in contacting Bernheim, offering to become his German translator, too. Then, ingeniously, with ample footnotes, Freud moderated the claims of Charcot in his book, skating over the cracking ice, moving his theories closer to Berhnheim, and did the same with Bernheim's (to both authors' surprise). Freud came off sounding like the "objective observer," mediating between competing camps, strengthening his reputation as the expert on hypnosis and hysteria (by the time Charcot's successor, Janet, realized this, the "psychology" crown had passed to Freud). Freud would build on his footnote innovations by shortly publishing a book based on his own observations from using hypnosis in the service of hysteria, along with those of his collaborator, Vienna physician Josef Breuer. This is when the world would also get the first glimpse of a method for assisting hysterics discovered by Breuer, the talking cure. Most of us tend to know the story, from there.

Makari, from the period of Freud's translations of Charcot and Bernheim, through to his work with Breuer notes nearly a dozen innovations in thinking about psychology, courtesy of Sigmund Freud in just his first few years in the field. He would continue to innovate, of course, for his entire lifetime.

II. The Self and Its Competitors

Michel Foucault, in a talk on the 19th century, references the ways in which "the dangerous individual" became almost a staple of criminal proceedings, after late-18th century penal reforms; in "the good old days," Foucault suggests (I'm joking: Foucault did not suggest inhumane judicial proceedings were better), there was the crime, the trial, and punishment. In the 19th century, we began to "care" about the criminal, to need her or his story, the narrative of his development (and be stumped in the face of the refusal to find one): "The magistrates and the jurors, the lawyers too, and the department of the public prosecutor, cannot really play their role unless they are provided with another type of discourse, the one given by the accused himself, or the one which he makes possible for others, through his confessions, memories, intimate disclosures, etc. If it happens that this discourse is missing, the presiding judge is relentless, the jury is upset. They urge, they push the accused, [if] he does not play the game" (Foucault 1978).

Every individual must have her story. In such a way, this was how "being individual" became modeled for everyday folks, as trials begot newspaper headlines: a warning about individuality even as it was spreading, as a concept. (For more on narrative as one of four basic types of human exchange, see the Informatik Framework (Vore 2007), where Story is explored in the creation, production and testing of information technologies).

The unconscious was a feature of the intellectual landscape before Freud, though his work built crucially on it, and did not gain credence until scientific research showed unconscious processes at work (more below). Yet with the subconscious/unconscious as a full-blown backdrop for individual life (depending on who one ends up following in psychological history), each of us might well have a crazy aunt in the attic of our minds. There's nothing like being given something (a political right, a sense that you have been born in a place where you can follow your destiny), only then to be warned you might also be a lunatic, that is, in reality, be unable to truly act out any kind of destiny. We stay close to group – even ad hoc ones, e.g. "extended families" – because of this. In a world of ever-increasing diversity, who one can be has changed dramatically; the problem: human neurology has not evolved as fast as 20th century history, and cannot accommodate great variance among other humans: so it freaks us out, period.

In theory, most of us like being unique, special; in reality, nobody likes to be left out, and we'll edit what we say (though not often what we do) to insure that we have a herd in which to hide (or, perhaps, simply, to rest). Accepting differences among our fellow men and women, because of neurological limits, may never arrive easily, automatically, or without great (individual) effort.

From my readings of various histories, I'm not sure if the concept of the individual has ever had it easy, nor, given the above statement, will it. Foucault maps its appearance on the scene in the 18th century and argues it could not have been imagined prior, in The Order of Things. "Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist..." (Order, 308) and "The Classical episteme is articulated along lines that do not isolate, in any way, a domain proper to man...the very concept of human nature, and the way in which it functioned, excluded any possibility of a Classical science of man" (Order, 309). Sometime in the late 1700s (after the 1742 recorded use of "individual person" (see Etymology Online)), and early into the 1800s, the great grounds of knowledge shifted (some of which would result in the new psychiatry in Paris, in the mid-to late 1800s), and the concept of man as an object of study was borne. I'm going to duck reconstructing the tectonic shifts Foucault arranges. Suffice it to say: the success of the concept of the individual from then on ensures that it is not difficult, today, for some to imagine we anachronistically show up (as individuals) in, say, the Bible and that the Good Book speaks to us, personally (how easy it is to find in religious texts one's moral enemies: named and smote). Some of us seem so determined to find the life of an individual, we'll go on tours of the Holy Land to see where actual people named in the Bible really lived – remaking this book of stories across faiths, derived from hundreds of years of oral tradition, into what we expect it to be. Monty Python, as one would expect, disagrees with Foucault, smartly accepting what I've called, elsewhere in this blog, the Identity Paradigm. In Life of Brian, after being mistaken for the messiah, when the lead character finds himself followed everywhere by the throngs, to get them to go away – and for this reason alone – Brian assents to a prophecy-fulfilling, messiah-like speech. He tells the crowd, "You're all individuals...you're all different," both phrases which the crowd repeats in unison...with the exception, after "the different" chant, when one person says: "I'm not."

Such paradoxes have been there since the first days of 18th century talk of "individuality." For better or worse, almost since its birth in the West, we have a continuing concern for the self, right along with the means by which any individual can completely undermine the quality of the individuality of her neighbor (e.g., responsible to crazy). Sometimes, we don't even need someone else to do this work: Foucault, himself, did not resolve questions about his own sanity until completing his renowned work History of Madness; this is at least what one gleans from Ian Hacking's foreword to the 2006 edition, which in the biography lists "depressive bouts" and a suicide attempt by Foucault in the late 1940s, working as a psychologist at Hospital Saint-Anne and lecturing through the 50s, while finishing his thesis, published in France in 1961. Hacking writes, "It is the work of an author who is no longer obsessed by the fear of madness and dread of unreason" (Madness, xii). And Foucault's History of Madness discusses the exponential increase of anxieties surrounding "unreason" and "madness" during the course of the 18th century. "...in the anxiety of the second half of the 18th century, the fear of madness grew at the same rate as the dread of unreason, and for that reason these twin obsessions constantly reinforced each other..." (Madness, 362).The work of self-ownership, self-individuation, is – or at least, can be – maddening.

So, as I hope one can see, there exists ample room within the consciosuness/unconsciousness construction for each of us to torture ourselves, with or without the help of others. Yet, whether alone or not, with the out-of-context use of psychological concepts, too often, the petty, hysterical or fearful seems like it has a foundation, and difference, for some, gets drummed into a demonology.

Cover for Makari's book (Grabbed here).

This plays itself out in Makari's encyclopedic intellectual history, through letters between Freud and Carl Jung. Among Freudians, if an adherent hadn't "brought into consciousness" his (they were mostly, early on, men) "issues," they could barely call themselves a "Freudian," and the Freudian in-crowd seemed to always be keeping tabs. Jung wanted to be a Freudian; Freud needed Jung's scientific rigor. Jung and Riklin's association tests helped empirically establish that repression was a near-universal unconscious process (Makari, 193-197) – the first scientific confirmation of Freud's theories, so they battled it out.

In one exchange, Jung writes, "...Even [Alfred Adler]'s cronies do not regard me as one of yours..." He'd meant to write "one of theirs," as he was trying to patch things up with Freud; Adler had already been expelled. When Freud pointed out this, um, Freudian slip, Jung's response was pointed: "...your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies." As Maraki describes this exchange, "...Jung insisted he did not have a neurosis. After all, he had been analyzed [by Freud]..." (Maraki, 279).

This was even more prevalent in the weekly Wednesday group which met at Freud's house in Vienna. As folks came and went from the group, they were sometimes met and attacked with a viciousness that should quell any notion that early Freudians were ideologues. Decades later, Anna Freud would be trashed by British Freudians, after the Freud family moved to England to escape the Holocaust (not even being the daughter of the founder, or an escapee from a 20th century horror protected her). Within Freudian circles, one could be undermined in the most petty ways, under the guise of not having self-analyzed well-enough, or properly – and though this kind of criticism remained prevalent through Makari's 70-year history, it at least, eventually came to include, as a lasting criticism: not having properly adhered to scientific method.

From its earliest days as a way of doing psychology, there were good and bad Freudians, even though decades would go by before anyone could definitively say what this meant, and things which startle our sensibilities went on for quite a long time without being considered a professional offense (e.g., not sleeping with a patient took decades to become Freudian rule). Freud passed up a "methodology" book, perhaps wisely, several times; difficulties with Carl Jung arose because he decided to write such a book almost at the same time as early Freudian Wilhelm Reich published his version of psychoanalysis; neither of them were expelled because of their lack of bed-side (e.g., stay out) manner (it would be unfair for this author to not mention that such an experience began his own journey of questioning psychological and religious authorities, after a series of events with a priest-pscyhologist in the 1980s (see Vore 2000, below).

Without Jung, Freud would not have had a better scientific grounding for his theories; with Jung, and each of those who were the brightest after him (and there were many), Freud had a series of collaborator-competitors who tried to say what composed "Freudian psychology."

Almost every "major light" in the Freudian movement thought that they'd found a crucial new "key" that was central to psychological development, believing it changed the entire field, thus making them destined to compete for the leadership of this psychological movement (if they were not destined to take over Freudian psychology, let it be Jungian!). And nearly every one of them, over time, was shown to be wrong. This included Freud, himself, several times (as he regularly admitted); Jung, Reich, Adler all the way up to Melanie Klein. Freud seemed to have learned from his earliest experiences as a psychological theorist to let others fight it out on the theoretical front, then, as the dust settled, move in, claim what was best from both sides, and add what he himself had developed (as time went on, with less and less shared credit).

Which isn't to say Freud retreated from making uncomfortable, unpopular and morality-bending claims (as was his theory of phasic psychosexuality).

From reading Makari, one could almost come away believing the pitfall of universalizing was nearly a rite of passage for every young psychologist. It is important enough to bear repeating, I think: for a theorist, to believe, for a time, he or she had found the elusive "holy grail" by which to understand being human, to then run with grail in hand, sprinkling its waters over the field, developing it into a full-blown theory which governed all aspects of the field, then only later be found wrong. Freud became a master of surviving such tempting theoretical battles, then moving them in an entirely different direction, partly because he had gone down so hard, a few times, very early in his career, when he escaped a dead-end research job to became an advocate, in writing, for the use of cocaine. (The temptation to believe a chemical is a cure-all seems almost as prevalent as the small-study insight, universalized; the temptation to avoid the complexities of being human, being individual never goes away). Freud had left Vienna for Paris just as research began showing that he had been terribly wrong on cocaine; he came back after a year, the dust settled, though with something else which raised eyebrows: hypnosis as a way to cure hysteria, an idea which he worked over-time, as it were, to carefully back away from.

The professionals in our lives, those to whom we go for life-changing answers, we can never forget, are people, like us, struggling to make it in the world, full of financial fears and the need to make a living – just like us. "Physicians were forced to quickly shed their identities as students of nature and adopt a variety of treatments that proven or not, would sustain their practice and provide some relief for their patients" (Makari, 133). This hasn't changed since the early days of medicine; perhaps these pressures have become even more prevalent in the midst of research, educational, and hospital budgetary cuts in recent years.

So, when any of us uses an element of psychology – especially as a weapon in petty political and personal "warfare" – we must recall that we are using an idea that has a history which, at times, and with given individuals, is more or less scientific. Short of a repeatedly proven inability to utilize one's brain (as in the horrors of Alzheimer's), no diagnosis should be a license to ignore responsibility in the most complicated aspect of individuality: freedom. No fundamentalist of any religious persuasion in today's world can escape it: they obviously prefer to hand it over to a deity. Again, my suggestion is that we do our best to not hand it over to anyone, while at the same time, being careful not to ever believe that we can "figure it out," alone. The call to individuality isn't a call to arm oneself against everyone else, it is a call to enter into society with like-minded individuals on an equal footing. This is fundamentally at odds with any reliance on experts-as-priests – and it always will be.

III. Modeling Self-Construction: The Quantified Self, Complete

My standpoint in all of this, as regular readers known, has been the development of a kind of information theory which could grab psychological information in a non-ideological way. Or perhaps better stated: in a theory-netural way. Given the wreckage, above, in the history of psychoanalysis, I'm quite happy to not be a psychological theorist. By that I mean that I'd like to capture information about an individual which does not depend on the success (or failure) of Freudian or any other psychological theory. I'd like to develop a platform that could be used to handle any psychological school of thought, or any health-related research trial: imagine what we'd find out as more and more people began to utilize such a platform; it would make interpreting results less hazardous, and enable meta-studies to compare apples to apples.

As I've moved through a series of questions in developing this platform, I've gone back into the research literature, back into histories of psychology, histories of science, and developments in the fields related to psychology, brain research and cognitive neuroscience. My goal (repeated for emphasis): capturing information about a person in such a way that it does not presuppose the validity or any of the fourteen schools of psychology which have grown up over the last 125 years: they may be right, they be wrong. Can we not, with such technology, create the largest research population that ever existed and find out?

I want to put the cumulated research of all psychological schools in the hands of individuals so that they can become better collaborators in the diagnosis of and recovery from mental disease. Given the difficulties involved in the human-as-individual enterprise, we may not be able to fully fulfill the call to individuality without the help of machines that can parse our wishes and fears better than we can, alone.

Person-as-information (side view, facing right): Your (Self)
Information Begins...here?(Source: Vore 2003)

As discussed in my portfolio, the basic theoretical framework I've developed centers around the deconstruction of an individual's "mental universe" as if it were based on information routines. Aspects of that theory follow.

An information routine is the pattern of behavior by which an individual grabs, hold, and passes on the information in her life. I suggest that these are related to sensory hierarchies, e.g., weighted by aural, visual or kinesthetic preferences that might be unique, and that might change in a given stretch of time. A person may, in the morning, prefer aural information to be dominant, and in the evening, prefer visual (figuring this out made up this project). A person may "answer" a question by making a drawing, arguing with a friend, writing a paragraph, or taking a walk. Information routines show how an individual grabs the data of life, utilizes (and disregards) it, communicates it.

These info-routines run behind language-use, and aid in its construction. Where a Freudian (or other trained clinician) might talk of hysteria, I envision recording of sensory and other information in a way that shows individual patterns of sensory data and their movement through brain systems (e.g., as sights and sounds are coordinated, compared, and passed on up into consciousness), such that a given thought might might be uttered; I imagine being able to trace a thought back through a complex network of such neural parsings to, in fact, be able to, in a given session, complete a sentence of a given end-user – after time spent with the software, say: ten hours.

The Turing Test consists of placing a person on the other side of a partition in an experiment during which a conversation ensues. If after a given period of time, the person cannot tell whether or not the interlocutor behind the partition is human or machine, it is, for all intents, a human. The software I imagine goes well behind this – and one hopes, with Turing's blessing: he committed suicide after being subjected to hormone treatment to cure his homosexuality. Many folks in information sciences know of the Turing Test: not many know why, to not move beyond it, would be, in my humble opinion, a moral failure. We have moved well beyond the time when "information" has no meaning, no value, no morality.

A myriad of machines have been designed, over the years, to take down an individual's blood pressure, heart rate, pupil dilation, eye gaze, weight, height, etc. We can measure chemicals in the bloodstream through blood, saliva and hair samples – and as the years go by, we can even genetically identify specific individuals from such samples. Fingerprint scanners have been around, and affordable, for years. Add to these methods for voice transmission and we have a digital record of an individual's use of language–so we can note their vocabulary (number of words, word patterns), the urgency of voice, the seeming emotion behind it, the speed of locution, and how all of it changes under the influence of chemicals. We can capture changes via their abilities to use keypads (phone, text, keyboard).

As the Quantified Self movement shows, we can also follow, in never-before-detail, these things, our ability to respond to others' language-use, and all of this in an untold number of contexts.

Mapping of aural-visual-kinesthetic biases to abilities in reading,
writing and assessment of meaning, with meaning further parsed
into public, professional and personal realms (Source: Vore, 2005).

Utilizing digital texts, we can mine a person's IMs, emails and other writings – with their permission, to enrich our understandings of them in contexts wider than a therapeutic setting. We can of course also, if given permission by a patient, follow them through the internet–or, as many social informatics professionals have discussed, through a myriad of situations in which public/private video capturing devices follow them with varying degrees of privacy. And we live in a time when these machines that handle self-representations (via speech, listening, text) and abilities to capture activities on video have become smaller and smaller, making combining them in a personal configuration (as opposed to a means owned by a state or corporation) possible.

Over the last decade in Western life – since 9/11 – the privacy fears of rights advocates, the dystopias of those afraid of "Big Brother" (who, um, perhaps do not watch the show...) – have been given ample play, as they should. But rarely have we seen in a public venue the case made for how these technologies could be used to assist the individual in her or his daily life in a positive way. Security concerns, as anyone who knows me, have been part of my thinking throughout the development of this information psychology perspective. The very patterns which are captured in the use of the psych-soft I envision could also quickly determine whether someone other than the intended end-user was plugged-in to the software. The design of the system, itself, would help insure that insights it develops with you and for you would only be available to you, and nobody else. Without attention to keeping personal information private, at every step of an envisioned digital psych-soft journey, this entire project fails.

Ventilator dialogue box, from Life in the Box iteration
(Source: Vore, 2004).

We can utilize all of our personal devices in a coordinated way to create a digital mirror of unprecedented resolution for anyone who wants it. Further, I believe digital recording techniques could be combined with a "cognitive mapper," so to speak, which could begin to do the work even of everyday therapists. A series of algorithms derived from an individual's information routines could, at minimum, be a consistent and accurate mirror of a person's inner life (certainly a necessary aspect of any therapeutic setting, be it body, mind or spirit). I've argued for years that a "digital therapist" could be a boon in situations where court-ordered therapies are required, and human therapists are deluged with a case-load that would overwhelm even the best of them. Digital therapy could aid in cases that require monitoring; and digital therapy, attached to the internet, could create group-based services for addicts and virtually any group to which a label could be applied.

I believe one could take an individual's "core data" (information routines, situational reaction-strategies) as gathered by the pscyh-soft, and via plug-ins, allow it to be parsed by one of the fourteen schools of psychological thought (of course, this could extend to any religious school of thought, or moral universe one could imagine, as well). After working with the psych-soft I envision, you would be able to ask it to comment from a Freudian perspective, a Jungian perspective, a Behaviorist perspective, a Jamesian perspective – Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, etc.

Imagine the uses of such an information psychology: in commercials, recently, I've seen a young man talking to older man, as he seeks to find his family roots in a village where he cannot speak the language: the hand-held device does the translating. Why couldn't something like what I've been working on mediate differences between a Buddhist and a Christian? A Christian and a Muslim? Or two Freudians?

Minder Poster (Source: Vore, 2006)

Imagine a world in which the use of technology builds common ground between individuals across the thousands of divides that our diverse world offers. This of course has been one of the ways in which the internet has been hyped over the last decade, that it would somehow automatically bridge the differences: though it has bridged geography, it has also placed people who disagree dramatically next to one another in a way they never would have been before. The aspects of the work in my portfolio related to the Reading-Writing-Meaning Triangle, Life in the Box and Minder, show, concretely, how these warring camps might, with the help of technology, find common ground.

If you can see this, you'll also begin to see why these project I've worked on, now, for 7 years, continue to dominate my every thought. Before Freud would come to revolutionize the new psychology of late-19th century France, Théodule-Armand Ribot had to rescue it from the founder of positivist science, Auguste Comte. Comte didn't believe that a science of man could come into being because the contents of the self were so subjective. With the revolutions afoot today in cognitive neuroscience, and the myriad quantified self technologies coming into being, the subjective self, as a concern, may be irrefutably released into the dustbin of history. There is no predicting how thousands (and perhaps hundreds of thousands) of people, as they come to the quantified self movement will change psychology. For a field that started out as discounted science, became, in fits and starts, a science which recognized inner states, then moved to quantify them with scientific methods, there has never been such an opportunity. 200 years ago, a science of man couldn't have existed. 100 years ago, it began to gain a foothold. Over the next decade, it could well become the first science which is entirely, empirically user-directed.

Works Mentioned
Note: for brevity, citations have gone unlisted which reference Wikipedia.org entries, though they are, of course, high-lighted in the text and one can click-thru to them.

Damski, Jon-Henri and Vore, John Michael. Damski to Go. Firetrap Press (2002). More details can be found on-line, at the following links, checked 22 Aug 2011: [http://www.amazon.com/Damski-Go-Deck-One-Jon-Henri/dp/189134353X and [Vore - 01-0 - Rethinking The Book - informatics411

Duffy, Troy (writer, director). The Boondock Saints. Franchise Pictures (1999). Found on-line 22 Aug 2011, here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boondock_Saints

Foucault, Michel. "About the Concept of the 'Dangerous Individual in 19th Century Legal Psychiatry." Translated by Alain Boudot and Jane Couchman. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Vol. 1, pp. 1-18. Pergamon Press (1978). Found on-line here, and checked 22 Aug 2011: [http://schwarzemilch.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/foucault_dangerous_individual.pdf

Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Routledge, 2006. Found on-line 22 Aug 2011, here: [http://www.amazon.com/History-Madness-Michel-Foucault/dp/0415277019

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Edition (1994/1970). Google Books has an edition by Routledge, here, checked 22 Aug 2011: [http://books.google.com/books/about/The_order_of_things.html?id=xVeRwX-AvLAC

Makari, George. Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. Harper, 2008. More information can be found on-line at the following address, checked 20 Aug 2011: [ http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061346613

Monty Python's Life of Brian. Terry Jones (director). Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. 1979. More information can be found at the IMDb, here, checked 22 Aug 2011: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/fullcredits#writers

Mortimer, Kareem. Children of God. Mercury Rising Films (2010). Found on-line 22 Aug 2011, here: [http://www.childrenofgodthemovie.com/www.childrenofgodthemovie.com/Welcome.html

Online Etymology Dictionary: "Individual" Found on-line 22 Aug 2011, here:
[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=individual

Vore, John Michael. Informatics411 Portfolio: Informatik Framework (project) found on-line and checked 22 Aug 2011: [http://www.informatics411.com/if

Vore, John Michael. Informatics411 Portfolio: Life in the Box (project) found on-line and checked 22 Aug 2011: [http://www.informatics411.com/apps/Vore_-_08-1_-_Life_in_The_Box.html

Vore, John Michael. Informatics411 Portfolio: Minder (project) found on-line and checked 22 Aug 2011:

[http://www.informatics411.com/apps/Vore_-_11-0_-_Minder.html

Vore, John Michael. Informatics411 Portfolio: Reading-Writing-Meaning Triangle (project) found on-line and checked 22 Aug 2011: [http://www.informatics411.com/apps/Vore_-_09-0_-_Reading-Writing-Meaning.html

Vore, John Michael. Tell Me What Home is Like: A Map/Memoir in Lieu of a Place (Firetrap Press, 2000). Found on-line 22 Aug, here: [http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Me-What-Home-Like/dp/1891343009

Social Network Mapping - How NDDB Mapper Could be More Like Honestly.com

2010-10-28T18:46:00.000-07:00

Screengrab of NNDB.com's social network map of Funeral for Martha Graham - Washington D.C. publisher of The Washington Post and former center of quite a few social universes...

(v1r3 in one section; Ann Arbor, Michigan) - I'm looking for something special: I want a piece of software that does these things: (a) gives me a way to represent all kinds of data in a visually cool way (b) allows me to build relationships between data-objects (c) which is smart enough to suggest to me what a connection between two data objects would look like, if there was one (d) could be a "dynamic" object which had an identity that changed through time. So I went hunting on-line and eventually found NNDB.com, a detail of which is above.

You can see the full NNDB Martha Graham Funeral Social Network here: http://mapper.nndb.com/start/?map=402 . I've not had luck using Safari (5.02) on a Mac, but Google Chrome (7.0.517.41) works great.

I've begun making some social networks at NNDB, but stopped because there was no way to (a) build-up the connections fruitfully and (b) add a full-profile: you can add nodes along with (i) thing (e.g. man, woman, company, etc.), along with one "title" – but then you have to wait to get what you've added, approved - and given NNDB's criteria, they may NOT. So while waiting, I've been playing with Orange...I'll write later how that goes. It does in fact seem to have the (a) thru (d) capabilities I was looking for.

But I've been thinking about what would make another on-line social networker, better. Because I also see no reason why you couldn't, with relative easy, turn a good social networking tool into a good social network "truth incubator." Here are four (4) new features, two (2) of which could help NDDB.com compete with Unvarnished.com, now Honestly.com - which, I think, has given up it's claim out-of-the gate because of allowing "anonymous" reviews (and I had such hopes!).

Items (3) and (4) could easily be "ported" to Honestly.com...for years, I've been saying to folks at LinkedIn and even Facebook (not like saying it daily, but when it comes up in convo, kind of underscoring it) that the next revolution in networking is letting end-users TO SEE the darn network. This seems some kind of last bastion of "ownership of data" in the social network, and frankly effing ridiculous that computers aren't used to represent the network those networks want everyone to be on. Like jumping into a maze, yet they're touted as "the social fabric,' etc. Great: I'm connected; I always say: let me see how.

(1) Add a field for Event which can be a place-holder for information that indicates shared time-and-space between nodes. This could begin to show up dynamically as "strengthened" lines, e.g., the more events shared, the thicker the line.

(2) Add a Time-Role field which allows for an individual to be tracked through various resume-positions. As I'm building my maps, I'm intrigued by the way in which an individual from 1988 was networked to folks then and how those networked connections change as we move forward time to present day.

(3) Add a "Verifiable Statements" field which could be grounded via news accounts, legal actions and other public information databases and could begin to rate the "truthfulness" of a given person based on a simple of algorithm related to instances contradicted and instances collaborated. This might lead to different interests listing more and more verifiable statements, etc.

(4) Add a "Disambiguation" feature which allows you to determine the "connectivity" of two nodes/people and perhaps gives reasons why two people are NOT connected to one another; in a world in which Six Degrees somewhat rules, the more interesting question is not what connects two people, but the DISAMBIGUATION, e.g., barriers to a connection.

If you know anyone at NNDB.com or Honestly.com, please let them know I'm thinking about them! I've emailed both to no avail: NNDB email is dead; and Honestly.com is in that stratosphere of neo-development where it seems it can't be bothered...

v1r3 © 2010 John Michael Vore

Claiming my Technorati Space...a Technorati Bio

2010-09-24T09:26:00.001-07:00

(v1r9) Starting out as a trained writer of non-fiction, Vore wrote a lengthy dissertation on the American Midwest construction of self, while at the same time engaging in progressive identity-based politics, scrambling to gain civil rights for LGBTQ students, faculty and staff at the University of Notre Dame, while also attacking the University's decades of silence and cover-up regarding a serial sexual & spiritual abuser there. Vore next wrote a book about the construction of the Self in Western societies, along with instructions and insurrectionary prose which would help one step "outside the box" of self and create a new ego-identity. In the late 90s, Vore worked with the longest running columnist in LGBTQ America, Jon-Henri Damski, in bringing into book form his twenty-plus years of columns, while starting up Firetrap Press and working towards gaining a patent for e-book software. Vore designed an e-book reader (both hardware and software) from scratch, on paper and using Adobe Illustrator for iterations, then spent tens of thousands of dollars in 2000-2003 making it thru the 2nd Round PTO (with over dozen claims in "Personal Knowledge Index"), only to be told "it had been miscategorized" and he needed to "start over."

Since then Vore has worked to create the theory necessary to "digitize a personality;" returned to graduate school for work on a 2nd Masters (first is M.FA. in creative writing; 2nd: work towards Masters of Science in Human-Computer Interaction Design); and worked various contract- and other-kinds of projects in high tech and publishing (putting out six new books in 2009-2010). Vore began his blog "Informatics411" in 2006, and before that blogged about Raftian perspectives on current events in "Ideas withot Ideology" ("Raftian" refers to the perspective on psychology he began developing in The Raft (Firetrap Press, 2001).)

Vore hopes to eventually create a different kind of software company, one that embodies freedom and shows end-users how to find it in their own lives.

In lieu of a "centerfold" on FB...

2010-08-12T21:02:00.000-07:00

(v1r1 in one section; Ann Arbor, MI) – Was trying to post to Facebooka smaller image of a page in my Portfolio called the Kitchen Sink, where illustrations from all projects can be seen bulletin-board style.

After Grabbing the three sections (Top, Middle, Bottom) and reconstructing the full "scroll" in Photoshop, went back to Facebook, uploaded, and got this:

So, though in some ways it seems odd to post an image of a webpage you can click a link (here) and go to, one still can't get the full skyskraper in one view other than like this (and this is "X-Large"):

Want to see it bigger? I finally got it posted to FB by doing this (click for even bigger):

-jmv

© 2010 John Michael Vore

Simulation Trumps Story

2010-08-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

Vore's diagram of his Informatik Framework: List, Story, Simulation and Virtual Reality (Vore: 2006)

(v1r1 in one section; Ann Arbor, MI) – In a very well-written – yet poorly headlined – blog today, Andrew Whiteacre at PBS's Idea Lab talks about the aftermath of Wikileaks massive publication of United States Department of Defense field reports regarding the War in Afghanistan.

Mr. Whiteacre correctly sees that there is a disconnect within the American public about the war, but his remedy - a better narrative - fails to address the fundamentals of competing types of information in today's world. He suggests we need "more compelling storytelling" to better make the case for what's going on, gone on and will go on in the Afghanistan theater. He writes: "What the WikiLeaks episode illustrates isn't that the American government is lying. Rather, it's that we're bad at hearing and processing the truth."

While I agree wholeheartedly with this analysis, the question is: why are we "bad at hearing and processing the truth?" He suggests with the headline we need better story-telling: "Case Illustrates Need for Compelling Storytelling." Here I disagree: case illustrates need for the limits of story-telling and the need for narrative in a different media altogether: Simulation.

In my Informatik Framework, I theorize four ever-complex ways of handling information. I suggest these are rooted in cognitive neurology and thus shared by all humans. What are the four "information routines"? List, Story, Simulation and Virtual Reality. Out of these and with these, we create our Tools (the fifth element of the Informatik Framework, aimed ostensibly at Information Architects, Interaction Designers, User Experience designers and Usability specialists).

So, how do you combat a "bad narrative"? By shifting upwards in the information routine hierarchy, to Simulation.

Three recent examples of this over the last year make my point: Tiger Woods and the conservative critic, Andrew Breitbart and WikiLeak's 2010 video, "Collateral Damage."

While I might find policy differences with the Breitbart – because I tend towards progressive/liberal views – his appreciation of and use of media shows that he understands what shifts the narrative. The best example of that is his use of folks in prostitution drag to attack ACORN.

More sadly for sports and golf fans was the repeated, non-ending stories about Tiger Woods' personal life. Most media sources eventually credited the Taiwanese video simulators for some part in how perceptions of Tiger Woods shifted so dramatically. (Link to The Daily Beast's use of the Taiwanese video.)

Finally, Wikileaks' Video "Collateral Damage" was an effective way to critique an effort using video in a way which is more akin to the Informatik Framework's Virtual Reality - even higher up the information routine foodchain than Simulation.

In an age of "new media," one does not have to rely on one of the oldest forms of information-transfer: The Story. One can, in fact, change the story by relying on a Simulation, instead. Why, because, in our brains, a Simulation trumps a Story.

Another tweet, today, demonstrates this in other ways: Andrew Odewahn at O'Reilley Radar, "Lies, damn lies, and visualizations."

--jmv

© 2010 John Michael Vore

Firetrap Press Updates, Continued: From 80s, 90s, to 00s?

2010-08-04T22:39:00.000-07:00

(v1r3 in 1 section; Ann Arbor, MI) I've further updated two of the Firetrap Press pages - the Welcome page and the John Vore page.

Both seemed still too dated - and the Welcome page had too much static in the background. So I worked with the background image for a few hours in Photoshop to find a much more smooth effect; I honestly wasn't sure what I was looking for at first - or even how to get there exactly, but as I continued trying different effects (everything from simply adjusting levels, or hues, and various filters), I finally "got" it.

I'll do a before and after so you don't have to scroll through entries...first the page as of the last entry....

Just "too busy" - too much going on, more in-between where it was and where it needed to go...

And below, as it is today:

Firetrap Press Cooperative Welcom page after "pushing hard" on the background image...

I realized I wanted to aim for something closer to what the iBookstore looks like (here) (or how DeliciousLibrary looks: look at that brown)...yet I also wanted this to come from an image rooted in Firetrap Press's history: thus the hanging onto the "Victory at Samothrace" image from an out-of-print 19th century text, which had meaning for Jon-Henri Damski and was part of our first book together, 14 years ago (here's another version).

The cool thing about that image: never having been in the building where Jon-Henri lived , I hadn't known that a copy of the Greek statue was in the lobby! So when I presented the early drafts of his first book, and it was on the cover, we both had a great moment. We established a strong "synchronicity" with repeated events like that, enabling me to design uniquely for Damski's writing – which many had thought obtuse later in his life, but which I eventually felt a great affinity.

Now to the redesign/makeover of the John Vore page (treating myself like a client): while it the last version reflected more of the "curio cabinet" I was aiming for, it still seemed dated - and dark. As a "designer" I had to say: what's with the Shadow-figure crap? They had to go.

Take a look: this is the page as it was about a week ago...

The "curio cabinet" page...but I began to think the shadowy figures looked Shadowy: nope, nope, nope...

So I next moved the look to a more zen-like appearance, with a scanned print on rice paper (I think). But then the texture began to, like the busy static of the last-version Firetrap Press "Welcome" page – seem not fresh as a design. You can see it in the darker "dots" along the left margin, below...Like I'd gone from 1987 ("curio") to 1994...

Moving from "Shadows" to Zen...but the texture kept seeming "unfinished' and "throw-back," though not far enough...

So I again worked with the background image in Photoshop (playing in CS5!) to get the "shiny like glass" look. It truly was analogous to the sand/stain/sand process one goes through in making actual wood gain a sheen. I bent and pushed and copied and subtracted and added and inversed and Surface Blurred until I got to this – see what you think...

So after some work in Photoshop, I was able to get rid of the texture, and find the sleek, glass-like appearance I was hoping for...

No more Firetrap Press designs (at least for a week or so)! It has been a great challenge to re-engage my Photoshop skills, which had been dormant. Both pages - and the rest of the new Firetrap Press pages are at: http://www.firetrappress.com

© 2010 John Michael Vore

Form Letter (Form-Post?) for a Future Life on FB (With an Internet Past...)

2010-08-01T17:26:00.000-07:00

As a brief response to Jeffrey Rosen's incredible, thoughtful, must-read "The Web Means the End of Forgetting" (New York Times, July 25), I have penned a "form letter" response just in case what one does on Facebook doesn't stay on Facebook (it came about yesterday during a spicey, spirited & fun exchange).

Feel free to amend, fill in blanks and use as the particulars of your situation demand.

-John Michael Vore

v1r1

Informatics411 - Updates to Portfolios (Updated 12 Aug 2010)

2010-07-31T09:01:00.000-07:00

(v1r4 in five sections; Ann Arbor, Michigan) – This entry is mostly a hands-on updater rather than a theoretical exploration. It covers: (a) permanent v. temporary test blog entries (b) updates to the Informatics411 portfolio & makeover (including a look at "Tornado" menu (which I'm excited about)) (c) an issue with Google Chrome and UTF encoding via iWeb (d) a work-around which isn't a work-around but a simple notice to users about which browsers were tested and work (e) Firetrap Press 2010 "makeover."

(a) - Informatics411 Blog - Itself
As I have long advocated, one writes blog entries with an "always beta" mind-set. Some blog entries come and stay, going through a series of revisions - others get removed to my dustbin of personal history. Any trained writer knows that "draft-redraft" is a rule - doing this on-line involves a bit more risk, as someone may mistake a "draft" with a "final"; in the old days, the only "public" document would be the final draft.

I began down this "public beta" road slowly and carefully, with some wonderful/scary missteps - but mostly with - I believe - good results. That's why all the blog entries have Version and Revision numbers at top or bottom (or both): e.g., "v1r3"). I've renamed this the "Informatics411 Sandbox" to better underscore this point, and...

With the return of the on-line portfolio (moved to the "back-end" of Firetrap Press), the Informatics411 Blog Itself "permanent" entries - those which move beyond the "test phase" postings, here - have a new web address:

http://www.firetrppress.com/informatics411/blog/

Sorry to have to keep moving around the web like this - it somewhat reflects my itinerant life-style as I continue to look for full-time work/housing etc. One reason I had to retire the last domain was because someone on the same network as I was on accessed my computer and email accounts (and apparently sent fictitious email out; one friend was so horrified she simply trashed it and wouldn't talk about it); as a vagabond, one does not get the choice, always of having "secure" anything!). At any rate, to the new Informatics411 Portfolio...

(b) - Informatics411 Portfolio
(1) wanted a look which broke free of a too-conservative (not "designy" enough according to one recruiter) look and feel, and a break-away from the regimentation of the "plates on poles" previous menu - and wanted to lose the tape. For those of you who never saw it, here's what it looked like (at the old domain):

(2) the Tornado menu, posted in late July, one has a test of this idea: in a Portfolio, how "driven" is the traffic? Is it more drive-by browsing around, or does it require a tight "if this, then this" button to pageview. The new menu is purposefully designed with a bit of fuzziness, hoping to drive traffic more by pure visual interest rather than "rational" "let me see this, then that"...here's what the "Tornado menu" looks like:

(3) for those interested in a slightly different take on a portfolio with 27 projects, I also offer the schizo-directed Kitchen Sink page...it has "timed tour" pathways and, if you continue scrolling, links to all projects via illustrations/images from that project's deliverables; you can find the Kitchen Sink page here: http://www.firetrappress.com/informatics411/John_Vore_-_Kitchen_Sink.html

(c) - GoogleChrome + iWeb Issue - UPDATED (12 Aug 2010)
-what appeared to be a coding issues is actually much simpler: by using Web-ready fonts it gets solved; updating pages one-by one...
-there are issues between the GoogleChrome browser and iWeb; despite web research on this (finding unanswered comments on Apple-user sites, and a too-general description of a Google code issue), even after changing the iWeb-generated code to better reflect the UTF-8 line suggested by Google, Informatics411 (and one presumes Firetrap Press) still looks like this on Google Chrome:

(d) - BrowserTest Button UPDATED (12 Aug 2010)
   - I couldn't stand the Browswer Test Buttons, so they got relegated to the Site Map page and nothing else, which kind of made them useless; new solution discovered in (c)
   -at first I thought this was a problem in the use of quotation marks around the UTF-8 coding in the i-Web generated meta-tag; well, several attempts at replacement yielded no difference - and I tried 3 different ways...here's one:

      (1) Locate and erase the iWeb-generated meta-tag (I used Dreamweaver to edit the code):

(2) Add the UTF-8 meta-tag as Google code suggests:

(3) When this failed to make a difference, I added a "Browser Test" series of icons to the top-level pages in the Informatics411 pages. It reflects positive experiences with Safari, Firefox, and unreadable garbage with Google Chrome (which I otherwise like):

(4) I wanted a Browser Test notification that would work regardless of being able to read the pages' text (i.e., reason for whole thing), that's why I used images; the icons were grabbed from the web, and the thumbs were Grabbed from Apple's Font Book (image size scrolled to "huge"); I then mistakenly notated the Browser Check on some of the pages - as you can see in the CV page image above...!; will correct that today!

(e) - New Firetrap Press web designs (updated here)
Finally, I'm very pleased with the new Firetrap Press web-page designs; as with any of this, I'd love to hear input. The goals were to (a) update the design with a less conservative look, breaking away after ten years, from the "Firetrap Color Palette" and "cookie-cutter" look of site (b) make room for a new writer who was joining the Firetrap Press Collective (Owen Keehnen) (c) and design individual author pages which better reflected that author's work and personality (d) update continue to fill-in the Firetrap Press News page (design kept old-school so as to facilitate ease-of-use for folks in media).

Here' a before-look:
(0) Firetrap Press - Welcome (before redesign)

Firetrap Press - Welcome - BEFORE makeover

Here are the 5 new pages:

(1) Firetrap Press - Welcome (after redesign) - http://www.firetrappress.com/welcome/

Firetrap Press - Welcome - AFTER makeover

(2) Firetrap Press - Lisa De Niscia - http://www.firetrappress.com/de_niscia/

Firetrap Press - Lisa De Niscia (makeover, 29 July, 2010)

(3) Firetrap Press - Jon-Henri Damski - http://www.firetrappress.com/damski/

Firetrap Press - Jon-Henri Damski (makeover, 29 July, 2010)

(4) Firetrap Press - Owen Keehnen - http://www.firetrappress.com/keehnen/

Firetrap Press - Owen Keehnen (makeover, 29 July, 2010)

(5) Firetrap Press - John Vore - http://www.firetrappress.com/vore/

Firetrap Press - John Vore (makeover, 29 July, 2010)

The #Privacy2010 Debate: When Openness Is Taken Private

2010-04-18T14:24:00.000-07:00

Screengrab from a lively PrivacyCampDC site.

(Ann Arbor, Michigan; v4r2 in one section) – After taking an ungodly eight tweets to ask a question of attendees at an on-line broadcast of PrivacyCampDC, I realized my love of the brevity of Twitter had made me forget I blog! So I decided I'd save the bright, engaged and energetic folks at #privacy2010 some time by pulling the tweets, and incorporating them into one (tweetable) post.

Here I expand on the situation, the question, a realization and some repercussions. First, though, the tweets:

Q: For the gent who spoke 04-18 about not hiring a seemingly qualified, peer-friendly person, after a social network search...

Q: (contd) that gent said an on-line posting showed the potential hire to be "actually a bigot," despite his progressive feel

Q: (contd)...Q[uestion] for the gent is, "Did you ask?"

Q: (contd)...did the person who in person seemed as progressive as you, but appeared (to you) bigoted on-line, get a defense?

Q: (contd)...I don't mind any reaction to my on-line life; I choose to be here. An open-forum asks for debate, not deprivation

Q: (contd)...for one doesn't seek the truth by researching difficult topics, explore cutting-edge ideas...challenging...

Q: (contd)...challenging [the] powerful to, at a moment of import, be summarily dismissed or written of[f], prevented from engagement...

#privacy2010 Q: (final)...(apologies for overly long interruption in stream)

Now for the realization: as I listened yesterday, and pondered through to today, I realized it wasn't that I sought some kind of protection for my on-line opinions. In other words, my concern wasn't about "privacy" per se; as I tweeted, "one chooses to be in the on-line world"...

What bothered me was the possibility of private decisions being made regarding my on-line life--decisions in private that may effect me. Now the gent in #privacy2010 said his potential employee turned into a digital bigot--who knows what anyone may think about any of the many positions I've written about on-line.

But by keeping his "objection" private, the employer actually forcibly cut-off the debate in a secretive way. His attitude almost seemed as if he'd "caught" his potential employee in "a lie." Though this wasn't said explicitly, the gent at #privacy2010 said that the "on-line bigotry" contrasted with the way the person "answered all the interview questions" in the right way.

The problem, for the interviewer and the interviewee then becomes something deeper, as the employer believes the self-portrayal in person to be less important than the portrayal on-line. The tid-bit of "bad" on-line information trumped all the good seen face-to-face. It was if the potential employer believed he had "special" access to a "secret" about his potential employee, even though this is absurd: it was information found out, on-line.

The employer in the live feed seemed to act as if what he had found out "on-line" about his potential employee trumped the experience of interviewing him or her. In other words, what was found in an on-line forum seemed to counter what the person doing the hiring--and others--believed while doing the hiring.

In effect, this action took what a person wrote in a public forum and privatized it, making it the basis of a hiring decision. Turning what was public into something done in private is what seems problematic, to me.

Again, much of this discussion turns on whether or not the potential employee had the chance to defend the impression left by an on-line utterance. If not, then the question at hand becomes larger than should an employer look at an employee's on-line life, but how to resolve an incongruence between the two.

The question has deepened because of more knowledge: and how the potential employee doesn't appear to be who he or she says. This is much more serious.

The problem isn't simply making a mistake in an on-line forum, or a photo taken compromisingly. When the so-called "free the internet" mindset takes a public event and privately and without the chance for review, makes a life-threatening decision based on it, that "free internet" gets destroyed.

There is almost nothing I have ever experienced in a life of activism and challenging the powers that be, as not being able to find work.

I used to say, to my ex, you can read my on-computer journal (ah, the innocence of just writing on a computer)--but never ask me about it. What is meant as private should stay private. Yet when the forum is on-line, it wasn't meant to be private, it was meant to be public. It should stay that way. So, future employers: please don't treat it like a secret. As I recently read on a Facebook page dedicated to the poet Allen Ginsberg, "Candor ends paranoia." When we respond to openness with openness, it drains fear away--and in the case of an actual bigot, creates the space in which growth can occur.

To this older newcomer to high tech, I see the signs of progressive thought in entrepreneurs across the industry who have "made it" early: they want to give back to the world. I love seeing that. What surprises me is that, so often, in high tech, some think the revolution is what happens "out there"--somewhere else, rather than in our own minds, our own companies--and with our own employees. Changes happens where you are, not just where you want to be.

Facebook requests: FAIL

2010-04-17T04:12:00.000-07:00

(Ann Arbor, Michigan; v1r1 in one section) – These are some of the Facebook requests I rejected this morning. It's Spring--these go back to Winter, as you'll see. Some folks' names have been changed so as to not call out the unsuspecting....

...beads, hearts (x5), food fling, hugs, birthdays, kinky gifts, go eastsiders, dr. phil personality test (when I'm done!), adopt a reef, randomness, optical illusions, sketch, st. patrick's day, mardi gras, birthday, pass a drink (x2), movies (x2), flower mandala, farmville (sorry ne**), iSmile, universal chairs (wtf?), johnny depp (he's a FB app? ok, accepted one), chocolate, rock band pictures, beautiful wild birds and song bird (c'mon susi!), wisdom, kidnap, true age test, friendship day, bumper sticker (ok, tiz), bonsai and lucky bamboo, thangka paintings, there/their/they're, (lil) green patch, alcohol gifts, more pass a drink (x4), round of drinks, snowball fight (x2), texas holdem poker (who is michael lxxxxx?), snowball fight (x2, again)...

The Notre Dame Psychedelic Club?

2010-04-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

(Ann Arbor, Michigan; v1r6 in one section) – There's a great dialogue going on about Don Lattin's book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club. I've sent them a longish letter with some of my thoughts, because one of the "usual suspects"--in Lattin's Psychedelic Club--is an old mentor of mine, Dr. Timothy Leary. We met only a few times; he mentored me through his books, all of which I have read (and once owned, in better times). The following is based on the email just sent:

As a student of Timothy Leary's, I have to take exception to the binary treatment showing up in the talk of him and Richard Alpert. I think we should at least take the two men at their words in The Psychedelic Experience, and not be so caught up in our own egos when shelling out kudos or bardos.

If Leary played out "the ego trip" in one way, and Alpert another--are they not both equals in being teachers? One makes us aware of IT, the other passes stealthily through IT. Not sure who is trickier, and I cannot wait to read Don Lattin's book to find out.

Though I'm an Aspergian, on whom talk of egos might be a moot point, I don't find any less ego in those who comment on ego from a so-called humble stand-point: they're still focused on ego, and oftentimes, they do more harm (Steve Silberman has already pointed out the worst example of this, the Catholic Church, so no more need be said on this point).

Thanks, also, for posting this dialogue for free, when Well.com requires a subscription! Now if you'll allow me, may I cite a few examples of personal exchanges with Dr. Leary? They show him to be quite different from what has come so far in this exchange.

Leary, when I hosted him at Notre Dame in 1985, was a spectacular guest for three days who gave students and faculty a discussion of the history of information, still relevant 25 years later; after a long lecture, he answered every single students' questions, fending off quite a few conservatives with grace and humor. He met with students on-campus and off, and I had the pleasure of introducing him to Theodore Hesburgh, then President of the University. Off-campus I could barely pull him out of conversations with undergraduates at one bar--and in another, he happily posed for photographs for a celebrating couple and their wedding party.

Seeing I was shy and didn't have many friends (my Asperger's diagnosis occurred in 2006), during the reception after his main lecture at Notre Dame, Dr. Leary climbed up on a table (!) and thanked me by name in front of all the assembled students. He was trying to make me friends! Before he left, Leary invited me and my girlfriend to visit him--and we did, in Spring, 1986--at his Beverly Hills home. There he showed off "Mind Mirror" on his own PC, pressing me until I was uncomfortable to critique it ("Mind Mirror" is still an inspiration to me in my quest to create life changing psychology software; there is a Mind Mirror web domain, too).

I met Leary again in the 90s, when he was one of the first "mentors" to whom I came out; "that's great," he said--an unusual source of positive support in Indiana (it would be the last exchange we shared). I had caught up with him after an Indianapolis tour date and drove him back to his motel, but drove the wrong way; he ranted against the Hoosier war memorials to unnecessary death, which we kept passing, but never minded my being lost, late into a long day.

I never saw, face-to-face the "egotist" many like to write about: I saw a (to play the game) humble, intelligent man who was concerned about how he came across, cared about the interests of his audience--and the life of the student host I once was. Indeed, the only heated exchange we ever had was when I kept asking about editor David Solomon: "why do you keep asking about the past," Leary reprimanded: "I care about the future!"

A man full of egotism would seek out ways to remind us of his contributions in the past, now, wouldn't he? Leary's essay in Solomon's book, "How To Change Behavior" became the basis for the analytic tools I would use in my first book, when I thought about the Catholic Church, power and Notre Dame--and how it could allow a sexually abusive priest (and my spiritual advisor) to advance at the University during a 20-year career of abuse.

So, the egotist, in my life, was the Catholic Fr. Hesburgh had promoted time and time again--not the one he had shadow-boxed in the 70s as Nixon's "favorite college president," the former Harvard professor he welcomed to Notre Dame, in 1985--and a man who became one of my heroes, Dr. Timothy Leary.

Timothy Leary came to Notre Dame as part of a speaker series sponsored by Student Government. During the 1985-1986 school year, I was Chairman of the Ideas and Issues Committee. The Leary-inspired Future Perspective Series sponsored (in order): Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg (with the Sophomore Literary Festival) and Ken Kesey. This was the Notre Dame Psychedelic Club, and I was happy to be one of its catalysts.

Above: Advertisement for the Future Perspective Series (Vore, 1985; more here).

Book cover link:

http://tlcbooktours.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/harvard-psychedlic-club.jpg

Book excerpt:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-09/the-harvard-psychedelic-club/

Dialogue at Well.com:

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/382/Don-Lattin-The-Harvard-Psychedel-page01.html

Future Perspective Series Artwork (Vore, 1985):

http://www.johnvore.com/John_Vore_Portfolio/John_Vore_-_Process_Slides_-_Publishing/Pages/JV05_-_MacPaint_-_Future_Perspectives_Series.html

American Intelligence Failures: Trapped In Old Paradigms

2010-01-02T09:19:00.001-08:00

Screengrab from CNN of America's former Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff; for the complete clip, go here.

(Washington, D.C.; v3r6 in one section)--The former Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, in a recent conversation on CNN, has described the problem of applied intelligence gathering as distinguishing between the "signal and the noise." This is much more incriminating than the over-played, out-of-context remarks of the current Homeland Security Secretary. Why? Because it relates to something larger than even "systemic failure" --it relates to complete paradigm exhaustion. Behind every systemic failure is an old paradigm that won't die.

Mr. Chertoff's remark makes it sound as if we're trying to solve new problems by simply saying how we solved old problems. This doesn't cut it, as far as national security is concerned. This Informatics411 entry attempts to describe the paradigms which worked in the past, but do not solve the problems before us, today.

Let me quote the transcript of Mr. Chertoff, from CNN on December 31, 2009:

MICHAEL CHERTOFF, FMR. HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: I'm sympathetic to the problem of what we sometimes call intelligence overload. So much information comes in, how do you separate what we call the signal from the rest of the noise? And often it's very difficult to do. (CNN Transcript 2009/12/31).

If Mr. Chertoff had said "wheat form the chaff," it would sound too religious, as such metaphors tend to go back to the Bible. So he used a metaphor from information technology--which may make him sound more hip (which means "capable" in the professional world), but as it also points to an outmoded theory of information, his remark signals a serious problem in American intelligence gathering--if our intelligence community, indeed, uses the theories Mr. Chertoff's metaphor implies.

Mr. Chertoff's comment seems peculiar, as well, because the traditional problems of intelligence gathering since 9/11 have related to "human intelligence"--gathering real information from real people. And intelligence gathering has also been plagued with information sharing among agencies, something President Obama has already alluded to in his own quest for answers.

As is widely known, to get around the difficult, expensive and time-consuming face-to-face intelligence gathering, which requires agents infiltrating networks in foreign countries--during the past administration, we relied on an "information theory" approach: just start listening to every conversation. I call this an "information theory" approach because it treats all calls like data; and it needs all calls in order to pinpoint "terrorist" behaviors. In other words, you need a field of dynamic data in order to find, within it, behavioral patterns--only from them can you begin to build algorithms which might predict future behaviors.

You need a field of wheat to harvest before you can separate wheat from chaff.

The paradigm which governed the problem set gave us a solution: create a field of data and find patterns within it. Some variation of this is what Mr. Chertoff refers to with his "signal and noise" comment.

He had this solution available to him over the last decade because old information theory paradigms could chalk up a lot of successes (more below); yet those paradigms don't see whole people on either ends of an information exchange, they see digitized behaviors. So it was easy to "trample" rights--laws were being broken (in theory); and we are at war. While this has great justification, it would make a lot more sense if the ends justified the means; that is, if it worked. It has not--and most Americans watching the news know this (which is why Janet Napolitano's misstatement has had such an afterlife, unfortunate as it does not reflect her outspoken advocacy for new Homeland Security approaches in many other forums over the last six months).

When combined with profiling, screening and watch lists, the "signal and noise" remark further points to the use of old paradigms which have been out-of-date now for years. One hesitates to write "no wonder we're in this jam," but that doesn't help. One needs to distinguish between the paradigms which governed information technology during the last one hundred years or so--and may, tragically, still govern intelligence information in America--and the paradigms which might show up as alternatives.

This is another "wheat from the chaff" comment--and it can be difficult to see it as such because the old technology paradigms, and the problems they solved continue to add so much to our lives. Separating "wheat from chaff" here doesn't mean disregarding what came before--or the problem sets solved by the other paradigms--but recognizing that we have an entirely new problem set before us, today. One that might, for instance, call for wedding a database to notions from fluid mechanics, with data structures that act like waves--now that's thinking outside the box!

I pointedly chose an example about a new kind of database, because our way of handling information literally determines what information we look at--our information routines separate the wheat from the chaff. So if we keep missing links between important data, then we don't have a database that works. If we're not sharing data "across agencies" well enough, then we're not storing it in a way which requires multiple inputs in a central location.

We need an entirely different kind of database. Would one based on the principles of fluid mechanics work? I wouldn't know until I built one (with a team of mathematicians and programmers).

A paradigm is a way of thinking in which the answers to some questions have been solved; in this way, we don't have to keep "re-inventing the wheel." When a problem set was solved, a "new era" was born, a "new box." Five problem sets will be discussed here; each era had its "problems to solve," and answers which could be technologized, which today means writing it in silicon (in the old days, it was stone, then iron, then steel, etc. etc).

The nature of technical problem-solving makes change particularly difficult, for we often cannot see beyond what our technology provides; we cannot see outside the box. And as we become surrounded by more and more technology, we often do not see that we are trapped in more and more ideologies (solved problem sets). This is one reason why technological innovation is so difficult: we want a Mac experience, even at the office: but the company uses PCs...(realizing it couldn't overcome this, Apple created a new way for us to have the Mac experience: the iPod, then the iPhone...)

The five eras, then: I. Capture & Transmit , II. Store & Play; III. Catalog; IV. Search and V. Puzzle. The first refers to technologies which capture real world phenomena and replay them in real time with ever-better fidelity. They usually meant allowing the reality of one place to be experienced in another place at the same time. And example of this can be found here; note in particular that the precursor to the phonograph record was an item which was designed to create pictures of sound waves--a phonautogram. The designer--back in the day they were called "inventors"-- wanted a photograph of the way a symphony sounds, something that could be framed art.

It took other thinkers before it was realized that the technology for capturing a picture of sound waves could be used to store and transmit them via a phonograph and a record. This is a new solution set, and it makes up Era II.

In Era II, technologies store what is captured, dislodging their place in real time for playing in a later date. When I and II are combined we get a Tivo. And with a Tivo attached to HD TV and Surround Sound, why, we almost "feel like we're actually there..." And attached to the Internet (a version of Transmit), we can "be there" with countless others, commenting on the play.

Era III is when we have so much music, videos and emails that we need a new technology to find a specific song, scene in a movie or important email.

Era IV, is when Amazon.com gives me a book choice I might want--or iTunes DJ creates a mix of songs I might really like. These digital discoverers take a mountain of information and mine it; they hope that our past choices infer something about our future choices--and they often do.

Eras I-IV typically capture behavior sequences, even when we choose whole packages, like a book, song, painting, or movie. In Era IV, we can even trace and somewhat predict future behaviors based on past behaviors. But nothing in Eras I-IV gets us more than a few trace suggestions of a "whole person."

In Era V, we try to predict future behaviors not from past behaviors--a sequence of small choices--but from first putting together a jig-saw puzzle of human behaviors, motives and ideas into a (for this moment) solved whole puzzle. In other words, we digitize a personality, a whole mind, an ego (to use a word more common to psychology).

Mr. Chertoff's sentence indicates American intelligence gathering is doing everything it can based on Era IV solutions; yet we're in Era V. So, how do you do come up with the new solutions? It is a complicated problem set, but one which does not have to be left to technologists, even though it will take quite a few people in high tech to get us to the goal. I've already suggested a direction to go in designing a new database, above.

But we must also leave behind the consumerist/behaviorist '50s notion that past behavior equals future behavior; it is consumerist because marketers, business plans and investors all need to believe that they can lock-in behavior--this, in turn, makes them treat us like we can never change (once we've sipped Coca Cola for the first time, for example), or if we do change, it is only based on the narrowest of choices (Coca Cola v. Pepsi), and that we "must" be co-erced into the "other" choice. E.g., the choice of the producer whose product has the most market reach.

When one thinks about it, some models of "industrial psychology" (and most of marketing) want us all to be addicts...what else is brand loyalty, at its base level? Marketers do everything they can to make us think there is only one choice (their product)--and in a nod to reality when there is actual competition--then, that their product is the best choice.

Choice is easier when there are fewer of them. But it is not reflective of actual life, when one can--really--walk out of one's door and leave everything behind. Truly--or at least, at the level of American political theory which harps so much on Freedom--one can leave it all behind. The consumerist cast to the American dream has too often equated Liberty with a market niche, where, with a defaulting mortgage and credit card debt out the wazoo, one cannot leave even the cell phone bill, behind.

Yet when a terrorist walks out his door on the way to a suicide bombing, he believes something that few consumer-idealogues--few 21st century Americans, that is--believe: that he (or she) can change his world--and our world--with one act.

Until we move into a paradigm of intelligence gathering which assumes this for each person, we will be five steps behind each new terrorist act.

We will not get ahead of the curve on terrorism by only tracking humans at the level of their behaviors, a model of predictability which fails the moment someone changes his mind. In my book, The Raft, I proposed an "Embodiment Percentage Rate" to distinguish the ideas in our head which we say we believe from the ideas in our head which we actually act on every day. In this way we can begin to track, in our own lives, how far we have to go before we are truly living our dreams (a software model of this is here)--which is the call for each of us in a country dedicated to "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

A terrorist act is a final behavior, an individual's call for a final judgment on others. Predicting this kind of activity requires a new paradigm--one which captures the whole dynamic of human aspiration. For if we believe in Freedom, we must believe that even a destructive mind can be changed. And if we want to truly have "intelligent information," we'll begin building such technology like our lives depend upon it.

I think our lives do depend on such an effort--but then again, I've been working on this technology, now, for ten years--first as a book, then in software designs. In the end, I, too want to join the consumerist craze and build the "next next thing" just like any other tech entrepreneur. But I don't want to create a piece of software or hardware that narrows an end-user's choices, or ties them to the technology for better (and often worse); I want to create a new kind of technology which enables more life change for more people than even an army of life coaches could ever imagine.

I want to create a psychology software that enables each of you to believe that the choices before you can change your world, and ours--and not by choosing death, or having no choice but being tied to a withering consumerism--but by recovering what it means to Choose Life.

iTunes Rebuild Mysteries (like Cover Flow's "See Thru" Desktop)

2009-12-08T07:03:00.000-08:00

Using Apple's Grab, a screen shot (above) was taken of iTune's Coverflow...which--ironically?--shows the Desktop action (e.g., the use of Grab and the Dock on left side) in each "empty" Album cover "slot"... (Source: Vore, 2009). This Informatics411 entry deals with some of the ways of getting a handle on your iTunes Libraries. There is no Synch Up Heaven, be forewarned!

(Version 2r1 in 1 section; Washington, D.C.) - I've often spent hours rebuilding iTunes whenever re-installing the OS, or doing major disk maintenance. And despite the many ways of backing up, from within iTunes; or using Apple's BackUp--or other methods, iTunes always must be rebuilt from scratch.

I've even downloaded and used (1) Acertant's TuneRanger and (2) Red Chair's Anadpod Copygear--and felt immense relief when Apple announced (3) "Home Sharing": each of these has its disappointments. (1) TuneRanger worked incredibly well when a long-term temping assignment provided me an office cube + PC , and I could put some (but not all) of my iPod's music onto the Dell PC; but it never seems to be able to actually synch my iPod and iTunes on two different Macs (with errors like "Can't read/write to iPod"). (2) Copygear seems almost like working with Terminal, without the advantages of actually working with the command line. You see everything, and moving files from one place to another seems easy. But Synching up, again, fails.

Is it only driving me crazy that the G4 shows 6,369 items and the G3 shows 6,224 songs? With 18.9 days (453.6 hours) and 18.7 days (448.8 hours) of solid music listening available--do I even know what I'm missing (5.1 hours!)? Well, that is precisely what I don't like: that I don't know what I am missing! The iPod shows 5,012 songs (15.2 days (364.8 hours) solid listening--or three lost days! Forget Rose Mary Woods, I've got a 5,328 minute gap! 1,012 songs!

This matters when you've spent a dollar a pop, or digitized vinyl (and sold the vinyl)!

So much for Apple's vaunted "one lost second" rule in user experience design. (In designing the Macintosh, Steve Jobs motivated his designers to create something "insanely great," and graded them on 1 one extra second saved in better user design, across all Apple User's lives. After 25 years of Apple uses, I've got a few years coming in Apple Heaven). Without question, of course, the every day use of iTunes is flawless--though of course, it is leaving behind the pre-Intel Mac users with each new version.

And the newest solution (3) iTune's Home Sharing doesn't do squat--especially as you have to sign-in to Apple's iTunes Store to use it. I've used it successfully once--I thought--then discovered all these multiple copies of the same song on the G3. And today, though both computers had Sharing on in the System Preferences, a dedicated ethernet connection, and Sharing enabled within iTunes Preferences--the G4 said the G3 "wasn't accepting connections"! (WTF!?)

Whatever happened to Steve Jobs announcement that iTunes was moving to DRM-free music? Hasn't happened, and one suspects, that's part of the problem...(although I have to admit using the File/Show Duplicates method works as a manual solution, though it takes hours; if you hold down the Options key while choosing "Show Duplicates" it will show "exact duplicates").

iTunes is like the metaphorical elephant on the hard drive, taking up so much room with its files that one has to work around it--delicately--or loose a lot. Especially if one has downloaded a lot of .mp3s. It is only a "metaphoric" elephant, however, because iTunes, from rebuild to rebuild--and, again, even from back-ups (and in my humble experience)--has never remembered a song's Rating, or its Play Count--or most important of all to the music aficianado--the Equalizer settings (cause Classical does not sound like Rock or Techno!).

Elephants, if I'm remembering correctly, are supposed to be great with memory.

I've lost playlists so many times that over 4 years ago I began Exporting them to text files for the inevitable rebuild (File/Library/Export Playlist).

One of the most disturbing aspects which has shown up in iTunes over the years is the replacement of images of album covers in Cover Flow with a "screen grab" of the Desktop. I've done some quick searches on the 'net for others who experience this, but not found much: so I included a screen grab of Cover Flows' not so stealthy capturing of the Desktop action. I'm posting this just after some kind of "blow out" to my iTunes Library caused me to rebuild it...again. Don't know why these happens, or how: I simply start up iTunes and it says something like it did this time, "iTunes Library unrecognizable" and that it is being moved to a "Previous iTunes Libraries" folder.

I am working on 2 very old Macs, so maybe it's just a processing issue--though there are over 1GB of ram on both computers showing these issues, their processors are embarrassingly slow; and I'm on 10.4.11, so unable to take advantage of the stronger back up features in OS X 10.5's Time Machine, which, in my brief experience with it, seemed to overcome these issues*. Yet, still, somehow in trying to address all the Synch Up issues, I end up with a Cover Flow hole-in-the-wall...

Regardless, iTunes finishes it's absorption of the 6,000 + songs -- a pretty remarkable feat, of course. Yet some album covers never return. I wish I could say there was a "pattern" to which album covers stay in a rebuild and which don't, but in the "new" iTunes Library, albums I digitized from vinyl, bought from iTunes and even borrowed from friends, were all sometimes lost and sometimes found. (And the rebuild this week, on the G3 Powerbook recovered all albums within the Album view; last week, though, on the G4, it lost 75 of those: no pattern.)

Today the "See Thru" happened again with an album cover which, when choosing the Album View icon within iTunes, shows the Album Cover to be downloaded. Yet when one switches to Cover Flow, it is just a Desktop hole...talk about "Hall of Mirror Effects"! People sometimes say "Life imitates Art" and vice versa. This is an example of Computer imitating Owner! (j/k). I've logged out, logged into an administrator and checked permissions, logged in again; restarted, etc. Problem persists. I'm writing this partly in protestation and procrastination: it took four hours to download what started out as 75 missing covers on the G4 iTunes rebuild, and turned into 152 (from Cover Flow)...

My freakiest iTunes experience came about four years ago, after moving from one state to another, and waiting several months to get my G5 out of storage. I went to rebuild iTunes--and it showed one song a close friend had given me as the only tune in the Library, but it filled up the entire list of songs! That was really like a ghost in the machine...and, um, a ghost who really liked Debbie Gibson (I admit that I too have become a fan!).

*OS X 10.5's Time Machine, ironically, could not maintain Apple's iWork and iLife serial numbers, a small pain in the larger scale of things.

--jmv

v2r1 © 2009 John Michael Vore

Re-thinking the Identity Paradigms' tools (IF#6)

2009-03-23T11:30:00.000-07:00

TABLE IT (above)-->Usability methods as they relate to the Informatik Framework, and vice versa (Informatik Framework theory and table by John Vore, 2008).

How does the Informatik Framework map onto traditional Interaction Design’s categories: Application Type, Prototyping and Usability Methods? How does it preserve tools as we move into the Information Paradigm?

Most of Interaction Design’s tools “grew up” in the Identity Paradigm (more), and they were designed to support the human side of “Human-Computer Interaction.” If I’m right about the advance of the Information Paradigm, “post-human” (or post-labeling) could mean more humane technology. Regardless, the old Identity Paradigm tools might need some re-framing if they are going to continue to be of use inside the Information Paradigm. Or conversely, the Informatik Framework might benefit from a mapping onto traditional categories like: Application Type, Prototyping and Usability Method.

The table above shows traditional Interaction Design tools mapped to both projects and process links within the Portfolio and the Informatik Framework. We often aim for being Tool-makers and look for the right tools, so the Informatik Framework list, on this page, begins there: Tool (Application Types, Prototyping); Virtual Reality (Prototyping, Usability Methods); Simulation (Prototyping, Usability Methods); Story (Prototyping, Usability Methods); List ((Prototyping, Usability Methods).

v2r4

Info-rituals = HCI's Tools (IF#5)

2009-03-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

YOUR INFORMATION HABITS = TOOLS TO INTERACTION DESIGNERS (above)-->how you do what you do matters to how we do what we do (Informatik Framework theory, diagram by John Vore (2007)).

The end of the Informatik Framework Tutorial...

Those who have read and studied some of the Constructivist philosophies of the 20th century will have already noticed that I’ve been writing about the construction of knowledge via “info-routines.” To others, it might seem foreign; but not to an Informatik star! (more). In truth, though grounded by Foucault, the perspective developed here relies even more on Ovid.

He was one of the first Western writers to write about paradigm shifts. And he understood the strengths and weakensses of the newest Tool, the written word.

Discovering that one is using a tool even while one is in the midst of, say, a vehement argument about what is right or wrong about the world, is disconcerting, at first. But as I’ve been trying to describe, these tools are the everyday tools of our lives. We’ve “forgotten” that we had to learn to ride this bicycle...

I believe the strength of the Informatik approach comes from the fact that its four routines are precisely what we use, everyday, to organize our lives. We have To-Do lists; we learn from and are entertained by uncountable stories--in ever-increasing media. We can hear stories, read stories, watch stories. What was once stuck in a book has jumped to radio, TV, film and finally, the internet. The same could be said about paintings, which have become photographs, moving pictures, animation. Some put Virtual Realities on this continuum. I think they are something different; though mostly based in visual depiction, the sense of space one experiences when inside a virtual reality makes it a new kind of experience.

The tools available to the Informatik thus arise out of methods already familiar to us. When we make prototypes of our ideas, we organize our sense of what a person needs by all of these methods: we make lists of what people need and want, we interview people to hear their stories; we create “personas” and imagine living in a world with our product, to see how it might work. We experiment with paper versions of our solutions, and Flash versions (example)--and, more recently, Machinima versions (example)--which takes protoyping into the realm of Virtual Reality. From within a world in which our designs exists, we can look out; from outside, we can watch our “virtual” end-users discover things which are wrong before a real person has to.

What we use to find meaning in our lives is also what we use to test and construct products which mirror and enhance what is meaningful to people. Using these methods, which add yet more information to the designers’ world, can be daunting--creating yet more possibilities for confusion (staying on the same page while skipping back and forth between info-routines is a challenge). THUS, juggling realities is another responsibility added to the list for Human-Computer Interaction/designers. Some think Interaction Design means simply making a program more humane, or making programming more widely accessible. While these are incredible goals, there’s plenty of work to go around for both programmers and Interaction designers--and everyone else on the production team, as an idea moves from the white board to prototypes to the people who are waiting for the Next Next Thing.

Into the Tool Shed (or “We Tried Discipline, Now Punish”)
One of my favorite moments at Indiana University came from one of the short-but-packed meetings with Eli Blevis towards the end of my second semester at Indiana University. We were discussing applying some of the ideas in the Reading-Writing-Meaning Triangle. I’d drawn it out on a white board. I was suggesting its use in a broader educational context when Eli added the letter “C” to the center of my R-W-M triangle.

Now this was a teaching heuristic I’d developed, rolled-out and tested with writing students over several years. I felt pretty good about it. It seemed unlikely that it might need any improvement.

So I stared uncomprehendingly at the C in the middle of the triangle. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Clarity,” Professor Blevis answered.

I was bemused and excited. Of course! Students would not only make their way around the triangle to find their starting point in a writing assignment (my initial concept for the methodology), but they would also use it to make their writing better, as well!

Blevis proved, again, what I came to learn quickly at Indiana University: that several good minds looking at the same puzzle--all moving towards a similar goal--will inevitably create a better product than one mind working in isolation. This is the strength of teams, the value which different experience and perspectives bring to bear on a project.

So it wasn’t until a year after first sketching out a full version of these information rituals that I recalled Professor Blevis’ insight. These rituals I’ve outlined in the last few pages are not meant to keep you circling the problem; they aim to improve the design. They mean to keep an interaction design team juggling the “right” things as they zero in on a design solution: that tool which makes life somehow fantastically better.

Keep in mind this notion about tools: they interpose themselves between an end-user and a desired outcome. But the best tools don’t get in the way, i.e., one should not have to walk outside of one’s creative process in order to use them. The best tools allow the creative person to achieve the desired result in a better way than was known before.

It’s a tall order--a difficult task--and to come full circle in these [ Informatik Framework ] pages, exactly the challenge an Informatik loves.

v4r0

"People-centered" is NOT a formula (IF#4)

2009-03-23T11:20:00.000-07:00

The discussion below steps back and considers why and where Human-Computer Interaction/design matters. No formula will hold, for long, in accurately capturing human experience, where the quantitative is always being made obsolete by the qualitative. A formula – and even a phrase like “people-centered” – can be followed 100%, and still leave people behind.

People-centered design concepts sometimes seem obvious, especially when they are contrasted with “technology-centered” design. Yet, this seems weird when one pushes on the latter: machines were invented to ease the burdens of people and beasts of burden, so how did their design end up opposed to people? Let us side-step the economic issue of jobs and for our purposes, here, say that “techno-centric” design is when any technology-related requirement runs-over the person who waits for our new product. For example:

1. --> price-gouging (this is an acknowledgment that almost all of the time we are designing market-destined products)
2. --> delivering products with incomplete testing/debugging (this is more complicated than it sounds)
3. --> designs which count on users being invested and thus economically unwilling to walk away, enabling the above
4. --> a design so system-dependent that one cannot walk away if one wanted to (web-based applications begin to address this)
5. --> design decisions which get high-jacked by poor planning (again, more complicated than it sounds)
6. --> designs which seek to exploit even a great new technology for inhumane purposes (the “Evil” is usually less pronounced than “Oh, the inhumanity!”; yet another issue more complicated than it sounds at first).

Lately the notion of sustainability asks the Informatik to think about the resources our products use (in both their production and use cycles), and where they go when they die. (A spicey exchange on design and sustainability can be found here ).

These considerations explain why a need arose for Human-Computer Interaction/design within Informatics--and why, in retrospect, the values described in the last few pages need an anchor in our technological productions. It isn’t obviously evil that one finds more bugs than anticipated, yet the launch date looms. It isn’t obviously evil that complex problems kill products and companies, human-centered or not.

One might ask, why does HCI/d--and my Informatik--insure more humane products? Jeremy Bentham’s “model prison”--psychologically terrorizing from our perspective--was an advance in the 1700s (above, from Foucault). A humanist and an architect, Bentham approximated these methods--the humanity in the design is up for interpretation: there was always the guillotine, considered more humane than hanging (they may have a point!).

No creative enterprise has guarantees, but creative people have track records like everybody else. “Character is cumulative,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like a person, a company lives in time. So one can look to see where things end up most of the time, over time (given we’re in my Portfolio, I should direct you to my Projects! ).

But let me try to be more reassuring. In design, do we remember our roots? Easing the burden of human life does not mean ignoring its reality, or escaping forever from the puzzles and predicaments found therein, but embracing them so as to transcend what is front of us, today, in order to better face what will be, tomorrow--especially when that tomorrow includes a product we created.

No method, no value and no person will, for long, be successful without direct engagement with Life as it rushes at and around us, seemingly like a million simultaneous moments. The best methods, values and people, while designing interactions, parse what is needed from the known, while keeping an eye on left field for the unknown.

An Interaction designer and an Informatik are conductors before this symphony; a choreographer back-stage on opening night; and the movie director who goes to theaters in as many neighborhoods as possible to see if the attempt hit home (I stole this from Tarantino, interviewed by Tavis Smiley).

v2r6

Information rituals = handles on reality (IF #3)

2009-03-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

Final definitions: four types of “information-gathering rituals”; includes examples!

An Informatik (e.g., “information designer” or “interaction designer” ) works with representations of reality, e.g. the above painting: it represents the painter’s vision (one reality) and what we are able to see in it (another reality). There are four increasingly complex ways of representing things, four ways of getting a handle on a reality with information. These information- handlers are: the List, the Story, the Simulation and the Virtual Reality.

Each of these four handles has its own organizational principles--how information is supposed to show up in it. That means that four different routines are used to harvest information from a given reality. For example, what it takes to make up a List may be very different than what it takes to make up a Story, to Simulate an event or even to create a Virtual Reality. Knowing what you’re supposed to end up with--List, Story, etc.--determines how you gather information. Routines route information. The structure you are trying to “fill” determines how and what you will look for to fill it, to complete the List, or fill out the Story (scroll to *, below, for how this relates to McLuhan).

Each routine adds and subtracts from reality: the representational routine, itself, leaves some things out (none is omniscient), focusing our attention uniquely on itself. And by focusing our attention on itself, it also invites us to narrow our own sense of reality, temporarily. Think of how you feel at the end of an intense movie: as you walk out of the theatre, you find yourself jarred by re-entry into a larger reality.

Each routine also gives a slightly different take on the meaning of what it describes. This happens by virtue of its ability to narrow our focus. So each routine can leave us with a slightly different take on the meaning of the whole it represents, one which may even collide with a meaning grasped when the reality is represented differently, via another routine. Thus, each routine imparts different meanings. It is because of the ways in which these routines situate meaning that I also think of them as rituals. So the List, the Story, the Simulation and the Virtual Reality are information rituals.

Let’s go back to the painting, above. In the reproduction of Velasquez (taken from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things), one could describe Las Meninas by Listing the figures or the paintings-in-the-painting; one could tell a Story about how they came together in Velasquez’ mind; one could go “deeper” by reproducing the painting, Simulating it. Finally, one could produce a Virtual Reality in which one goes into Velasquez’ room, and even talks to the figures while you watch him paint his way out of a corner (the painter will refuse your questions and be irritated by your interruptions, no doubt).

Foucault, a writer in the European mold, lingers over Las Meninas for thirteen pages.

This Portfolio is designed around the four ‘info-rituals’: List, Story, Simulation, Virtual Reality. Now here’s a quiz: is the painting, itself, with its collection of people and other paintings: a List? a Simulation? With the tilting edge of a large canvas leaning on its left edge, aren’t we already inside of it? Is it just an older Virtual Reality, then?

These questions underscore the skill of a great artist, for Velasquez’ brilliance, it seems, has given us a painting that will allow us to respond to it with whatever level of complexity we care to bring to it. The point of the Quiz: the Informatik categories are meant as handles, tools, not air-tight boxes. Well, “a box” if it’s an over-used, cardboard moving box wrapped in tape--but not the box of a stone coffin. Our misunderstandings about scientistic methods too often have us requiring them to be super-human, which is kind of ridiculous, since we’ve made them in the first place.

By the way, I assume a natural continuity between the public arts of writing, book designing and interaction design: A word can be seen as a folder of meaning; none are alone, despite the spaces on either side of them. They are word museums–and their histories get zipped and sequenced when one writes; unzipped when someone reads. Indeed, when one thinks about it, the words which last have the same qualities that Velasquez’ painting has: all the information rituals can show up in just one of them (more).

As for books: where one directs one’s attention on a page, how one finds one’s way through a book, and how one looks up things in an Table of Contents or Index are merely older information rituals; they offer much to the digital ones we create. Why? Though there are many reasons, perhaps one suffices: with few changes in 2,000 years, they still work. Books remain the most successful way in which all four information rituals work together.

*McLuhan says, “The medium is the message.” I say the route (i.e., medium) structures the message, over-determining the information––that’s all. In the 21st century, we have the ability to absorb multi-media information streams. We do not assume that disliking a message means we should kill the messenger, a reaction which betrays its dependence on a limited means of communication which no longer has to be so limited. Today, we don’t even need to make any judgement until we’ve heard several versions of “the message” from several kinds of media. The “message” ends up being served-up cafeteria-style, a little of this, a little of that. Which takes us to what may be the “root” of my issues with Marshall: “You say ‘to-may-toe,’ I say ‘to-mah-toe’.”

(v4r4)

The information ritual defines the human experience (IF#2)

2009-03-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

“Sit up in your chair! Don’t slouch!” (above)-->Your first grade teacher was practicing a centuries old tradition...it wasn’t very User-centered, was it? Don’t let it get you down; times have changed, and you can still be a star! (Illustration taken from Foucault).

To continue with defining my terms, this page deepens the discussion about “information rituals” in the context of the Informatik’s human-centered values.

An Interaction Designer (or, “informatik”) creates rituals--routines for people, their machines, and their information. A very old example of this, above, demands that humans become like a machine in order to write. The illustration above, scanned and adapted from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, shows the correct posture for sitting at a desk, and the correct way to hold a pen--I mean, a quill--in the 17th century.

No limp wrists! That is, discipline equaled control of one’s body (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 170).

An Informatik anticipates what people need; lives with them where a need exists (its context); interprets need: what comes before it, after it, what constructs it. And an Informatik experiments with solutions which meaningfully meet those needs.

An Informatik creates personal rituals with a dynamic mix of confidence and humility. Confidence comes from experience, familiarity with what it takes to create for others; it allows one to take the risks necessary to escape one’s own contexts, to fully put oneself in others’ shoes.

Humility comes from making mistakes–and learning from them in a way that ensures proper risk-taking continues.

Even success requires humility. In success, an Informatik becomes invisible; our new rituals should gently guide a human being, then disappear...

Designing digital rituals involves the way things look, as well as how things will look from inside our routines. This two-way vision affects the way people follow our proposed steps: have we created a routine which people can follow? One they would follow even in the face of alternatives? A routine they can leave at will?

Have we created a ritual that makes people more free? Or have we built something which meets a need at the price of a numbing, mechanical dependency? (I have one question: do you like to write?)

An Informatik loves these human puzzles.

To solve human puzzles, one has human ways of grabbing, holding and representing life. I see four basic methods, each a Tool in of itself: the List, the Story, the Simulation and the Virtual Reality cross back and forth between everyday life and an Interaction designer’s life. Each of them is both a way of gathering information and a way of producing information: each is an information ritual and an information tool.

The Product Briefs pages in the larger Portfolio describe completed work which falls under each of the following rituals:

Ritual 1: The List
An everyday ordering of things involving (a) word-based sequencing, (b) numeric priorities --and which sometimes (c) attempts an efficient matching of real-world routes to destinations (i.e., “OK, I’m going to be on-campus; that’s by the cleaners”). Examples: surveys, Tables of Content, Pull-down menus, hand-written To Do lists–this page...or: del.icio.us ).

Ritual 2: The Story
A narrative description of what shows up in a life or in lives, whether in non-fiction or fiction, and according to the prescriptions of mysticism, scientific realism or poetics, etc. From a paragraph-length persona, or illustration--or even diagram of a puzzling design space--to peer-reviewed journal articles, short-stories, novels.

Ritual 3: The Simulation
A mimicry–or mirroring–of real-world sequences within a narrow context or limited contexts; from a prototype to a map; from traditional scientific experiment to stage-plays and films; from ethnographies and algorithms to micro-assays.

Ritual 4: The Virtual Reality
A creation of possible-world sequences within or across as many contexts permitted by existing technologies. Examples: Machinima prototypes, The Sims, Second Life–and in the past, Freudian psychology; a given language...

Ritual 5: The Tool
In Rituals 1 thru 4, we gather experience, information and insight. In the end, we practice an old craft, toolmaking, and build something that users need and may not even know they want...

v3r0

Defining the fullest possible user experiences (IF #1)

2009-03-23T11:05:00.000-07:00

The Long and Winding Road? (above) Ux and user-centered design don't have to map onto your business like this. In experienced hands, they won't (Adobe Illustrator illustration by John Vore, 2006).

Introducing the Informatik Framework, a creative, productive tool-set for interaction designers.

When it comes to creating successful User Experiences, we must ground our interaction design in the everyday ways people understand their lives: through our lists, plans, and stories–our shared and individual perspectives. These routines organize our information, so I call them “information routines.”

They also imbue our lives with meaning: though we often need more time to check-off our To Do lists, these are the things that matter, one way or another. Thus these information routines have the power to inform our lives with value. This is why I call them rituals. With their power to embody meaning, rituals can transform lives.

When working for others, incorporating people-centered design and following the methods of usability testing do not mean turning a production cycle upside-down--as the picture, above, tries to indicate. They mean finding a way to the right information. The following pages of this Informatik Framework Tutorial demonstrate an approach which starts with the information gathering routines: List, Story, Simulation, Virtual Reality. And then this Tutorial shows how these routines can be the very research tools we use in order to create digital experiences. The point: if you gather information like people do, you can produce information like people want. You can create high tech tools which are people-friendly and desirable.

In the hands of an experienced designer, putting People First means working with end-users not to find some "lowest common denominator" of user experience, but maximizing each user's unique experience. It means finding the Fullest Possible Experience. This has been reflected in work on Usability Testing, where I pioneered a new approach. Called "Embracing The User," it suggests that we divorce Usability from the century-long struggle of social sciences (e.g., to be more scientistic). Usability Testing should be allowed to stand on its own, freed up to be a radical transformer of human experience. I've argued that we should "cozy up" to the user during iterative processes, introducing her to the design problems as we show them our design solutions, making them "co-conspirators" in better products. “Objectivity” gives way to the radical subjectivity inherent in the relationship between our digital creations and their users.

The "Fullest Possible Experience" insight first came to light in a project on Universal Accessibility. As we worked to create a mobile e-learning device, our design team realized that the goals were not some generic user experience that didn't exclude anyone – a top-down approach to Universal Access. The better approach was to build-up user experiences from unique users, so that each has the Fullest Possible Experience. This entailed breaking down the “user” into her sensory experiences of an event, and working with Sensory Hierarchies to maximize that experience (more).

Finally, my work in Interaction Design and this Informatik Framework Tutorial have been characterized by three other notions: (a) Representative Design, regarding the relationship between end-users and designers; (b) Direct Design, regarding cutting-edge hardware-based capabilities which are re-making interface design; and (c) The Shift to the Information Paradigm, regarding the theoretical approach to solving interaction design problems.

Representative Design remembers 18th-century political theory, which first tried to handle the tension between end-users and designers, although it sounds like citizens and representatives. While some still debate whether 'democracy' should always be 'first,' design benefits when an Interaction Designer puts herself into the shoes of end-users. In political theory, a representative works for citizens, tempering citizen requests with a perspective rooted in the district but with an eye on wider goals. Thus, interaction designers represent the end-user as fully as possible in our own minds, and in our iterative processes (more), without being blinded; this recognizes that digital user experiences are created with ends whose steps may never be known to the end-user.

Direct Design means by-passing the social constructs by which knowledge is grabbed, handled and passed on to give end-users direct access to experiences. Where one can immerse another in one's experience, why tell a story? why create a virtual reality? Why simulate it, when you can actually experience it? (more)

In the Information Paradigm which is moving more and more into place in Western societies, the medium is no longer the message. When the Identity Paradigm reigned, one had to fashion data into an information package which could reach a person. From the 18th to the 20th centuries, a Who-label governed. Who one was determined What one could (or might be allowed to) know; the notion of being someone overshadowed actual being. Now, in the Information Paradigm, a person can begin to be defined more by her data than her identity-based label (the shift to a new paradigm is one of central subjects at Informatics411, The Blog).

In the Information Paradigm, data needs no intermediary representation before it can be served up; it only needs protocols and hardware sensors which connect them. In the Information Paradigm, Information is “god,” not Identity; and there is nothing more personal than near-simultaneously shared experience: aural, visual and kinesthetic “data.” I put the word “data” in quotes, because it is an old-paradigm way of referring to sensory information which demotes it, or suggests it is pre-packaged, somehow “not-quite” truly information: uncooked–or awaiting “author-ity.”

In the Information Paradigm, data doesn’t wait to become ordained, some person’s packaged info; it stands on its own, waiting to be shared. My aural, visual and kinesthetic information streams look for the technology which connects directly to your aural, visual and kinesthetic streams. We usually don’t even know Who makes up “my” stream or “your” stream; that Who rarely matters anymore is the death-rattle of the Identity Paradigm.

v5r4

Health management, teaching of writing, e-publishing

2009-03-23T06:59:00.001-07:00

FIRETRAP @ FIVE+ (above)-->One of my favorite www.firetrap.com pages: it started out with elements designed in Photoshop and Illustrator, moved to Fireworks, which was then typically tweaked in GoLive, before being published to the web (web page & elements by John Vore, 2002; the firetrap.com domain was sold in 2004) More recently I've explored iWeb...

SUMMARY
With the dangers and promise of interaction design now before use (after reading [ Vision ]), we move back to experience, though at a higher resolution: 3 years cross-trained in Health Management, 12 years running his own business utilizing cutting-edge publishing techniques (and adding to them with an e-book software patent attempt), 20 years of teaching writing off and on, and most recently, a new way to teach writing based on the latest in cognitive neuroscience. Finally, 2 years in graduate school for Interaction Design. These add up to real world experience across many domains, all of which had product and project’s whose success demanded understanding stake-holders and end-users, and reaching a goal, together.

Health Management, Teaching, Product Management
During a major transition for the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation, as it launched its first satellite office, John Vore helped in the management of its flagship multi-specialty medical practice in Chicago, Illinois (USA) during the early 1990s.

Cross-trained in every non-medical role (medical reception, medical records, practice management) Vore stepped in where needed, along with assisting the Practice Manager in her development of single and multi-year budgets. (This is where he fell in love with Excel and spreadsheets, even using them as a graphic design tool to map the HVAC system of the office.)

John Vore also managed the computers, networks, phone and the physical plant. For a very brief period he filled-in as acting Manager, and helped to negotiate contracts with some vendors. He also participated in early discussions within NMFF about moving to a paperless medical office.

These experiences working with incredible Printers Row medical practitioners gave Vore the confidence to launch an independent micro-publishing company in Chicago, Illinois (USA) in 1996, his third business start-up in 10 years.

Firetrap has, since its inception, been the “holding company” for different projects, on-going even as Vore worked for others and on other products/projects. Acting as Creative Director/Publisher of Firetrap, Inc., Vore:
•participated in publishing conferences and published 18 paperback and e-book editions;
•created a production model which was virtually self-sustaining, utilizing cutting-edge publishing technologies to keep costs down;
•formed a strategy of incorporating on-line publishing of free texts, accompanied by off-line “keepsake” limited-number collections;
•acted as graphic designer, editor and lay-out designer for all Firetrap media, including the Firetrap website;
•to broaden market reach and expand the number of Firetrap writers, created an eJournal, publishing leading experts and writers;
•worked with intellectual property lawyers to contract with authors and artists, and to trademark the Firetrap name and logo;
•worked with patent lawyers on a multi-year effort to gain protection for Personal Knowledge Index e-book software (7 years before Kindle this was completed with my Chicago intellectual property lawyers);
•led the Firetrap Branding effort (in this instance “led”=just barely, and with the help of an extraordinary Chicago designer/brander);
•sold the www.firetrap.com domain to a UK enterprise in late 2004 for a five-figure sum;
•began moving the company towards software design in 2002, an effort culminating in my return to graduate school in 2005.

While teaching introduction to college-level writing and a course in literature at Wilkes University (2004-2005), John Vore created a new approach to teaching literature, seeing it as an earlier method of information exchange; and Vore continued the development of the Reading-Writing-Meaning Triangle, a new approach to the teaching of writing, begun in Indianapolis in 2003, and based on the cognitive neuroscience research which was part of his e-book software design.

While in Indiana University’s School of Informatics (Bloomington, Indiana USA; 2005-2007), John Vore: worked with student teams and faculty on innovative design solutions, gaining a reputation as a “idea machine” from students and considered “one of the best students” from faculty (Editor’s note: while I find this flattering, it is also somewhat embarrassing to trumpet it; but humility does not win one a job, does it?). His work gained some international notice, or at least enough to gain Vore a scholarship-spot in the Convivio Summer School (Edinburgh, 2006). In his final year of graduate school, Vore developed a conceptual tool for understanding Informatics, the [ Informatik Framework ], here.

Work philosophy: “Every collaborative effort I’ve been involved in has been a continuous series of negotiations between expectations/goals/requirements, people and resources. User-centered design makes the human-centered values of other fields first in Informatics, as well.”

v11r6

Vision: Representative Design and Direct Action Design

2009-03-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

PARADIGM-SKIPPING BACK TO OVID (above)-->The notion of the “individual” as it arises via an intllectual history, designed in CS3 Illustrator, and created for an introduction to college writing class using Garry Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg for the text. The u, on the right, shows the entry-level position of the student writer, each young writer’s invitation: the point where she has the chance to jump into the conversation. The idea of "Representative Design," discussed below, comes from Vore's study of American history (Illustration by John Vore, 2005).

SUMMARY
Strong parallels exist between interaction design and writing. Interaction design, like writing, represents reality while at the same time trying to get closer to it. This handler+handling duality has two dangers: foremost, a hall-of-mirrors effect, where one gets stuck in a representation, debating a reflection of a representation, rather than assessing the closeness (usefulness) to reality. And secondly, methods of representation bias end-users towards their present handles (paradigms): (a) it is very difficult to escape one’s paradigms of thought: one must leave language, find insight, then return to words, bridging to insight via metaphor and analogy (b) designing new interactions involves always using last-paradigm (last generation) tools. Along with these parallels, there is cross-over: Interaction design also uses writings’ tools to explain itself, and more specifically, interaction design takes real world examples (the Office environment) and makes them metaphors. These metaphors then become OS realities (an on-screen Desktop)--a prime opportunity for hall of mirror effects to arise. Meanwhile, in the real world, life is more complex than either language or interaction; Direct Action Design is a endless loop call to redesign interactions yet, again--even closer to an end-user’s actual life.

Direct Action Design
Trained first as a non-fiction writer (M.A., University of Notre Dame), my work has spanned speechwriting, copy-writing (print, video, radio), busiiness proposals (3 start-ups), and books (as author, editor, and publisher). I’ve also taught writing at the University level off and on since 1987.

A pre-GUI way of representing information, the narrative form hands off meaning, sentence by sentence, often building to a new plateau of understanding.

I’ve more recently left this behind to build hardware and software which depends on a deconstruction of the cognitive neurology of language, dissecting the brain’s construction of meaning and human use of words in aural, visual and kinesthetic contexts (more).

One can think of language, itself, like a workspace which one imagines must exist in order to "get things done"--but it may be unnecessary. Example: Sometimes we think we need to say it, but then realize showing it is better. We say, "Here: watch me do it." Language augments the experience, but it wasn't necessary. In fact, it got in the way.

We have had these kinds of shifts in technology. First personal computers, then DOS, then windows, desktops and pull-down menus. Yet Apple's iPod Touch and iPhone have now made the desktop unnecessary, replacing it with one-step action spaces and cover flow. This suggests a different kind of future...

Most of life happens outside language and must be translated in and out of it, to be carried across space and time, to other people.

The future designed interaction will be be less a matter of translating a machine's power into some recognized representation--a desktop, or language--and more about how we can augment and use the raw information of life, to share our direct experiences.

Example: instead of thinking that you need a cell phone to talk to your friends--some device interposed between your talk and theirs--imagine 24-7 connection through hardware and software built into your clothing. Their voices are simply there, next to you. Again, using Apple as a reference: “Where’s the device?”

Or imagine a hand-held you find in the waiting room of your doctor's office which allows you to create your medical record directly by marking up a picture of a person and the ability to tap “pain" buttons to show what's bothering you. That way you’re not repeating yourself five times, having to use language to push your symptoms into a box (such devices may enable more accurate symptom capture). More radically, imagine the doctor’s office in your iPod (+more than Touch).

Lose the "inter" in inter-action; you end up with action, direct. Machines designed less for the in-between space of representation, and more for the full spectrum of information used by humans.

The teams attractive to me have already begun this work. I bring with me an ability to see in the dark, and talk about it--and perhaps even describe why others will like the experience, as well. As someone who "grew up" in a model of creativity which insists on write-rewrite-write again, then published in an environment allowing for successive iterations of book covers, interior lay-outs and websites--and who finally came to use these same brain tools on e-book software and psychology software designs, I'm ready.

v12r2

End-User Advocacy

2009-03-23T06:30:00.000-07:00

Cognitive Thinking Isn’t What it Used to Be (above)-->Slide from an Apple Keynote-designed presentation about harnessing the exciting research going on across multiple disciplines, all of which are radically reshaping our understanding of our brains and how we learn; that same research is also radicalizing the definition of human interaction. (Illustration by John Vore, 2006.)

SUMMARY
In work domains outside of high technology, “user first” notions have been the rule in this person’s working life: in activism, the citizen comes first; in advertising, marketing and product creation, the consumer comes first. In health management, the patient comes first, in writing, the reader comes first, etc. Next follows an overview of this Portfolio. With 20 years of product management across advertising & marketing, 20 years of teaching writing, 15 years of professional writing, 12 years of small business ownership (publishing), a 5 year ebook software patent attempt, 5 more years developing psychology software and 2 years of graduate school training specifically in Human-Computer Interaction design, this person is well-positioned to be an anchor of creative & practical experience in usability, user experience and interaction design.

Patients, Readers, Consumers, End-Users & Students
On these pages, you will find an overview of products, recent projects and their related research developments. They range from the profound to the silly,and reach across advertising & marketing, non-fiction writing, web & graphic design, weekly newspaper and book publishing, ebooks, interaction design, usability theory and user experience.

Since 2002, work has become intensely focused on interaction design. Most products have been created within the context of small business: building products that will (and do) live in the real world. All the projects in this Portfolio are anchored by what interaction designers call “the end user”: in political action, this is the citizen; in advertising, product development and sales, this is the consumer; in health management, this is the patient; in writing, this is the reader; in teaching, this is the student.

In each context, what others need is a very real question, one that needs to be asked repeatedly. Listening to the answers offer the opportunity for grounded, practical solutions. The best practices within the field of Informatics relating to User Experience and Usability testing are now in my professional took kit.

A quasi-formal methodology for understanding Usability Testing and User Experience, the [ Informatik Framework ], starts here. It categorizes the ways in which people gather and represent information in our everyday lives, thus making these “information rituals” good handles for thinking about products and testing in Informatics. A table which relates this Framework to traditional Usability methods, Prototyping strategies and Applications--and also links to examples of actual products and processes in this Portfolio, is found here ([ TRADE TOOLS ] ), above).

By clicking No. 1 ], to the right, you can read about some of the brilliant and creative people I have been lucky to have as teachers--from the worlds of scientific research, music, government, literature and high technology.

Because of a professional life which has focused often on finding the locus of change, either in an institution or a community--whether with stakeholders or end-users-- Direct Action Design has become the theme for this on-line Portfolio (see [ Vision ]).

Please get in touch with me with any questions, comments or other thoughts. You can reach me via informatics411 [where] gmail.

Thanks for taking a look!

v11r7

About John Vore: Expert Areas

2009-03-23T06:11:00.000-07:00

Deconstruction Junctions (above)-->Using Adobe's Creative Suite 3 to visualize some of the calculations used by a brain in moving from sensory experience to language (Illustration by John Vore, 2005). These investigations into cutting-edge cognitive neuroscience and mapping them onto actual brain functions and language have given John Vore a unique perspective on Human-Computer Interaction Design.

SUMMARY
We pull back to the big picture and describe 5 expert areas, all domain-independent: 1. The Word (speechwriting to copywriting to author to editor/publisher to teacher); 2. User Experience Design (2 back-to-back five year projects: e-book, psych software); 3. Semantic Information Gathering (new approaches to gathering human information); 4. Social and Cultural Meta-Analyses (understanding what makes us different in order to find what allows us to work together); 5. *The Asterisk (the corner cases are almost more familiar than the everday to someone who tests new ideas 24-7, on everyone he meets).

THE WORD
As an award-winning writer and a University-level writing instructor for over 20 years John Vore has, everyday, utilized the primary human intellectual tool: the word. He’s written:
1. •speeches for a Midwest governor;
2. •numerous articles for independent weeklies;
3. •collaborated with industry professionals to create multi-media advertising & marketing copy for agency clients;
4. •edited, designed and published 18 works;
5. •and written five books.
Vore has taught writing at the University level since 1987, where he most recently created a new approach, The Reading-Writing-Meaning Triangle (2003). This heuristic aims at familiarizing students with their own Word Server, a notion developed after extensive reading in and reflections on the latest cognitive neuroscience research.

USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Writing anything implies a reader. Publishing anything implies stake-holders. In moving from the art of writing to creating e-book software and then designing a psychology application, Vore has thought about stake-holders and end-users in a variety of contexts and situations. Interactive design matches and extends his life-long professional experience; and testing the quality of user experience in a human-computer interaction seems as natural to him as knowing whether or not--and how well--a writer knows her audience.

SEMANTIC INFORMATION GATHERING
An emerging interaction designer, Vore developed a new approach to capturing psychological information from end-users which reaches behind their use of words. This cutting-edge methodology is of a piece with semantic information theory, one of the newest areas of interest within the field of Informatics. Vore’s willingness to get outside of language–a counter-intuitive approach for a life-long writer–has led to some of the more interesting projects in his School of Informatics classes (see, for example, Park Optimizer).

SOCIAL & CULTURAL META-ANALYSES
Vore believes our current age is best understood as being an “inter-paradigm,” meaning no common paradigm dominates human understanding (he writes about the inter-paradigm in his blogs: Ideas Without Ideology (since 2002) and Informatics411 (since 2005)). The inter-paradigm encompasses cultures, countries and scientific, as well as, technical enterprises.

This has profound implications for Human-Computer Interaction/Design, because conceptions of what is human govern the left side of the interaction and they by definition radically determine what is on the right side. During the inter-paradigm, defining the human means answering dozens of categories of questions, not just a questionnaire. It means reaching across ideologies, orthodoxies...and even the over-hyped assumptions sometimes found behind the next next thing.

And it means not getting trapped in microscopic looks at narrow behaviors or over-worked, pscyhologistic profiles. In short, it means not losing sight of human capacity even as the intellectual foundations of those limitless abilities shift underneath and around us.

Knowing where each member of a team comes from–in terms of her beliefs, culture and self-understanding–provides key insights which contribute to reaching end-goals; living successfully in the inter-paradigm means knowing how to match the goals of stake-holders to the talents of designers and programmers–all the while, co-creating with end-users.

*THE ASTERISK
John Vore doesn’t believe in averages or regular when it comes to users: he thinks everyone pushes their hardware and software to the limits, especially on deadline--or when involved in the heat of our games.

To take this notion a step further: Vore understand the corner cases, the far-flung exceptions, the asterisks. He has explored many of these “roles” in the hopes of better understanding himself, the world, and those around him. From his first book--which analyzed the roles, structures and power dynamics of identity-formation in the Midwest--to his latest ideas about personal psychology software, John Vore has been--and is-- a game-changer.

This isn’t just a business phrase, to him: it’s about real peoples’ lives and giving them tools to enable the changes they desire.

v11r3

Foucault's Failed Escape from the Planet of Las Meninas

2009-01-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

With Foucault on my mind as I continue to "process" reading The Order of Things, I was quite startled to find on TV recently a crazy scene in the 70s flim: Escape from The Planet of the Apes. In that scene, weighty philosophical issues arise about time travel, physics, the observer and the observed. My Foucault mirror got bumped hard when suddenly the film's Dr. Hasslein turned to a painting to explain the mind-boggling realities which confront ape and womankind...

"Just like Foucault and Las Meninas!" I thought. Well, maybe....

The "coincidence" raises the irreverent and intriguing question: did Pierre Boulle, the popular French author whose book The Planet of the Apes became a series of movies, find inspiration in Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, whose The Order of Things was published in 1966 - in between Boulle's book and the American-made films? Finding the answer is meant more as a light-hearted commentary, than literary history.

A YouTube clip above shows the actual scene where Dr. Hasslein utters the magic "roll clip" in order to explain how apes Cornelius, Zira and Dr. Milo might have time traveled from 3355 to 1971. He describes a theory of "infinite regression." 'Tis reproduced below (if it seems long, scroll to where the text has been emboldened, for the point):

                        BONDS
          Dr. Hasslein, when you asked the
          Male Ape where he came from, he
          answered: 'From your future'.
          Do you believe that?

                       HASSLEIN
          Absolutely. It is the only
          explanation.

                       BONDS
          But the-explanation itself needs
          explaining. Doctor, you've written
          learned dissertations on the Nature
          of Time. Could you explain, in
          terms that will be understood by
          less knowledgeable viewers, how a
          person or persons could travel from
          Time Future to Time Past -- or,
          indeed, vice versa?

                       HASSLEIN
          Time can only fully be understood
          by an observer with the godlike gift
          of infinite regression.

                       BONDS
                 (wincing)
          Could you please explain infinite
          regression?

48    INT. CONTROL ROOM

                       DIRECTOR
                 (to Technician)
          Roll the film.

CUT TO:

49    TIGHT SHOT - A LANDSCAPE PAINTING

We shall later see that it is only the central part of
a much larger painting, as we PULL BACK (when
indicated), during:

                       HASSLEIN'S VOICE
                 (O. S.)
          Here is the painting of a landscape.
          But the artist who painted it says,
          - Something is missing. What is it?
          It is I myself who was a part of the
          landscape I painted.' So he mentally
          takes a step backward -- or
          'regresses' -- and paints...
                 (PULL BACK)
          ...a picture of the artist painting
          a picture of the landscape. And
          still something is missing. And that
          something is still his real self
          painting the second picture. So he
          'regresses' further and paints a
          third...
                 (PULL BACX)
          ...a picture of the artlst painting a
          picture of the artist painting the
          landscape. And because something is
          still mlssing, he paints a fourth and
          fifth picture...
                 (BIG, SLOW, PULL BACK)
          ...until he has painted a picture of
          the artist painting a picture of the
          artist painting a picture of the
          artist painting a picture of the
          artist painting the landscape.

CUT BACK TO:

50    MASTER SCENE

                       BONDS
                 (blinking)
          It's enough to drive you mad.

                       HASSLEIN
                 (very seriously)
          Yes.

                       BONDS
          So infinite regression is--

                       HASSLEIN
          --The moment when our artist,
           having regressed to the point of
           infinity, himself becomes a part
           of the picture he has painted and
           is both the Observer and the observed.

Even Bonds has begun to sweat.

                       BONDS
          What, in that peculiar condition,
          would he observe if he were observing
          Time?

                       HASSLEIN
          He would perceive that Time is like
          a freeway with an infinite number of
          'lanes' -- all leading from the past
          into the future. But not into the
          same future. A driver in Lane 'A'
          may crash, while a driver in Lane 'B'
          survives. It follows that a driver,
          by changing lanes, can change his
          future.

(bold formatting added; Clint, 2007-01-25)

Now, this craziness - in the part about the "observer and the observed" - matches the observations (sorry) by many, including Foucault, about the complexity of Velazquez's Las Meninas, and the many ways in which elements and tensions inside the painting extend outside of it: "The royal couple appear to be placed outside the picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer, although some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting Velázquez is shown working on" (Wikipedia.org).

Foucault's blessed commentators, Dreyfus and Rabinow, explain "infinite regression" as seen in Las Meninas by Foucault:
"...man [sic] emerges not merely as both subject and object of knowledge [in the Foucualt's Modern episteme, what I've called the Identity Paradigm], but even more paradoxically, as organizer of the spectacle in which he appears. The unthought of Las Meninas had reserved a place for him. As Foucault puts it in placing man in the empty space front and center in Velazquez's painting..." (Dreyfus, p. 29).

Foucault, himself, writes:
"...man [sic] appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows; enslaved sovereign, observed spectator, he appears in the place belonging to the king, which was assigned to him in advance by Las Meninas, but from which his real presence has for so long been excluded. As if, in that vacant space towards which Velazquez's whole painting was directed but which it was nevertheless reflecting only in the chance presence of a mirror, as though by stealth, all the figures whose alternation, reciprocal exclusion, interweaving, and fluttering one imagined (the model, the painter, the king, the spectator) suddenly stopped their imperceptible dance, immobilized into one substantial figure, and demanded that the entire space of the representation should at last be related to one corporeal gaze..." (Foucault, p. 312)

While the above illustration (by Vore) doesn't with such drama show the "infinite regression" of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, it would appear to be implied in Foucault and his infinite commentators, yes? Though Foucault, above writes of "one corporeal gaze," he is talking about the embodied human outside the painting. Of course, though the artist is not reproduced infinitely, the observer - as the Hallsttein/Boulle dialogue bears out - is. Once the painter finishes the painting, each successive observer looks over his shoulders; when reading commentary, we begin to infinitely expand (not regress) the series...

At any rate, if one thinks of the mundane, rather than the philosophical: I've found a digitized reproduction of a film from 1971 and posted it, via technology, to a stretch of words composed on a machine connected, via wires, to other machines that are accessible to folks from almost every country on the earth.

Compare that technical feat to the 19th century conversations about "phonautograms" - when all the rage was capturing a "picture" of sound. This was, of course, decades before moving pictures, or talkies. Now compare the notion, in "infinite regression" to an artist referring to herself. We call this, today, "self-promotion" - though we tend to think it indicates an artist who cannot escape his own image...you'd think we've come a long way...unless we are all trapped in a schlocky painting made for a wacky 70s film, with its mocking title reference to an impossible escape...

Works Referenced and/or Cited

Clint. "Infinite Regression" blog entry accessed on-line 25 January 2009 (Boulle & Dehn screenplay excerpts):
http://lifeinview.com/clint/blog/open/text/59

Boulle, Pierre and Dehn, Paul. Writers. Escape from the Planet of the Apes directed by Don Taylor. 1971.

Dreyfus, Hurbert L. and Rabinow, Paul. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. The University of Chicago Press, 1982: Chicago.

"Escape From the Planet of the Apes" entry at Wikipedia.org, accessed 26 January, 2009:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_the_Planet_of_the_Apes

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Randon House, 1970 (Vintage edition: 1994): New York.

"Las Meninas" entry at Wikipedia.org, accessed on-line 26 January, 2009:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Meninas

"Pierre Boulle" entry at Wikipedia.org, accessed on-line 26 January, 2009:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Boulle

"The Order of Things" entry at Wikipedia.org, accessed on-line 26 January, 2009:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_of_Things

Vore, John. "Boxing [Foucault (boxing Velazques)]." Informatics411.blogspot.com entry accessed on-line 31 January 2009:
http://informatics411.blogspot.com/2009/01/boxing-foucault-boxing-velasquez.html

wyncko. "Infinite Regression." YouTube clip accessed on-line 26 January 2009:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ3fNNfCsR8

v2r2; Text and Foucault+Las Meninas Image © 2009 John Michael Vore

Boxing [Foucault (Boxing Velazquez)]

2009-01-24T15:32:00.001-08:00

Underlying, over-arching, fundamental orders often become most noticeable when disrupted, e.g., when you get knocked out of the groove. I knew after a few years with Michel Foucault, it would take some Wittgenstein to knock me out of the Frenchman's point-of-view. Thus I was quite happy to find, remaindered, and inexpensive beyond belief ($1.98), Susan Sterrett's intriguing book Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World.

Early on in the book, one reads of the case of Leon Scott (Scott is also found in Wikipedia). In 2008, this 19th century inventor was "rediscovered" because one of his "photautograms" was found (more here). We are told Leon Scott's 1860 photautogram, after some dressing up with 21st century technology, is now "the first recording." Slate even called it the "best recording of 2008," but it wasn't...

Leon Scott, in the late-1800s, wanted to capture sound waves in the way that a camera captured light waves. Prior to his invention, new music was circulated beyond the concert hall as a score on sheet music (hard to believe, but there was a time when most homes had pianos like today they have TVs; Sterrett, p. 1-11). Scott's invention, the phonautograph, indeed captured sound waves by converting them into squiggly lines.

It never occurred to Leon to capture the squigglies on a medium that could, by reversing the etching process, then playback the sound from the squigglies. He was after a photograph - or phonoautograph - the unique visual "signature" of a voice, musical instrument or symphony.

In other words, it never occurred to him to cord (e.g., cord like a string or squiggle), then re-cord - that would be left to Edison et. al. I find this so odd that Scott's phonautograph seems, in retrospect - and unfairly - a "half invention." Yet Scott achieved what he wanted: to engrave sound as an image...a picture of sound...

So, when one of his phonautograms was discovered in 2008, was it right to call it the first known "recording?" No. That is something we 21st centurions imposed on Scott's phonautogram, by using it in the way Berliner or Edison would (more or less). Scott didn't want or expect his picture of sound to make a peep: it was a picture....an ornamental addition to the musical score as sheet music, important in the way that a photograph was - with the unfortunate drawback that looking at a picture of sound waves didn't augment the musical experience.

Does this have anything to do with Michel Foucault's use of Velazquez' Las Meninas? In the least, it seems to be a good reason to put up the Grid Iron Version of Las Meninas...or, alternately, the 2D Tabled Version of Las Meninas. Once again, we are poking fun at Foucault's use of the 17th century painter as a precursor to his alleged & sudden 18th century advance in the episteme. Unlike yesterday, we are, here, taking the mathesis literally.

Ultimately, and in comparison, to say that Scott's rediscovered phonautogram was a recording would be like saying that Las Meninas, above, was the unfinished movie which, no doubt, and some day, someone will make out of it. Yet the 19th century efforts by Scott, Berliner and Edison also prove Foucault's point about a new paradigm arising; and our 21st century nostalgia also reinforces Foucault.

Those trapping sound in the 19th century were by-passing the kinesthetic-visual method of representing aural information - written language, musical scores - with an analog of aural information. The steps to what we would call a "recording" included one which stayed in the kinesthetic-visual paradigm; Scott made a sound wave capturing device, as others, earlier had created light wave capturing devices (cameras): the result didn't alter the order of God's universe, it merely captured it in a new way.

Sterrett captures the tensions of the time: some argued that making physical models of theoretical constructs was useless: equations were all one needed. Nobel Prize-winner Wilhelm Ostwald "thought models unsound" (Sterrett, p. xix). To get at this from the paradigms of Foucault: keeping things on the page was as far as humans-under-God were supposed to go: we were, only, to describe the world given to us, no more. We represented God's creation in homage to God; to go further risked usurping God's authority, a blasphemous, prideful and heretical undertaking.

Others thought physical models were required on the way to building something new. Machines, some could argue, captured "God's law," operating from natural law (recall the fantastic orreries, showing the "mechanics" of God's universe). Regardless, in machine-building, one created models, successively closer approximations to a working prototype. Prototypes = functionality. A key issue of the time was how to get from a scale model - a model aircraft, for instance - to one which could carry a human being.

The scaled-up model, we see, is what a human could use. By thinking about "human use," we have left behind the God Paradigm - that metatheoretical glue which stretched from Foucault's 16th century Renaissance episteme, through his 17th Classical episteme then stopped. Foucault's 18th century Modern episteme is human-centered, not God-centered. Identity-centered (so I call it the Identity Paradigm). We have, with sound recordings, shaken apart the very space and time God created: now sound from one period of time could be played in another period of time. Shocking, disturbing, disruptive?

The advance away from the old school representation came with Berliner and Edison, who realized sound could be divorced from the fabric of time, if recorded and played back later. Scott wanted a snapshot of sound in time; Berliner and Edison wanted more - to capture the sound itself, via a device. This would be a radically new kind of representation - one taken up by a machine.

A machine - as some no doubt warned - by-passed the human-destined role of representing - of using representation - for God; the machine represented sound to and for human ears. And now one can see that the American Declaration kept things "under God" by making humans "created"; but things we created were "of, by and for" people. This was one lasting, paradgim-shattering affect of the separation of Church and State (see Wills, Under God).

The new paradigm remains so strong that we insist on seeing Scott's rediscovered phonautogram not as what it was but through the lens of sound analogs. That any of us in 2008 (or 2009) could give a phonautogram some added status because of its age, its "firstness" shows that we continue to be held in the sway of another new paradigm element: historicity.

"It is no longer origin that gives rise to historicity: it is historicity that, in its very fabric, makes possible the necessity of an origin which must be both internal and foreign to it..." (Foucault, p. 329).

Foucault's notion makes us aware that a thing acquires a new dimension: the ability to have a history. This marks a shift in paradigm because prior to "minor" histories, all things - all creatures great and small - belonged only in a Divine Narrative. We were all a part of God's grand design, which had a Genesis: the only important history lead back to the Garden of Eden (Foucault, p. 331). In lesser order beings, there are stories of birth, who and what came first.

It is our love of antiques and second-hand stores, genealogies - and squiggly lines from the 19th century - that mark the new paradigm's new understanding, and its continued hold. In the Identity Paradigm, each human searches for her unique destiny, a blasphemous undertaking from the God Paradigm perspective.

In the Information Paradigm, one imagines, we'll all be more-or-less, contentedly, in some world-wide present moment - where "personal" identity struggles are dropped, and we can look across a neighborhood in Gaza, Jerusalem, New York, or Dublin and see, looking back at us another person, sharing the same moment: history not required.

Works Cited and/or Referenced

Christgua, Robert, et. al. The Music Club: "The Recording of 2008 Was The Oldest," found on-line 25 January, 2009:
http://www.slate.com/id/2206848/entry/2207289/

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Random House, 1970 (Vintage edition: 1994): New York.

"Las Meninas" entry at Wikipedia.org, accessed 21 January 2009:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Meninas

"Leon Scott" article at Wikipedia.org. Accessed 24 January 2009:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Scott

"Orrery" article at Wikipedia.org. Accessed 31 January 2009:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrery

Rosen, Jody. "Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison." The New York Times, 27 March 2008. Accessed on-line 24 January 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html

Sterrett, Susan G. Wittgenstein Flies a Kite. Pi Press: New York, 2006. An earlier version of the introduction can be found, here (.pdf accessed on-line 25 January 2009).

Wills, Garry. Under God. Simon & Schuster: New York (2007). Accessed on-line 31 January 2009:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Under-God/Garry-Wills/e/9780641938283

v2r5, Mathesis+Las Meninas Image and Text © 2009 John Michael Vore.

Dimensional Shifts in Foucault's The Order of Things

2009-01-23T10:25:00.000-08:00

To begin, of course, as noted by Dreyfus & Rabinow (p. 60), Foucault doesn't utilize Kuhn's concept of "paradigm," on which he is "strangely silent." So when I write of Foucault and paradigm shifts, I'm importing a concept he did not use. (I'll explore the advantages and disadvantages of my characterizations in a later entry.) If Foucault had discussed "paradigm," however, it would apply to his descriptions of the episteme - a notion which Dreyfus & Rabinow suggest was "short-lived" in Foucault's developing methodologies.

While The Order of Things talks briefly of a Renaissance episteme, it dwells on a Classical episteme and a Modern episteme. This brief entry will focus on Foucault's contrasting of the Classical episteme as a flat, 2D table on which the items of the world are arranged, and a 3D trihedron. "The domain of the modern episteme should be represented rather as a volume of space open in three dimensions" (OT, p. 346). The human sciences "show up," as it were, suspended in the space amidst the three planes.

Now Foucault spends a great deal of time on Las Meninas, shown above, by Velazquez, painted in 1646. That date would make it a product of the Classical episteme, which runs from the 1600s to the late 1700s. It is, thus, for Foucault, an example of the table which holds the representations discovered by mankind in God's world; there is no place on the table, of course, for "mankind" (should have been parenthetical in first instance, sorry). What is perceived can be arranged, but the perceiver has no place within these arrangements. As in the painting, which has so many interplays between inside-outside that it oscillates amidst shifting points of view, yet contains no human, within it, that, sees all of it.

That individual occupies a space outside of the painting, and outside of Velazquez's time.

Yet, it occurred to me, as I looked at the painting again - after updating my geometry by visiting Wolfram Science and seeing a picture of a trihedron - that, indeed, one can find a trihedron within Velazquez's painting. While nothing in The Order of Things precludes and prevents Foucault's description of a 3D episteme within an example of the 2D episteme, it does make one wonder if anything knowledgeable is gained by using the geometric analogy...and so much talk of "volumes" as opposed to "linear sequences." I do admit, however, that it seems like a break-through (this is being somewhat facetious)...

All of this matters, of course, if one wants to take Foucault at his words, and actually construct a model of different episteme based on his descriptions...indeed, it seems that any self-respecting model of human intelligence would have to not merely pass an everyday Turing Test. It would have to produce a situation in which individuals from different episteme, or paradigms, could talk, explore, confuse and teach one another...

Works Cited/Referenced

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Randon House, 1970 (Vintage edition: 1994): New York.

Dreyfus, Hurbert L. and Rabinow, Paul. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. The University of Chicago Press, 1982: Chicago.

"Las Meninas" entry at Wikipedia.org, accessed 21 January, 2009:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Meninas

Weinstein, Eric. "Trihedron." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource, found on-line, 21 January, 2009:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Trihedron.html

v1r2, Trihedron+Las Meninas Image and Text © 2009 John Michael Vore.

Info-gathering RITUALS Become Info-production TOOLS

2008-12-15T08:01:00.000-08:00

The coolest insight to date is a continued refinement of the Informatik Framework. It shows up, in the Informatik Framework Tutorial, couched in all the terms familiar to people-centered designers. But sometimes I miss the simplest formulation amidst this framework for handling information overload and its complexity. That's a problem that besets end-users, interaction designers and information architects.

Here's the insight: The image at the top of this entry shows Information as it is being GATHERED. It is taken from the Info-Rituals page of the tutorial. Two pages later, in the tutorial, in Info-Tools, it shows Information as it is being PRODUCED.

Take home point: Four info-gathering RITUALS yield five info-producing TOOLS. The four rituals? List, Story, Simulation, Virtual Reality. As I try to describe in the tutorial, these four human rituals are, I believe, universal, e.g., rooted in human neurology. That means, if you use the Informatik Framework, you start-out in the people-centered corner. Why? Because you start out thinking about information like a human being, rather than an information technologist.

The five info-producing tools? List, Story, Simulation, Virtual Reality & Tool. Catchy, huh? All you have to do is add one thing to the previous list, and that one thing is the very thing which names the category. So don't be one, OK? (This self-reflexivity is part and parcel of human tools, btw). All this comes from thinking about neurological information as inputs and outputs. Think of the RITUALS as inputs and the TOOLS ast outputs.

Just thought I'd make all this clearer, from here. And for any of you who want to understand the Informatik Framework from the perspective of traditional Interactive Design Tools, check out the Foucault-inspired table of Usability Methods, Prototyping Methods and Application Types mapped onto the Informatik Framework. That's in Trade Tools.

v2r0 © 2008 John Michael Vore

Info-Paradigm Formula: Who=Information Handled

2008-11-13T12:14:00.000-08:00

(v1r5, 2008-11-13.) Ever since finishing the entry on bailing out paradigms, I've been trying to make a list of Info-Paradigm candidates, what an Information Paradigm product would look like. There are several features which make the Information Paradigm different from the Identity Paradigm or the God Paradigm. I'll try to write about them while giving examples.

In the Information Paradigm, the reference point for one's attention is an information stream rather than an interpretation of information via internal or external reference points, e.g., one's sense of self, or one's sense of God. For instance, a song might matter because of its beat, which most likely has little to do with who one is, or whether the song is divine. In news, this is the live feed, without interpretation.

In the Identity Paradigm the catch-phrase was: cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), with its clear reference point, um, the human identity, "me." From the standpoint of the Information Paradigm, the who of the Identity is determined by the information handled (more). If "I think, therefore I am," then what I handle determines who I am. (The Latin for this is unwieldy.) On the old Identity Paradigm cogito, a label, an interpretation frames who I am; on the Information Paradigm, my information governs me.

The "model" of the Identity Paradigm was the Egotist, whether villain or saint; the "model" of the Information Paradigm will be the person on the Autistic Spectrum with her information streams, which need nobody's interpretation before they are of value. In the Identity Paradigm, questions of whether or not this or that was shared were priorities; in the Information Paradigm, it's all shared, and the "villains" are those who try to own information, interpret to less-than-big-picture ends. In the Information Paradigm, the information is always there, only if you can handle it.

The Identity Paradigm breaks down into groups, a herd mentality. The Information Paradigm gets swept away by the beauty of aural, visual and kinesthetic information and wonders why any body would get caught up in anything less. (An Identity Paradigm truth-in-advertising disclosure would insist that I'm an Aspie, so of course I'd "universalize" my experience; an Information Paradigmer would say, "hey, chill out, enjoy the ride." Or Turn On to life outside the box, Tune in to your information streams, and Drop Out of the herd.)

The Information Paradigm offers a big picture for the big picture's sake. For example, the site which made me think to write this, today: fivethirtyeight.com, the Election Prediction site which did so well in its presenting its raw numbers to readers of the site during the election. Though there is commentary at the site, and interpretation of data, Nate Silver and others stick as close to the bone as possible: they write about the methods they use and the tics of those methods; otherwise they get out of the way and let the numbers speak...

Works Referenced
fivethirtyeight.com. Accessed on-line, November 13, 2008.

Vore, John. "Desktop Application - Semantic Information Theory." Informatics411.com. Accessed on-line, November 13, 2008.

Vore, John. "Foucault on 'exchange': bailing-out paradigms." Informatics411.blogspot.com. Accessed on-line, November 13, 2008.

Vore, John. "Info-Rituals=Four Handles on Reality." Informatics411.com. Accessed on-line, November 13, 2008.

v1r5. Copyright © 2008 John Michael Vore.

Oscar Wilde Never Died

2008-11-04T05:38:00.000-08:00

(v1r2, 2008-11-13 added links) Oscar Wilde was born in 1854, so when October 16th passed, recently, I was in the midst of reading Oscar Wilde, the biography by Richard Ellmann. Wilde would be 154 years old, the age of an Old Testament prophet.

Oscar Wilde, according to Ellmann, "occupied, as he insisted, a 'symbolical relation' to his time. He ranged over the visible and invisible worlds, and dominated them by his unusual views. He is not one of those writers who as the centuries change lose their relevance. Wilde is one of us. His wit is an agent of renewal, as pertinent now as a hundred years ago. The question posed by both his art and his life lend his art a quality of earnestness, an earnestness which he always disavowed" (p. xvii).

Ellmann says Wilde died November 30, 1900. I'm not so sure, and as we're in between the days of his supposed last birthday, and Paris death, a kind of interminable hell like waiting for election returns, it seems an appropriate time to take a quick look at the life and times of this Informatics hero, who repeatedly talked about the tools by which he created art from life, and vice versa.

Despite Ellmann's praise of author Wilde, many, today, may know more about Oscar Wilde from the flurry of plays about him surrounding the centennial of his "death": I recall seeing David Hare's The Judas Kiss, starring Liam Neeson (quite a shock to anyone believing Wilde to be effete, a stereotpical notion Ellmann dispels); the 1997 film directed by Stephen Fry, who also starred as Wilde; or Oliver Parker's 2002 The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Colin Firth (who will follow Wilde in Parker's upcoming Dorian Gray in 2009, now in post-production).

When one goes looking for Oscar Wilde the pathways split, veer, end abruptly, and blaze a hall of mirrors. Not bad for this paragon of the Identity Paradigm, one of the first Westerners to understand and use the notion of fame, someone for whom "force of personality" became a way of life.

As mentioned in my blog entries about Narcissus (here and here) Wilde came to America in 1882. From January 9 to October 13, 1882, he visited: New York City, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Albany, Boston, New Haven, Hartford, Brooklyn....Fort Wayne, Indiana (February 16!)...one could go on, for his list of venues reads like a 21st century presidential campaign: 147 stops, from coast to coast, no fly-overs. He gave two lectures, "The English Renaissance of Art," where he emphasized the importance of artistic sensibility in the everyday life (read it here); and "The Decorative Arts," which discussed the need for schools of art and museums - which apparently had an effect on raising consciousness in 19th century America (he even read in a coal mine in Leadville, Colorado, for gosh sakes!; one account is here).

I mention the American tour because it is difficult to break through the ideal of Wilde in one's mind and get closer to the actual life he lived. There was and is so much about Wilde that is polarizing, sensational. As alluded to, some of this is because, as a budding playwright in the years which followed his American tour, Wilde knew that all publicity was good publicity. He'd learned those lessons in America, where a fight with a photographer gained them both publicity (they argued about the payment for the photograph by Napoleon Sarony). Wilde had several "sensational" bouts in America, as one can find by going to the New York Times website and searching the archives, all free, and all with plenty to say about Oscar Wilde from his 1882 arrival, to comments about his plays and their effects into 2008.

I really do wonder if there are others who appeared in the Times during the 1880s who continue to meaningfully take up ink, today. Is there anyone else?

And even though one might nod one's head and laugh a bit at any of Wilde's epigrams, their quick wit also distracted one from knowing that Oscar Wilde worked very, very hard. The tour came about because he was short of cash and raising a family. Even as he continued lecturing, back across the pond, in England, he was lecturing and writing to make money so that his family could survive: he had a wife, 2 children; a widowed mother–and an older brother who even made money imitating him, one drink at a time. He would apply for job after job to keep them living comfortably, eventually writing book and theater reviews up until the moment of Dorian Gray's serial publication in Lippincott's magazine in June 1890.

From the 21st century, we want to see him embody who we want to be. One reads of the trials that "ended" his literary career, over one hundred years ago, and responds viscerally. "No, don't do that!" (And yet, the literary career continues!) One comes away from visiting Wilde through Ellmann believing Wilde simply thought the trial one more publicity tour. He didn't reckon on becoming a player in someone else's drama. Wilde didn't know that his enemy wasn't merely out to get him, but to protect the hierarchies of power, in England, from bad publicity. For the powers-that-were, in 19th century England, some publicity was bad publicity. Wilde's trials threatened to out members of the royal family.

The laws which sent Wilde to jail had not been actively pursued during most of the time in which he lived a "gay" lifestyle. Wilde's extra-marital affairs were not unusual in his time (or ours): one of his first female loves was, essentially, a courtesan to the powerful. His own father had endured a trial about an affair. It was because the investigation into Wilde led to others of "great importance" that he, in the end, became the poster child for the "love which dare not speak its name," a phrase which up until reading Ellmann's biography, I'd thought belonged to Wilde.

In fact, it was first penned by the lover who would doom him, use him as a foil against a deranged father, later reject Wilde and marry (a lesbian), and who, late in his own life – which stretched into the 20th century – would come to claim Wilde, once again. Lord Alfred Douglas has even had his own renaissance, in the 21st century; yet almost nobody would know of him, today, if it weren't for his once and future king, Oscar Wilde. The story of the life of Oscar Wilde became sullied - at least that's what he and his friends seemed willing to let us all believe, so that the art, which fed on any publicity at all, would continue. It did, and does.

My favorite New York Times headline: "No One Found Who Saw Wilde Dead," from ninety five (!) years ago. Now, think about this for a moment. The headline doesn't even mention his first name; it appears on page one...thirteen years after his alleged death...Now again, back to the issue of fame: how many people who became famous in the Times in 1882 could still be referred to 31 years later on page one!

Ellmann, in his biography, pens a death-bed scene which befits Wilde's art and life. If you dig around the Times, you'll find other accounts - and if you dig further, you'll find scholarly accounts from the last ten years. One account disputes another.

I'm sticking with my title: "Oscar Wilde Never Died". (Now, go vote: you've had your distraction of the day.)

Works Referenced

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. Alfred A. Knopf, New York (1988).

Hare, David. The Judas Kiss (play). Review accessed on-line November 13, 2008.

The New York Times. "No One Found Who Saw Wilde Dead," published November 9, 1913. Accessed on-line, November 3, 2008.

Wilde (film) entry, Wikipedia. Accessed on-line November 13, 2008.

Wintermans, Caspar. Alfred Douglas: A Poet's Life and His Finest Work. 2007. Accessed on-line, November 13, 2008. (Amazon link, here.)

v1r2, © 2008 John Michael Vore

Foucault's "exchanging": bailing-out paradigms

2008-10-04T09:43:00.000-07:00

(v5r9; Updated 2008-11-06 with Kaufman link, citation)

In The Order of Things, chapter six is called "Exchanging." Michel Foucault here, continues to makes his case for the shift in paradigms from the 16th to the 18th century. In sum, "Where natural history revealed squares of identities separated by differences, the analysis of wealth reveals 'differentials' – tendencies towards increase and towards diminution" (p. 189).

"Exchanging" has to do with economics, markets, prices, values and currency. "...Money can represent more kinds of wealth only by circulating faster," Foucault writes (p. 185; italics added). "...[S]peed of circulation is defined by the number of hands through which money passes during the time it takes to return to its starting-point..." He continues: "This speed is limited in two directions: an infinitely rapid speed would imply an immediate exchange in which money would have no role to play, and an infinitely slow speed would mean that every element of wealth possesses its permanent monetary double."

Note that some of what has created the need for the current round of rescues from the American Federal government has to do with the bundling of mortgages, that is, taking mortgages out of the hands of local banks and trading them around the world (for a detailed case, see this New York Times article). The credit risk inherent in borrowing money for a home thus touched more and more hands because of high-technology, technology which could compute derivatives - near permanent monetary doubles, these complex representations; and our internet could deliver nearly immediate exchanges. Thus a new space in which wealth could grow appeared, a virtual space which could manufacture oscillations between the extremes of financial circulation unearthed by Foucault in Cantillon and the Physiocrats.

Let us continue with Foucault's accounting of 18th century discourse: "...the problem is not to discover by what mechanisms money circulates or fails to circulate, how it is expended or accumulated..., but what the necessary quantity of money is in a given country that will provide a sufficiently rapid circulation and pass through a sufficiently large number of hands. Thus, prices will not be intrinsically 'fair', but exactly regulated: the divisions of the monetary mass will analyse wealth according to an articulation that will be neither too loosely or too tightly knit. " (p. 186; italics added).

Three hundred years later, in early October 2008, 700 billion dollars has been suggested as the temporary American fix needed to increase the circulation of money through the "right" number of hands.

The "debate" on the American bail-out first hit a wall because the right number did not seem to include many or most Americans: the cry, "no Wall Street bail-out!" was heard. After failing in the House of Representatives once, a new story emerged, more about how the credit "freeze" was trickling down to main street. Local banks couldn't extend credit to small businesses, because they couldn't get money from the big banks. Pay-rolls might not get paid....as it turns out, this bail-out is all about you. Without the bail-out, money may not reach your hands; you'd be out of the financial loop. In short, Exchange hinges on spreading the wealth. It always has.

The second time around, the American bail-out passed. Will the plans in America and many other countries work? Time will tell, everyone says.

"...Time..." continues Foucault, "...belongs to the inner law of representation and is part of it; it follows and modifies without interruption the power possessed by wealth to represent itself and so analyse itself by means of a monetary system...this function of time within wealth...[is] a pledge...assimilated into credit: ...the duration of the credit, the rapidity with which repayment fell due, the number of hands through which it passed in a given time, [are] characteristic variables of its representative power. But all of this was merely the consequence of a form of reflection that placed the monetary sign, with relation to wealth, in a posture of representation in the full sense of the term." (p. 189).

Some readers might want to throw up their hands, perhaps even see money as "the root of all evil," or that it is a"false idol". Yet that misses the point, here, in the Order of Things, which attempts to describe the escape of representation from the divine, e.g., representing in the fullest sense possible. Roots and idols were old ways of thinking - from a paradigm which sought to arrange and govern perceptions and things-in-themselves entirely on how much they reflected a hidden divine nature; a limited, censored use of representation. It was an old tradition, a cognitive regime of mind-control, something which most fundamentalist religions still use: no words but God's or Allah's. That paradigm sought to harness all of cognitive life - all things intellectual - to the "discovery" of God in everything, and nothing else, period. As in, "there is nothing else, so don't ask."

THE MEDIEVAL, GOD PARADIGM constantly and purposefully missed the tree for the forest, always a mythical eden. A person with eyes living under this paradigm only noticed a given tree if that tree revealed the divine, otherwise it had no individuating characteristics worth noticing.

This gets cognitively tricky because it applies to individual persons, too: in most fundamentalist thought the individual only shows up in as much as he or she "reveals" some divine law, either through living it (and denying self) or breaking it (and denying "God"). Which is to say, the individual is most individual when she is least individual, in short – possessed; this definitional lock-up is what distinguishes a paradigm. Such a cognitive double-bind makes some 21st century people think religion is bunk; that's because we were born into a different, later paradigm which has its own double-binds. Paradigms bind thought to an over-arching system, such that one cannot imagine life outside of them.

In fact, the above example examines the God Paradigm through the Identity Paradigm, otherwise it would be understood even less than it might. The God Paradigm has as its sole reference point, a Divinity; the second has "the individual." How an individual relates to "The Identity" marks our current cognitive burdens. Under the God Paradigm, the deepest questions related to how, when and whether God showed-up. Under the Identity Paradigm, the deepest questions relate to how, when and whether an individual shows up.

The Identity Paradigm allowed for each and every tree and every member of every other species that makes up the forest to be categorized without regard to any given creature's relationship to a divinity, or even the existence of a divinity; in short, representing, itself, got free. Under the God Paradigm, while there were fishes, trees, heavens, etc., these were not categories in the way we would come to understand them via 18th century science, with its species; until then, we could name God's creatures, but go no further.

Looking in the rear-view mirror at the development and cross-over from the God Paradigm to the Identity Paradigm can be difficult for us latter-paradigm saints, who are used to using language, film, speech and IMs to represent a zillion things, and from more or less individual perspectives.

So, put yourself back into a time when few were literate, and representing was in the hands of the rich and/or religious. Everyman was, in reality, Helen Keller, talking with her hands – and only conversing with those they could physically touch. The sheer number of people one would come to know in a lifetime was less than a typical American sees walking to The El, in Chicago, much less when riding it. And in those small, tightly-shared worlds, few could read, and fewer could write. Sculptors and painters wouldn't make a dint, as populations, in these small worlds; as happens, still, those with special skills were taken to larger population centers.

You could represent, in those days, if you could talk - if you could tell a story, or a parable.

Those empowered to represent beyond their small worlds were the artists-with-patrons who, as you might know from Art History 101, had to paint and sculpt religious imagery and scenes. It took centuries to free up thought from this one end goal; it also took centuries for tools to show up which allowed Everyman to get into the game of representing reality (more). When, eventually, more and more people were freed from the necessity of endless journey God-searches, a tree could simply be a tree, escaping Kaballah, even escaping natural science Tree-of-Life analogies, so, eventually end up being not merely a symbol of a 21st century green movement, but its embodiment (plant a tree!).

This post-Medieval paradigm also, over time, allowed for the individual person to arrive on the Western intellectual scene; and only when more individuals showed up, of course, was there a "scene," and not a moment before.

WITHIN THE IDENTITY PARADIGM, a collection of adopted identities would become who one is, not some quest for the divine in which no body can show up, ever, e.g. "a quest" which never ends. One still hears remnants of this: "it's the journey, not the destination." Within the Identity Paradigm, you are what you eat, so to speak; you are each step of the journey, each detour, each description you give of it, and the destination: you think, therefore you are. You are all the things you say you are, which can really suck, it's so much work: so in time we would invite psychologists to help us edit the myriad self-representations which crowded into our once relatively empty brains. And with them, of course, we found our way into an "inner life" where we could bloom, what with internal heavens and hells, the diagnoses of experts which, to this day still capture many imaginations.

Looking back on the old, closed, dogmatic, mono-God-centered paradigm, it is difficult not to be dismissive: they seem closed-minded, what with their incomplete maps of the world and Terra Incognita. Our world was unimaginable to most learned folk before the 19th century; and "openness" remains difficult, such that some confuse "hockey mom" talk for it or straight talk, when, truly, such talk comes from a mind yearning to be closed.

Open minds are dangerous territory to closed minds; eight centuries ago, the Church closed the mind by creating heretics; to survive, some had to appear closed in order to safe-guard knowledge from dogma (e.g., Francis Bacon (more)). Today, touting a closed mind, as fundamentalists do both in America and abroad, simply repeats a repeat, though it's come to sound like bravery. Closed-minded paradigms, in the 21st century, are blind paradigms; "keeping the faith" is not about firm principles, but about an inability to grasp fundamental change. It is not anti-intellectual in some democrat v. elitist way, but anti-cognitive in the way in which one chooses to get smashed or stoned because life seems overwhelming. It is stupid-minded, like driving a car with one's eyes closed.

MONEY, IT CAN BE DIFFICULT TO REMEMBER, IS A SYMBOL. It is a thing which represents. The possession of symbols was always highly regulated. Early on, symbols were so limited, that freedom meant having the t-shirt with the emperor on it. What was hip was one thing. (This is an anachronistic analogy, but play along.) Then freedom meant having the t-shirt with the right divinity, or no T-shirt at all. Later freedom meant having a T-shirt without either the emperor or the divinity; later it meant a simple T with colors. By the 20th century, a T-shirt could have philosophers on it. By the end of the 21st century, you cold put yourself on a T-shirt in most Western countries. Or you could put a corporate identity on your T-Shirt.

This is a bit labored, this extended analogy, but it can be difficult imagining freedom without judgment as it expands, arriving where it is, today. A T-shirt with only the emperor or one divinity was an advance over no clothes at all, etc. Now, imagine that money is the T-shirt. It's ability to represent expands and contracts, yet its ability to represent must be regulated, or it ceases to represent anything. You thus cannot print money with your computer and a printer. If each of us did print our own money, rather than counterfeit a country's currency, money would cease to be a means of exchange.

Derivatives, on the other hand, these new ways of representing micro-slices of wealth: what have they done to exchange?

WHEN ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT MONEY, we're usually practicing some version of the Identity Paradigm's discipline, History. History is that way of thought which follows, like a sing-a-long's bouncing ball – some thing – through time. This usually means acting as though all the cognition which was required to perceive and value some thing in our time is projected backwards in time (itself a tricky, mostly 20th century phenom). In some ways, History is always Back to the Future. We find something present in our world then construct a story or narrative of how it was destined to show up here. Having, under the God Paradigm, not noticed the thing unless it represented the Divine, now we act as though we won't notice the thing if it represents anything about us. We treat the thing as if it exists independently of human thought, independent of yous and mes. You can't claim a thing, of course, unless you pay for it.

The wise reader will have noticed, by now, that we have, by the 21st century, used one representation - money - to bridge an imaginary wall between all the other things we represent. Money insures a wall between mind and matter, allowing us to ultimately believe, in the West, that we can own things.

Doing a money history eventually brings to mind "roots of evil" because, a long time ago, answering "What happened?" began as a sorting out of good and evil forces. Later it became an analysis of what people did and the decisions which led, or didn't lead to actions. Following this is an Alice in Wonderland trip. You need an individual before you can assign actions, house decisions. Yet how can we ever say someone is individual without attributing actions? Without attributing decisions. Again, these are the double-binds which lock us, still, in the Identity Paradigm.

When things go badly, we "naturally" want the bad to be extra-human, super- or sub-human - so as to get some distance from it. Partly this is cognitive: distance gives perspective by which to see and adjust. Some time allows us to see more clearly, allowing us to run in and out of the cognitive space created by the Identity Paradigm, the one which gave rise to yous and mes, the very ability to imagine that something could be one's own fault, or one's own problem. Or that the appearance of something bad might require something of us, rather than something of God.

Some of the initial talk of evil after cataclysm also comes down to laziness: if what's evil is too close, we might actually have to do something about it. Again, time sometimes allows us realize it's better to do something rather than nothing, or that doing something may not be that bad, maybe even preferable to what seems so threatening that it's evil.

We deflect fearful, threatening things, then watch them as they are reflected back through the hierarchies of identity which we believe in: how authorities we believe in see the challenge, how family sees it, how friends see it. It is through this deflecting/reflecting that we eventually come to have a handle on it, within the Identity Paradigm. The Identity Paradigm has a million possible mirrors; the God Paradigm, just one.

Identity Paradigm searches for causes and effects can easily and quickly melt into God Paradigm longings for the Prime Mover, or evil-doer. Yet, as Doris Kearns Goodwin remarked about Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression, finding evil doesn't empower. So Roosevelt would say: "if man made it, man can repair it; the mistake is not to try." Blaming "evil" takes solutions out of the realm of the man-made and into mystical territory. We need to confront a fear, what terrorizes, what is evil, to break it down; to move forward, we must get our hands on it.

Roosevelt's phrase thus captures the tension between paradigms. It will always be tempting to slip back into the God Paradigm and fantasize about being powerless: maybe somebody or something else will save us. Yet we have to come back into the Identity Paradigm through which we cognitively live (in the West): being able to represent a problem puts it back in one's hands, anchors power in one's hands. This was the journey of the American Congress during September, 2008: running from Responsibility, then taking action.

FUNDAMENTALIST THOUGHTS WANTS everyone to return to simpler cognition, one in which there is a unity between perceptions and reality, where the gap shrinks between innumerable choices and the "right" choice, a time when what is knowable was less confusing. Recall: it's either God or nothing at all, with one exception: Evil. Evil became the bogey man for the multiplying choices and an ever more complex world. And Good & Evil, for most, came to represent the illusion of choice, of course, when there is none at all. E.g., "Don't choose Evil, give in to God." In actuality, this meant: there is only one choice, you idiot: God. But the God Paradigm was doing what it could to accommodate the spreading popularity of the new kid on the block, the Identity Paradigm.

For if there was no You, then there was never a point when you could choose. Without a You or Me, there is no occasion for Free Will, there is no need for individual conscience.

Yet both paradigms have come to reflect choices that are closed and limited; perhaps there is some kind of super-pardigmatic law at work, that they tend towards closure as an alternative to them arises. As it is, today, at the dawning of the Information Paradigm: one is free to choose a closed system of reference where everything comes down to what God would or should have done; or one is free to choose a closed system where everything comes down to what you or other individuals would or should have done. In the 21st century, if He, She or It hasn't done It, I'm sorry to say, you're taking on the God-persona to figure out what to do; cognitively-speaking, you are imagining God to be an It, rather than all things. While this idolatry has for centuries been a criticism of successively more "modern" cultures by monotheistic religions, one can forget that the God Paradigm sent one searching for signs of God in the world, marks of the divine which ultimately rested on learned, priestly interpretation. You, Josephine Sixpack, would not, all on your own, see a sign of God – in part because seeing God was like reading tea leaves. Yet, Allah was never an It; God was All. But we Westerners will make God personified, like the Man in the Moon, because we live under the Identity Paradigm.

One cannot escape the Identity Paradigm eaisily – any more than one could easily escape the God Paradigm before the Identity Paradigm existed. And it still has a residual hold on cognition. A paradigm is the scruffy neck of the cognitive lives they govern; each is how you pick up these ideological cats. While many still profess belief in Jesus or Mohammed, what they fail to see is that Jesus and Mohammed were paradigms of cognitive virtue, literally models of how to live with a brain in an increasingly interconnected, multi-faceted world. Their "spiritual" journey is really a journey about handling self-knowledge as it spreads to more and more people. Self-knowledge comes in like a lion, but leaves you like a lamb. It starts in fear and ends in humility, with a question. The next step is always up to you. It used to be up to Allah.

Of course, saying that one's perception of God and religion equals how one cares to cognitively approach the world is heresy to the religious; they would kill and do kill to prevent this truth from being uttered. They would rather kill than admit that their sense of God says more about them than it does about us. But if you're willing to stand with them, next to them, and do conversational battle, you can tame this lion.

Under the Identity Paradigm, one is called to ask more and more individuals what to do. Under the God Paradigm, if a sign of God was found (and confirmed), and only when a sign was found, could one know what to do. The Identity Paradigm decentralizes authority, getting more and more people looking for a solution. The Ultimate Reference of the Bible is replaced by Reference Books; the priestly class expands, creating their own references, and successive classes of priests (call it "peer review"). Under the emerging Information Paradigm, the data, itself, becomes the point of reference: our choice is whether or not to respond to what we see.

PSYCHOLOGY AND GOVERNMENT are two "cases" through which paradigm-effects can be glimpsed.

In lesser 21st century hands, psychology is another religion; small-minded psychiatrists and psychologists look for signs, and see "the ego" as the newly christened reference point. In the hands of lay-people, the hunt for signs is even more dangerous, the post-modern equivalent of the witch-hunt, where a given individual can be deformed by others' search, in her, for the label of the moment, the -ism currently in vogue. The best psychiatrists and psychologists treat diagnoses like theories which need proving; the worst use diagnoses to increase their billing. And out in the world, where most of us live, the lowest among us use psychology to avoid the humane in ourselves, and cage those around us in boxes we can sort, or twirl on a desktop, like a Rubik's cube.

Yet just beyond the latest face-to-face interpretations lay the ground-work for a psychology based on cognitive neuroscience, a look at the workings of individual human brains from the ground up. Something like the software I've been championing since 2003 will eventually be built, and the interpretation of psychological data will no longer be dominated by the priestly class of the Identity Paradigm. It will be up to you. The Information Paradigm presents you with things you couldn't have seen before. In this case, it will be a psychology mirror run on your PC, software that takes your raw brain data and would then let you compare interpretations of it by the fourteen dominant schools of psychology. Or you could choose something from the God Paradigms, if you wanted.

Most people who go to see psychiatrists and psychologists don't even realize that 14 or so ways of doing psychology exist, and more if you include something spiritual. We want to think of them as doctors, and so far as this analogy goes, when someone is cutting into our skin, for example, we'd not like to think that there are three ways to do it. We want to believe there is just one, and that the individual doctor we've chosen is the best doctor around who can do this one, complex, life-saving technique. God Paradigm effects inside the Identity Paradigm.

In the paradigms of the 13th to 17th centuries, of course, it was worse. You probably wouldn't ever get individual treatment, e.g., you were always, inseparably, grouped. The herd was always at the mercy of divine forces it could not and should not try to understand; these cognitive sheep took Life on faith because they did not have the cognitive platform from which to try to understand. There was no perspective from which to analyze metaphors like "sheep" within the God Perspective: (a) first of all, the parable was the Word of God (e.g., no questions!) (b) there were no cognitive structures or real-world tools with which to list sheep characteristics and compare them to people characterstics in some systematic way thus demonstrating likenesses or differences between Dolly, Dolly Madison or Dolley Madison. Until late in the 18th century, people and sheep were, mostly, possessions of the wealthy or the powerful.

From the 18th century until today we have attempted to discover what we can and what we cannot understand (and thus control) by thoroughly cataloging everything in the world we find. These catalogs are the new books of reference. Fundamentalists would quibble about whether man causes global warming because they yearn for the End Time. They prefer we do nothing at this moment of American financial crisis, as well; they always want to see things as being out of their control; they must, 'tis paradigmatic.

As Governor Palin said in the American Vice Presidential Debate of 2008: government should "get out of the way."

GOVERNMENT CONFOUNDS IDEOLOGUES, those mini-dogmatist children of the God Paradigm who live, with us, inside the Identity Paradigm. The latter construct allowed the American founders to birth the phrase "of, by and for the people." Notice the shift in reference point: government not for classes of wealth and power, but for masses. "The people" was a new point of reference, and Government in America would protect the people against the wealthy and powerful – or so it was hoped.

Fundamentalists don't care about "the people," they care about converts: recall, not everyone goes to Heaven on most religious schemes. So when a Fundamentalist running as Vice President says Government should get out of the way, she's saying Government should not protect the People.

It should seem odd that a candidate for Vice President wants to expand that office, yet also says government is the enemy. "OK, Government is the enemy, but you want to be 2nd in Charge, and have more to do?" Maureen Dowd nails the Governor's no-speak talk with humor in "Palin's Pompom Palaver." For a look at this schizo-mindedness with McCain, see The Daily Show coverage of McCain's responses on the Bail-Out, done simply by replaying his contradictions over the course of one ten or twelve minute interview. One cannot say of Senator McCain, "he was for it before he was against it," because he is simultaneously for it and against it.

AS IT HAS BEEN FOR TWO HUNDRED YEARS, the burden of the conservative is always to both be someone and nobody at the same time, caught in between two paradigms of being, the Identity Paradigm into which they were born and the God Paradigm for which they yearn, out of time. Except when it comes to money, conservatives look for identity by-passes: they look for religious affiliation or "the family," a place in which self gets tied down and quickly lost to procreating. They look for "correct values" amongst themselves. The conservative group is usually a family affair. Conservatives are consummate warriors, always harking to first causes, ultimate causes that invite, you, too, to by-pass yourself. No wonder the Senator's head seems to be spinning in the The Daily Show segment: in the cognitive trap of conservative American values, McCain is not fighting for Americans, he's fighting for himself; but because he buys into the God Paradigm, he cannot see himself. Or rather, he does everything he can to not talk about himself, until cornered: and then he let's you know he'll fight nasty.

The burden on liberals is to always be somebody, but not too much of somebody; the critic of liberals is always ready to talk about conceit; having one's group, one's gang – helps here, as well as it does with conservatives, so that a cause is never about one's self, but about "us." Senator Obama is thus about a movement. The emphasis is on diverse values, so liberals look for signs of "equality" amongst themselves. Equality enables the liberal mind-set to accept identity if every single one of them is no greater than any other individual (whatever that means). Liberal groups tend to be more ad hoc than conservative groups, "alternative families" which provoke the ire of conservatives who insist on one kind of family, dogmas and DOMAs (so-called Defense of Marriage Acts).

Both liberal and conservative conundrums reflect the cognitive difficulties of an ever-expanding ability to represent over the last four centuries of human history: amidst a million signs of life, what, if any, have to do with "me"? Some want destiny to choose, any kind of prime mover, any God one would, of course, then fight to protect: as Senator McCain says, he had to learn to fight for something "greater" than himself. Some pull together a sense of self from the many signs of diversity around them, the many ways of being, thinking, getting together in innumerable ways.

Senator Obama had to find himself amidst a diverse history; Senator McCain had to find himself outside his personal history.

These points attempt to reflect Foucualt's talk of changing cognitive structures through the centuries. In the shadow of the God Paradigm, with the Identity Paradigm, itself, waning, the public debates in America still come down to one between those who act as if they have no agency except through a higher authority, and invite us to trust them to do whatever they want; and those who accept responsibility for their agency, acknowledge it, and invite the rest of us on the journey with them. The first group will call the second immoral, ungodly, etc. The second group will see the first as closed-minded liars. Both are right, of course.

In many ways, 200 hundred years after the last paradigm shift, we're still trying, as a culture, to say, it's OK that thought not be dominated by dogma, that culture can represent people in as full a way as it possibly can. In the American bail-out debates, we came dangerously close to retreating into the fundamentalist identity so much that we nearly jumped into a financial abyss. We may well have created a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom, world-wide economies out of control. Come November, perhaps we will put the reigns of government back in the hands of those who want to use them for more, rather than less, people.

Some larger questions, however, have to do with how little most people – even Government regulators – understand the new kinds of monetary representations called "derivatives." While our politicians and commentators still struggle with pre-paradigm and current-paradigm narrative conflicts, next-paradigm representations are shaking America and the world. In this, we are flying blind; our technologies have created a monetary-information complex which has brought credit to its knees. We all have some catching up to do.

THE INFORMATION PARADIGM IS HERE TOO STAY. The Info Paradigm doesn't care how you or I negotiate self-representation, as it happens above and below identity, tied to it only when interaction designers, programmers and computer engineers give us interfaces. Though the early hype about the internet was that it belonged to no country and escaped geography, the better understanding is that it removed geographic barriers to knowledge: anyone with a connection can find out what used to be reserved to experts. Yet we still don't know what to do with the hacker who knows as much about say, quantum physics, as the Ph.D. Expertise still remains tied to geography and routes of power, to the expert classes that created centers of power removed from Church and State. The Identity Paradigm gathers power around interests, intellectual pursuits, making the God Paradigm compete like one more special interest.

This of course provokes some to indignant rhetoric, from which some imagined "decline" in morals is offered as a symptom, rather than the always-present occasion for sin; recall, in the God Paradigm, all acts, all thoughts have one reference point: God. The "decline" of morals, has, for centuries, been the thing which God Paradigmers use to convert the masses; they do well, then, during harsh economic times, when sin does not necessarily multiply, but rather, it simply becomes more undeniable. One does not need a deity before one can count human weakness, misery or deceit; not does one need a deity to stop them: one merely stops wallowing, tries to decrease the misery, insists on telling the truth. In the Identity Paradigm, these three things sometimes oppose each other, compound one another. The complications can make one yearn for something better.

As noted above, there will always be a paradigmatic bias in the West favoring the God Paradigm; it has a prior hold on human imagination. We will always wish for fewer choices, with better guarantees. The Identity Paradigm never competes as well as the God paradigm, for attention, because it changes, begetting new centers of power, new interests; in most ways, this occurs as wealth flows into new endeavors. The Knowledge Worker of the last 25 years has put knowledge tools into the hands of millions of people. This has radically changed the composition of interested groups of people: their ability to see themselves, and affect their world has become greater.

The 21st Century engines of progress – information processors –are moving more and more towards smart machines which seemingly won't need human interaction, at all, in order to churn out physical or digital widgets; in the future, wealth could become less and less anchored to a given human's need. Rather, a person's need, represented by virtue of information technology, sidesteps ideological reasons which, in the past would not fully recognize that need. Ideological filters, de facto, refused to meet that individual's basic needs, either by not seeing it at all or discounting it with blame.

We have not reached the point, today, where all the information on the information super-highway seems human, mangable, relevant. We are still in-between the Identity Paradigm and the Information Paradigm, so we still tag & anchor information rather than simply presenting it. From within an Identity Paradigm, a thousand tags overwhelms; from within an Information Paradigm, the raw data could enable humans in ways we can, today, begin to imagine with YouTube, which by-passes reporters' take on politician's gaffes for a front-row seat of the gaffe. One key element of this is information technology's ability to deconstruct time, allowing you to find events in the news which, in past eras you first wouldn't have heard of, then would have heard of it too late, but now can watch on demand.

In between the Information Paradigm and the Identity Paradigm, we find again a reason why Human-Computer Interaction Design matters. Just as high-tech entrepreneurs built avenues for more and more direct access to the world around us, others designed the software and hardware which circulated harvested wealth through fewer and fewer hands more quickly than ever before. I'm speaking of derivatives. In Derivatives 2.0 one hopes they'll include the rest of us. As some comedian joked: $700 billion? Couldn't they just give every American $1 cool million, and be done with it?

To figure out how stuck you are in the Identity Paradigm, think through your reaction to this immodest proposal. The more you buy into the Identity Paradigm, the less you'll like it. Conservatives want money distributed by hard-work and risk; liberals don't have to discount that to say that neither hard-work or risk-taking guarantees survival or health, or fairness at the top of corporate structures. Liberal, conservative or independent, no matter your identity politics, I'd bet monetary identity politics matter the most. With dreams of money, we think the American Dream, built on the Identity Paradigm, can come true; without money, God knows what we'll do.

Within the Identity Paradigm, money is the only thing which allows your freedom of representation to expand; the only thing, without which, who you are contracts, ultimately killing your ability to exchange anything at all. As Foucault writes in The Order of Things, "It is...the same archaeological network that supports the theory of money-as-representation in the analysis of wealth and the theory of character-as-representation in natural history" (p. 189).

NEITHER THE GOD PARADIGM OR THE IDENTITY PARADIGM WORK. We used and use our deities to create enemies and kill them; to designate wealth, and limit access to it. We used and use identities and labels to create enemies and kill them; the representation of wealth has been greatly expanded, but holding onto it made more difficult.

It is only in Western history that there is a progression from the God Paradigm to the Identity Paradigm: Al-Qaeda wants, of course, the Allah Paradigm. The wildly uneven distribution of wealth around the world continues to mean that most people still do not have their basic needs met: nutrition, health, safe quarters in which to live.

In the long stretch of history, God Paradigms and Identity Paradigms routed knowledge, narrowing what we could see of the rest of the world. That limited what problems we knew about, what problems we could imagine trying to solve. Most people didn't always know that most people didn't have the basics; or if they could look around and see everyone else mired in poverty, they couldn't see a way out. The Information Paradigm could change this.

The American Federal Bail-Out has now taught us that we can mobilize immense financial resources not just to fight a war, but to unfreeze credit. Most Americans were against it, because they believed it didn't affect them. As the Information Paradigm continues to assert itself, more "light bulbs" will go off in more and more people; it will simply stop making sense that wealth continues to be so limited that so many continue to not have their basic needs met.

Does this then prophesy some "socialist" revolution? Not in any way that I know of. The Information Paradigm doesn't label. It simply provides information where, in the past, information didn't show up, or couldn't show up. The competition for the Future, in our current present moment, will be between the Allah Paradigm which never recognized the Identity Paradigm, and the West's Information Paradigm.

In another 25 years, the winner of this very real battle will be whichever paradigm meets more basic human needs - and not just in America, but in the entire world. The conservative turn of American life over the last 25 years was a throw-back, a grasping for any solid value in the face of the opening doorway of the Information Paradigm. The Bush Administration, with its NSA sweeps of American's private digital data, has shown us how the Information Paradigm works when it is harnessed to the Identity Paradigm: terribly.

Yet, conversely, the Identity Paradigm can represent basic human needs in a thousand ways, so many that they are difficult to ignore; the Information Paradigm will broadcast this knowledge to more people than at any time in human history. The view this offers will, for most people, shake every belief to its core, forcing many to make changes they could never imagine. E.g., a massive paradigm shift. The massive world-wide protests before the American invasion of Iraq were the prelude; most of the representatives in America got it wrong - from a lying Government, to a cowered corporate media. The world-wide movement came close to working; next time, it might.

I think most Americans, whatever their faith, are done with looking backwards for the answer. The Future is bigger than even the movement which shows up in the crowds for Senator Obama's Presidential campaign. The best this writer can do is to say this: in the past, the Big Picture was only available to individuals by virtue of wealth or power. Ten years from now, if the Information Paradigm finally takes hold, and another natural disaster like Katrina hits an American city, we won't be waiting for the government to mobilize: we'll have the tools, ourselves, to mobilize – if we can afford it, somehow (an Information Paradigm solution would look a lot like this).

That's the best example I can give, as I try to imagine a world in which great numbers of people have access to the same Big Picture. The Identity Paradigm pushes power into more and more hands. Today, however, we are face-to-face with the limitations of "knowledge=power," the later Foucault formulation. The best-selling representation on Planet Earth – money – stands, irresolutely, in its way; it would have you own power only through it. Yet, at the tail-end of the most Conservative, ideologically right-wing Presidency in America's history, money seems to have lost its ability to represent worth: it's digital doubles, derivatives, stole the show from all of us.

Depending on how the upcoming election goes, we may find America has begun to recover it's Can Do spirit.

Works Referenced

Damski, Jon-Henri; Vore, J. Michael (illustrator). The Damski Deck. Firetrap Press, Chicago: 1997.

"Derivative (finance)" article at wikipedia.org. Accessed on October 4, 2008:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)

Dowd, Maureen. "Palin's Pompom Palaver," in the New York Times, October 4, 2008. Found on-line October 8, 2008, here:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05dowd.html

Charles Duhigg and Carter Doughterty. "The Reckoning: From Midwest to M.T.A., Pain from Global Gamle." The New York Times, November 1, 2008. Accessed on-line, November 3, 2008:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/business/02global.html

"Everyman" entry at Wikipedia.org. Accessed on-line October 20,2008:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyman

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books Edition, New York: 1994. Chapter Six, "Exchanging" (pp. 180-196).

The Daily Show. "Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Bailout Bill Passes," aired on October 2, 2008. Found on-line, October 3, 2008:
[http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=186776&title=Clusterf#@k-to-the-Poor-House---Bailout-Bill-Passes

Kaufman, Wendy. NPR: Your Money. "Peer Lending Spreads in Tight Credit Market," aired November 4, 2008. Accessed on-line, November 6, 2008:
[ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96547454&ps=cprs

Kreis, Steven. The History Guide, "Lecture 27: Heretics, Heresies and the Church." Accessed on-line October 22, 2008:
[http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture27b.html

Vore, John (theorist, software developer). "Cognitive Neuroscience-based psychology application." 2003-2007. Found on-line, November 3, 2008:
[ http://www.informatics411.com/Projects/Process_Slides_-_Informatics/Pages/09_-_Desktop_Application_-_Software_Alpha.html

Vore, John (illustrator). Hand-out, "R-W-M: Reading." Wilkes University (2004). Accessed on-line, October 20, 2008:
[http://www.informatics411.com/Projects/Process_Slides_-_Informatics/Pages/11_-_Teaching_Writing_-_Classroom_Beta.html#9

© 2008 John Michael Vore; v5r9

Digital deconstruction

2008-06-01T08:22:00.000-07:00

(SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA) – “Eve’s Second Premonition: Knowledge Blocked by Force (Garden Nightmare),” to your left, marks the eighth hypermediated illustration in Jon-Henri Damski’s Angels into Dust (Firetrap Press, 1997). It startled me to see what simple techniques--a scanner and Photoshop--could “discover” in 100 year old photographs of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel murals.

The “Tree of Knowledge” panel, split and mirrored–looks, to me, frightening. In the others like it in Angels Into Dust, I found the hidden narrative of “Adam Meets Steve,” a delightful twist on an old story; for a more up-to-date digital interpretation recall the film version of The Da Vinci Code, with Mary Magdelene.

When one moves from the original painting to a photo, then a scan--one is twice removed in time, further removed in space. With such distances, information-load triples, possibly even tripping over itself. One has three bases for interpretation, all offering “clues,” none of which may match the artist’s contemporary accounts; his politics may not have allowed it. Nor may any necessarily match the art sponsor’s preferred written narrative.

Dogmatic believers of preferred narratives often find themselves engaged in rhetorical jousts, reminding one that the art of writing, as a taught subject, began as teaching would-be lawyers. Parrahesia, on the other hand was about fearlessly speaking the truth as a process of life transformation (see this). One speaks the truth, watches the reactions as factions handle the information, endures the “warring sides’” consequences...and is transformed. Wading into any throng of people as a parrahesiast, one always begins as a heretic, and if long-lived enough, sees the day of geniusification--so much drama when one was merely looking for conversation.

Jon-Henri once quipped that the “genius” label is the herd’s way of saying, “Oh, sh*t, he’s going to talk, again.” Then ostensible gestures react, their feigned attention masking a closed inner ear. In many it has gone to sleep too early; interrupted, it wants merely a return to sleep, as quickly as possible. These sleep-walkers hear only what serves an agenda and parse from the light of day what will shut-down real wakefulness.

Calling anyone a “genius” to their face is almost always about nap-time.

The young genius smiles broadly, happy for an audience, lips stretched across white teeth--and is usually surprised when one really shows up; the wise genius smiles with his eyes, saying, gently “...of course, sleep.” She knows, well enough: “don’t tease or feed the strayt people.”

These thoughts come on a sunny California day...

Moral Informatics and Representative Design

2008-04-06T07:34:00.000-07:00

Moral Informatics simply acknowledges that bad things happen to--or rather, "with" good software. And hardware. (Usually human designers are to blame.)

I first wrote about Moral Informatics while thinking about the field of Informatics at Indiana University, in 2005 (see the original post, here; and building on it in 2006, here).

Adam Cohen, in yesterday's New York Times makes a good case for what an Informatik should do in the face of the latest morally pregnant use of technology, "behavioral targeting"--an embodiment of semantic information theory. An Informatik would design hardware in which the defaults favor the security of an end-users' machines; would design software in which the default is to protect against cookie monsters...

Cohen describes the folks who, at the level of your ISP, trap & map your pointings, your clicks, your searches--and sell this information to advertisers. (See "The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying On Users," here.) These are today's Big Brother global communications and technology corporations, the ones who want the American Congress to protect them from lawsuits aimed at exacting a price for the corporate 'giving' of the last seven years--taking your phone records, your internet life and giving it to the Government.

If all politics is local, so is all technological selling-out: it happens on your desktop, in your hand-held. As Cohen writes, the golden age of the Internet was in 1993, when any dog could talk to any dog on-line, and nobody even knew you were...a dog.

The dirty secret dogging corporate-based design is that, at one level, it's about power, e.g., the attempt to gain protections from lawsuits. That power is usually not exercised for the good of people, but rather, for the good of the brand. (And one seriously has to question whether or not size does matter when it comes to being "good"; can a growing corporation, charged with protecting the livelihood of its workers and investors, not avoid cutting end-user corners? The world watches Google closely, to see.)

"User-centered" design, even as it becomes the dominant design ideology, as it becomes accepted more and more by the largest technology corporations, risks becoming less about what is really good, and more about what we can be marketed as being good. Some tech marketers might believe "if you think it's good, it is"--that this is, umh, an acceptable twist on Turing's intelligence test for a machine.

But Turing's theoretical test fails today, even though his ideas took us to better machines. The success of old ways of thinking about technology have delivered us to a new plateau, a place where the moral sustainability of our ever-smaller and ubiquitous tech creations makes morality something which cannot be ignored any longer.

User-centered ideologists know the "talk"--how to criticize with the appropriate data-driven models. Yet, some folks in technology still simply believe that most end-users are stupid, that they are to blame, no matter what the product is. They know this because they see what their company's marketing programs are able to "make" people buy...

Old Information Theory--which focused on the delivery of packets of information without being overly concerned about content--could, in an argument which gives the benefit of the doubt to an older generation of monetizing technologists, call itself morally neutral.

This isn't the case for the burgeoning areas of semantic information--meaningful information, an odd notion, when you think about it.

If you have to qualify the concept of information with a term like "semantic"--well, it says a lot about the concept of information at the core of our lives, today. Wonder why there's too much of it? Too little of quality? So much so that one seems to have to resign oneself to an onslaught, a blizzard, rather than what you need, when you need it? Too much meaningless information, so now we can counter that with "semantic information."

To counter the pressures on designers to betray the end-user, I've discussed Representative Design. It's a notion I've used to describe a role for Human-Computer Interaction Designers, who, in the midst of the emergent demand for user-centered measures, find it sometimes difficult to balance the dozen and a half methods for usability testing with a gut instinct sense of what's "good for the people."

In creating new experiences, user testing can often be hazardous--for if you've built a "killer app" it may well never have been experienced, before...and as soon as any method is formalized, it can be gamed. We all know that.

The point of Representative design: you stand-in for the end-user, always looking out for her best interests. This has its roots in the notion of Representation which was central to the design of the American system of government in the 18th century (the notion was over-run by extreme democratists in the early 20th century, those folks who believed that some kind of moral blessing was bestowed on 50%+1, the kind of people who are always part of a herd, will always be part of some gang, but who quite regularly, never get outside of their own lives long enough to see what's good for America may not always be good for each faction/herd/group in America, least of all any specific individual.)

With morals and representation things are pretty straight-forward: you either care about the implications of what you design, or you don't. One acts in concert with one's principles, or one doesn't. A user-centered product in the service of corporate- or government-sponsored espionage, no matter how you justify it, is a lie; it's designers did not look out for the best interest of the end-user, they did not represent the citizen end-user. They hid behind a false sense of moral neutrality: on the one hand, hyping a new age of technology which would put all the world's knowledge at every person's fingertips, and on the other, assisting governments in tracking not merely the worst among us, but any who would dare be free, on-line.

They should be held accountable for both the hyped-up products which couldn't deliver, and then products which delivered Americans into their personal electronic Panopticon.

Ladies and gentleman of the technocratic revolution: you stole time out of the lives of end-users with faulty promises, then enabled the theft of their freedoms. One hopes that the next generation of technology companies can put integrity back into the machines and return some dignity to the end-user. Imagine this persona: the single-mother who has plopped down a load of money on the hopes of enlightenment for herself (she knows, working two jobs, this is almost a joke) or her children, but instead got bogged down with porn, piracy and stolen identities from a machine she never even knew left her family so vulnerable...

v3r4 (Illustration grabbed from the section of Vore's on-line Portfolio on Informatik Principles; it is taken from Foucault's discussion of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. It was a prison without weapons, a "humane" alternative to the guillotine--the paradigmatic warning to anyone believing her "notions of the humane" are better than someone else's...)

happy returns

2008-03-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

After finishing Mason & Dixon, I turned to something shorter from the "to read" list, a gift from an old friend: Call Me By Your Name (by Andre Aciman, and reviewed in the New York Times, here).

I'm keeping several other books at bay because knowing me means I'd want to "do" something with the ideas they discuss or cause to come into my brain, rushing, wild, ready to be trapped, poked, undone and reconstructed into a machine fit for any hand-held device. So I'm avoiding more Foucault, or the book I had to close because it was producing fruit by the crate-full--Haraway's When Species Meet.

I knew I owed Pynchon a final push to the finish.

As it came to an end, without giving anything away, I'll simply say that the book, more and more, mirrored the creation of its protagonists, becoming more linear, humane & heartfelt. Because reading it was a journey, not a sound-bite or blog--starting 11 years ago, and ending up with me here in Santa Cruz, I'm not going to write much more about it.

Yet I can't let it completely go without saying: what's the irony, the coincidence of picking up a book in 1997, starting it, stopping, carrying it in moves from the Midwest to the East Coast, and then back to the Midwest, and finally all the way to the West Coast: California, and down thru Silicon Valley to Santa Cruz and the Pacific Ocean? What's the coincidence that a book about journeys has been so a part of my journey that it has references in it that I wouldn't have even understood in 1997, but do now? That this book takes place, largely, in Pennsyvlania--when I'd thought I'd escaped that state? That it's reclusive author is rumored to have taught at the University I'm "visiting," or that he possibly lived nor more than a few miles from my current digs?...that the book handles 11 days, and it is, unto itself, the bookends on both ends of my last eleven years?

I've died and been reborn a few times in that period. So much that the hyper-aware, first person narrative of first love by Aciman caught me completely by surprise. Pynchon's book reflected a mountain climbed, a journey survived: one remembers the view with some justifiable satisfaction. It's shear heft (778 pages) and finishing it leave one feeling accomplished.

Putting down Call Me By Your Name leaves you in that moment after your first real kiss, it brings you home to a place you hadn't known existed, to paraphrase Aciman.

The book has been compared to Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Right for the book's jacket, and deserving for its perception of passion, Italy, love which can barely speak its name, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde.

It was in reading Baldwin that I first understood that dialogue during sex could be different than the bold-faced, role-laden instructions in porn--that, indeed, porn was not sexual instruction at all..

Rather than a bumper-sticker for a g/l/b/t political movement, the "dare-not-speak" phrase from Oscar Wilde was also about the impossibility of truly naming or capturing any "love"--which is why any (and I mean any) marriage debate ever happens, or perhaps better stated: why one always debates such commitment.

Anyone who has felt the inside-out quality of true love, when the whole gamut of emotions jump back and forth between two magically connected people--skin touching, breath mingling...and fluids (oh my!)..and minding each others' maps so closely, that each even knows what they can barely say to one another--anyone and everyone wants to bottle it, lasso it; life would end without it. To speak of it could kill it; to not speak of it could damn it forever: all lovers are caught, somewhere in the middle.

Pynchon takes me back to 1997. Aciman's Call Me By Your Name back to 1986. And then there's the flashback from what I started reading, today, the book which made me stop and write: Look Me In The Eye, by John Elder Robison (his blog is here). It takes me back to 1975.

One more eleven year leap and we'll be back in 1964, when a conservative Republican Senator from Arizona ran for president...(oh...sh*t)...

John Elder Robison: you might know his more famous little brother, the author Augusten Burroughs, whose book Running With Scissors (here) was made into a movie (here). The little brother writes the prologue to the elder's book.

John Elder Robison has Asperger's syndrome.

And as of Chapter Three ("Empathy"), he has become my new hero. In some of my conversations with colleagues over the last couple of years, I've described why Aspergians are so good at modeling human-human interactions, a neat thing for those in the field of Human-Computer Interaction: we've been trying to figure out the rest of you our whole lives! When two neuro-normals interact, there's stuff going on that isn't always the magic of love, but is still invisible to folks with Asperger's.

To the neurodiverse, what neuro-normals do looks like acting: it doesn't feel valid, or real. It is confusing. Some say it's because Aspergian's lack empathy...(And this is where I surpress that Aspergian urge to have the improper social response.) Let me quote Robison instead (p. 31):

"I have true empathy for my family and close friends. If I hear of something bad happening to one of them, I feel tense, or nauseous, or anxious. My neck muscles cramp. I get jumpy. That, to me, is one kind of empathy that's 'real.'/When something sort of bad happens, I don't have the physical reaction but I still react to the news. When the bad news does not involve danger, my immediate thought is: What can I do to fix things?"

Robison calls his reaction regarding bad news for people he doesn't know "logical empathy." He deducts why the empathy response is called for: "...I can understand that it's a shame that those people died in a crash...People...hear bad news from across the world, and they burst into wails and tears as though their own children have just been run over by a bus. To me they don't seem very different from actors and actresses--they are able to burst into tears on command, but does it really mean anything?" (Robison, p. 32).

"As I've gotten older, I have taught myself to act 'normal.' I can do it well enough to fool the average person for a whole evening, maybe longer. But it all falls apart if I hear something that elicits a strong emotional reaction from me that is different from what people expect. In an instant, in their eyes, I turn into the sociopathic killer I was believed to be forty years ago." (Robison, p. 31).

I've said almost the exact same words to friends, trying to help them to understand my own diagnosis with Asperger's.

I began to realize I had it in 2004--one piece of the journey I've been on lately.

The tour through psychiatric offices which Robison endured as a child will be familiar to lesbians and gay people of earlier generations, when their difference was seen as psychopathology. Homo's got the nod from official psychiatry in the early 1970s; Aspergerians got it in the late 1980s. I was thus prepared for psychiatric mayhem when I began trying to talk about Asperger's and me. Well, some of it.

The reactions of friends and some colleagues: some think I'm using it to hide something else (and I want to say: hello, when in my life have I ever hidden anything?) Some even tried to prove it was their particular pet theory about something else, putting people in my path like those Robison meets, the ones who made him realize he wasn't "shifty" or "scummy"--the tag he'd received as a kid because he didn't like looking into people's eyeballs when they talked.

Some I should have removed, but this is a dicey thing (more below).

Others have adjusted to the fact that when together in the past, even though they had believed our conversational flat-stones skipped across a river the same way, in my brain I'd built several rivers and riverbanks, and readied myself for every skipping stone that might appear from any conceivable possible universe of "ours." What looked like a mind-meld was just me showing up in a virtual "shared" space at the right time, that's all.

Aciman's Call Me By Your Name reminded me that, only in love does the drawbridge of my Aspergian life go down. At all other times, it's up. But you probably won't know that...

It was in the 1970s, I think, that I believed I'd learned to master the neuro-normal ritual of saying goodbye. I didn't remember that I thought of things that way, until reading Robison today. I didn't remember that I had been so puzzled by people leaving that I'd spent my little boy brain thinking about proper good-byes. I thought this had all come later in life.

Until reading Robison, today, I had forgotten the supreme joy I felt when, just as my family was pulling away from visiting my grandparents, I yelled out the camper window: "Don't call us, we'll call you!" The family laughed; Dad said, "Dummy! Don't say that!"--not mean, just semi-scolding, semi-laughing. But the joy broke, fast.

And the puzzle reigned, again.

Pynchon expressed the journey I've been on these past eleven years, Aciman the love I once learned to call mine twenty-two years ago--and Robison took me back even further: to solve the puzzle in place since the start.

I'd thought mastering the rituals of hello and good-bye would bring the coming and goings under control, that they made people stay, even if abstractly (like a grandparent, at least staying in a place). Cause no matter how bad anyone might ever make me feel, if they stayed, then I would be spared the much stronger and always agonizing isolation which is the birthright of every Aspergian. The thing that made coming out as a gay person not enough, the thing that made me pay attention to every aspect of my "public" display--and worry about every conversation, fret over even non-chalant social blow-off, putting me in a non-stop self-monitoring process learned so well that by the time I was diagnosed, it was even invisible to me.

The diagnosis of Asperger's is difficult, complicated and expensive. Critics exist who bemoan and doubt the huge increase in diagnoses, and even the applicability of the Autism Spectrum. (For more on some of the issues related to mental health, see the New York Times, March 30, 2008, here.)

Our names for things continue to baffle our best efforts. Yet in the works by Pynchon, Aciman and Robison, the attempts make all the difference in the world.

Many happy returns!

Links to Works Mentioned/Referenced

Aciman, Andre. Call Me By Your Name. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 2007. More information found on-line at:

[http://www.amazon.com/Call-Me-Your-Name-Novel/dp/0374299218

Baldwin, James. Giovanni's Room. Laurel Paperbacks, New York: 1988 (1956). More information can be found on-line, here:

Burroughs, Augusten. Running With Scissors.

Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 2008. More information on-line at:

[http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/H/haraway_when.html

Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. Henry Holt & Company, 1997. More information on-line:

Robison, John Elder. Look Me In The Eye. Crown Books, 2007. More information on-line:

Cover for Look Me In The Eye grabbed here: [http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51qi2f1gfrL.jpg
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307395987/bookstorenow16-20
Blog by John Elder Robison: [http://jerobison.blogspot.com/

(i am not a lightning rod)

2008-03-26T07:28:00.000-07:00

(WISHFUL THINKING, CALIFORNIA) –I am not a lightning rod: the phrase keeps running through my head this morning.

I never wanted to be a lightning rod. Never. I never wanted to speak up, or out. I never wanted to write about difficult topics.

I ended up becoming a writer 20 years ago 'cause it seemed like what I could do best. That's the only reason. The last thing I wanted was "attention"--which is why I hate writing anything remotely personal. I hate being on stage; I hate being in front of people--I'm not even sure how much "social desire" I have, at all.

2 cats and a book=happiness?

Way back when, part of me thought writing would be a way to better connect to people. Words started out as a way for me to get outside of myself--it's why I love reading: in books is where I found what I love most, ideas.

Yet here's something you may not hear from any writer you know, if you know any: the "talk" about writing is that it's to bridge gaps, to communicate. Everyone wants to be a better communicator, right?

Maybe that's the way it is in conversation--or the hope, in conversation.

When you write a book--a years-long process--and finish it, and then maybe see it published: the post-partum depression is for the exact opposite reason that one converses.

Forget the bridge.

When it's done, you know that the long journey of the book took you somewhere else--a place you would need to write another book in order to explain. Which would only take you further away from everyone else. This is this writer's dilemma: even if I'm standing in front of you reading from a book I wrote, we're still not in the same place.

I moved into software and interaction design because I wanted to be here, now, with the user, in the moment of action--not in some far away place...not in a place I'd ever share with any reader. Writing only took me further and further into isolation...ideas set me free, but my writing was always a self-trap.

Which is perhaps a long-way of saying this about the difference between Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow, a speculative observation, if you will: Pynchon got tired of seeing himself repeated. There are no proverbs in Mason & Dixon, nothing you could really even put on a t-shirt. It aims bigger than being the talk of the town--as I suggested a few entries back: it is the novel of mathesis (which is really, really big)...and as surely as Foucault gets his non-fiction hands around the Big It, showing you the cognitive tools used before and after super-paradigms of thought--Pynchon, in Mason & Dixon, takes you inside the birth of the super-paradigm which still dominates the Western mind, just as it's causing its first tremors, and when we're yet far from when Mathesis has rebuilt the planet in it's own image.

Perhaps we'll find that in Against the Day...

v1r4 © 2008 John Michael Vore. Mason & Dixon cover grabbed here: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/Mason_n_dixon.jpg.

double trouble: Domino's hot pizza tracker

2008-03-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

I have never ordered a pizza on-line...before tonight. I didn't expect to be wowed by the Dominos website, but I was. It was easy to navigate--that is, signing up for an account was less painful than in most places. And "building a pizza" was straight-forward, though I didn't like having to scroll (I never like it, and I'm guilty of creating scrolling situations). Even adding the complication of a coupon didn't mess things up. Nice work Dominos' Design Team.

Nothing prepared me for Pizza Tracker. I like it's look, I like it's interactive, real-time reporting. I like the way it displays the progress and tells me the names of who is doing what--from prep to delivery.

I like the Fact-O-Matic, reminiscent of Pop-Up Videos, which augmented the pleasure of watching a video and listening to the music with a factoiod, and when done well, in a way which didn't detract from music viceos. The "Help Us Get Better" section has 4 questions easily answered with a star-rating system. The "Tell Us How We Did" allows for 120 characters or so--enough to make one edit a complex thought, which is the way it always should be, anyway.

Except here, where I'm expanding what I wrote about Pizza Tracker: The amazing Pizza Tracker creates a competition between hungry time (when one wants to make the wait shorter), and something that is so cool to look at that one wants to keep checking it--which tends to lengthen the waiting time with its updates ("watched pots don't boil"). Thus one ends up in a design double-bind; the magnificent lay-out and illustration of Pizza Tracker created a trivial tension, such that I ended up "checking the progress" of the delivery because I wanted to see how the Flash animation played out.

I ended up not paying attention to it because it suddenly occurred to me that this is what I do when I cook--which is why I don't cook, having to be aware of time. This was irksome enough for me that even though the site trumpets the legally dead 30-minutes ("or less," is dead), the actual ETA was 32-42 minutes. I had to stop for a minute to think why this would be trivially irritating.

It was because Time, itself, is highlighted and extended by Pizza Tracker. The site says it "takes tracking where it hasn't gone before"--and that's true. When tracking a package, we know to go away and come back in big time frames which allow for long stretches of forgetting about it. When hungry, every minute is a long stretch, and so I wasn't sure if I "should" go away or stay, thus the "bind".

But don't take this too harshly: I never would have thought about the design implications of hungry time, that period after a delivery order is placed for food and its arrival. That makes Pizza Tracker amazing--it created a novel, interesting and fun situation out of something ordinary.

I stopped paying attention after Step 2 (of 5), a good movie was on TV: so the wait didn't seem that long at all...but coming back to the screen to see how the Flash played out was still something I wanted to do. In other words, I didn't just order my pizza and close out the site. That might be an opportunity to exploit, for Dominos.

The design team which created the Flash animation for Pizza Tracker needs to be given the "Build Your Pizza" assignment, next. Flash that up, and Dominos' site will be perfect--except for one thing: Terms of Use. But that's a problem so wide-spread, it will get its own entry somewhere down the line...

v1r5 Copyright © 2008 John Michael Vore.

Hall of Mirror Effects +

2008-03-09T07:21:00.000-07:00

Strong parallels exist between interaction design and writing--comparing them helps to uncover the "hidden" taxes of bad interaction design, all those extra minutes taken up by end-users figuring something out, having to remember what she did before, and generally working to understand what is in front of you, as an end-user.

After introducing some general ideas, this entry gets to a specific example of a writing, a book about surveyors (thus the map to your left, or above, depending upon your settings).

Interaction design, like writing, represents reality while at the same time trying to get closer to it.

This handler+handling duality has two dangers: foremost, a hall-of-mirrors effect, where one gets stuck in a representation, debating a reflection of a representation, rather than assessing the closeness (usefulness) to reality.

And secondly, methods of representation bias end-users towards their present handles (paradigms): (a) it is very difficult to escape one’s paradigms of thought: one must leave language, find insight, then return to words, bridging to insight via metaphor and analogy (b) designing new interactions involves always using last-paradigm (last generation) tools.

Along with these parallels, there is cross-over: Interaction design also uses writings’ tools to explain itself, and specifically taking real world examples (the Office environment) and making them metaphors. These metaphors then become OS realities (an on-screen Desktop)--a prime opportunity for hall of mirror effects to arise.

Meanwhile, in the real world, life is more complex than either language or interaction; Direct Action Design is a endless loop call to redesign interactions yet, again--even closer to an end-users actual life.

A funny example of hall-of-mirror effects comes from the Thomas Pynchon novel, Mason & Dixon, about the surveyors who created, among other measurements, the latitude which divides North and South in America (the, um, "Mason-Dixon Line").

(If you're a fan of Foucault, and know what his "mathesis" is, this Pynchon novel is about its birth imho.)

Here we join the two surveyors who have come to America to solve the boundary disputes around the land grants given to William Penn: "The problem seem'd intractable..." For any readers who are Geometrikally challeng'd, the result of speculation, in the late 1700s, had left "the Lower Counties [of Baltimore] an enclave of Pennsylvania, inside Maryland" (page 335). Things were confused--M.C. Escher-like.

The two gentlemen from across the Atlantic have been asked to map a solid, straight line through uncleared terrain; with 30 axmen, it takes them six months to go eighty one miles. That line is supposed to hit a point on a circle which is centered on the Spire...of the Court House in New Castle Delaware--according to the land grants.

Because of the popularity of amateur surveyors--and the length of time the boundary disputes had gone on, many people offered suggestions about how to solve the problem, which takes us to our joke.

"Marylanders suggest locating the exact center of New Castle by taking a sheet of paper showing a map of the town, trimming 'round the edges till only the Town remains, and then shifting this about upon the point of a Pin, till it balances, and at that center of gravity pricking it through, as being the true center of the Town" (page 337).

With the tedious close-reading of the previous post, we see that Marylanders--of course, understand maps--get the importance of geometry, and even circles--and to a degree, gravity--yet they get lost in using all of these ideas, together. They are letting the representation over-determine the reality, inferring analogical attributes to the representation which it does not have. The example is a great example of how taking seemingly correct narrow steps do not get us to the right big picture, the right tool. Yet an argument about the Marylanders' approach which tried to correct it would still not get anyone to the answer the surveyors ultimately found. It would merely trap us in hall of mirror effects.

v1r3 Copyright © 2008 John Michael Vore. Map, accessed 2008-03-09 from Google Maps, here; note the ARC about 3x the length of the Google arrow pointing to New Castle.

The Metaphor Kills The Medium

2008-02-10T07:15:00.000-08:00

Steven Levy's Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (With a New Afterword) is 13 and 8 years old, from the first to the revised edition. The book is a must-read for anyone who has an interest in the user-centered design movement in America: it lives up to its title, the mantra Steve Jobs used to motivate the Macintosh team, the vision to build something “insanely great.”

Some folks find a user-centered movement rooted mostly in Scandinavia, design as a result of the close relationship between governments and unions; and they make a strong case. The American lineage is different in that it began as ideas in single individuals' minds, as "computers of the future"--as what hacker-turned-designers would want for themselves, or for their kids.

In this way, Levy follows the ideas, people and personalities that lead up to the design brilliance embodied by the Macintosh and all Macs since, as well as most Microsoft-based PCs...and taken to yet new heights with the introduction of iPod, iPod Touch, Cover Flow, and of course: the iPhone.

There need be no "winners" in this historical debate, for all of us win when interaction designers keep end-users first. And because it is too good to not read, I will halt my synopsis of Insanely Great, so we can get to some nuts and bolts issues which affect interaction design: the way we talk about what we do. For instance, although we use the word "desktop" to refer to a real thing, the graphical user interface through which we access our files and utilize our applications, started out as a metaphor. Making computers more user-centered meant getting away from the command line and punch-cards, and making them seem more like what happens in an everyday office.

An interesting discussion of the Desktop Environment (99-101) centers on the merging of a created environment which simulates real world desktop activity. In other words, the discussion focuses on the interplay between a design metapor or analogy, and its implementation. One Apple designer is quoted as saying, "Most Macintosh users believe that when they move a document icon from one folder to another, they are moving the document itself." People think when they move a file they're actually changing its physical location on the disk. Yet they're really only changing the pointers to the files' physical location.

Levy responds by saying that users' perceptions matter more than what actually happens on the hard drive, where nothing moved. Returning to the scenario out of which the Desktop Environment arose, Levy writes: "What we are concerned with when we move a physical file from say, a typewriter to a manila folder in a file cabinet, is not the rag content of the paper, the stiffness of the folder, or even that paper is involved at all. We do it to move information from one location to another, so we can retrieve it later. That's the essence of the action......when they drag an icon representing a file over a trash can, they are emphatically throwing out the file. Not just 'pretend' throwing it out, or virtually throwing it out. It's gone! Just as lost as if you had tossed it into the wastebasket" (p. 101).

While you may well understand the sentences above, if you take them very slowly, you can reach a more thorough notion of what's in play in this blog entry. In an interaction design world in which internationally populated teams must often use language to get on to and keep on the "same page," metaphorically speaking, a deeper appreciation of these issues might be beneficial.

1. Paraphrasing Levy: In a simulated environment based on real-life analogues, by definition, an action creates the same result in either. Yet this depends on a "sealed" simulated environment, e.g. where one cannot escape the GUI and access the command line. At that command line (yet another representation), as the security conscious end-user has learned, an erased file has just lost it's physical address: the content remains physically where it was on the hard drive, until written over by something else. So, in reality, one can put something "in" a GUI icon of a trash can--and one can (thankfully) sometimes still "recover" that thing.

2. By basing his discussion, here, on Metaphors We Live By, by Lakoff and Johnson, Levy attempts to clarify the way in which metaphors can control contexts. "'Argument is war,'" for example yields ways of pigeon-holing the look and feel of argument, itself: with "the attendant expressions like attack a position, gain ground, indefensible...conflicts...with winners and losers" (p. 100). Yet argument has many purposes: a lawyer takes sides in defense of a client; a philosopher takes sides in exploring implications--in these instances, the implications of a metaphor don't seal the use of "argument," metaphor doesn't demand a logical equivlance, but rather metaphor structures the use of thought. Argument isn't war, it uses elements found in War. This distinction is lost if one is not careful.

3. Using language as an example involving design metaphors is not as helpful as it could be, because it seals the discussion in the simulated environment called language. There is no escape to a command line, when one focuses on language: there is simply more talk. This tends to overwhelm readers and listeners; and in the case of Levy's argument, it actually misdirects the conversation because it sidesteps the competition between simulated environments and language in representing the "real."

4. When Levy writes about a physical piece of paper which we might wad up and toss into a waste basket, the relationship between the written words in his sentences and the things they signify is tight, one-to-one. Non-ambiguous relationships like this aid clarity, and the clarity one "gets" from a good analogy is supposed to then transfer to a particular side in argumentation. When being metaphorical, we typically say, "It's like..." meaning this is similar to that, but not the same. We drag a meaning from one context and drop it into another. At the level of an argument about analogy--a discussion using words which is simultaneously about word use (metaphor)--the cognitive ability begins to falter; the "like" turns into "is."

5. "Argument is like war" becomes "argument is war." One loses the distinctions, the things about argument which are not war-like, at all. Levy thus ends up falling into the trap he attributes to Lakoff and Johnson, even as tries to use Lakoff and Johnson to show that it is Levy's opponent in this argument--the Apple designer--who has fallen into the trap. (Language use has this slippery tendency, and in judging arguments slipperiness gets more fully developed into the fallacy called "slippery slope." Example: if you do this, you'll end up doing that.)

6. Levy's mistake, here--"attacking a position" for its under-appreciation of the power of metaphor by himself succumbing to the over-determining power of metaphor--only becomes apparent through a tedious, slow parsing of language use. This probably happened because his argument about metaphor is not his real point. To Levy, what's important is the information "contained" on a page or in a file. That information, and where it is, doesn't depend on its method of representation, he thinks.

7. On a computer, as currently designed, the what and the where kind of meld into a wherewhat or whatwhere: the what needs a place before it can show up. The Desktop Environement GUI attempts to create a better handle on this wherewhat, by building back into the human-computer interaction an aspect of the real-world separation of what and where. For in the real world, things move, get moved, and we move. And when trying to get help in finding real-world things, we use a what-label, a word. On computers, the GUI worked out well when the what was limited to office work, and the wherehouse wasn't approaching terabytes.

8. Language, speaking historically, began to dominate as a mode of representing things because it didn't move; it didn't even depend upon the existence of the writer, or knowing anything about her. The separation of an author from the text, itself, gave the written word the power to exist over time, and across place. Yet, it is important to note, the information in a text radically depended on this method of representation. It could not be extracted out of the sentences written. As even the best translators know: something is always lost.

9. Getting back to Levy, he emphasizes that what we care about in the real world use of the page is the information on it, as if it can be extracted. As a writer, however, he no doubt knows this really isn't the case. If you lose a paragraph you've spent hours on perfecting, sometimes you never get it back--this information wasn't extractable, even by the brain which arranged it in the first place. Text can shift mediums--though with losses; text cannot be separated into a how and a what; writing is really a series of ever-bound howwhat activities, the doing creating the being.

10. Actions as movements, however, can be separated from their information. Levy's example is of moving a file and moving a file to the trash. "That's the essence of the action." The history of machines is a history of analyzing human movements, breaking them down into precise sequences, and then mechanizing them.

The point of this involved deconstruction of metaphor in two pages of Insanely Great is not to nit-pick Steve Levy's amazingly informative and strong book, but rather, to encourage interaction designers to slow down our talk and thought.

Let's not push our sense of past accomplishments so hard that they're not recognizable, i.e. such that we forget what they were: the improvements made to computers over what came before. The Desktop Environment GUI, for most people, was better than the command line--though many argue (correctly) that on a Microsoft PC, the GUI created a whole host of other problems.

The Desktop Environment, developed as it was from real-world office analogies, lost a great deal when it translated real-world movement onto two-dimensional screens. And neither the Desktop Environment or the Command Line may be necessary to utilize the lightning-fast microprocessors and huge storage capacity, available today--as Apple's newest innovations suggest: no point and click, but rather: touch and push. We've lost the mouse: what next?

By assuming that programmed-based interaction or GUI-fronted interaction are the starting point in future human-computer interaction, we forget how we got to each, and why--and prevent ourselves from imagining a world without them. Once the laptop became a staple in computing, the Desktop Environment GUI no longer needed to be the governing metaphor. The smaller the components get, the more devices in which they can be found--and in countless more locations and of course (and obviously) outside the office.

The Desktop Environment GUI may, in 2008, now be overdetermining what a GUI should be. And note that it is now the office which is changing: now the office has to keep up with the tools on which it depends (and we work everywhere; alas, no longer do we have delineated spaces and times, a whatwhen corresponding to the computers' wherewhat).

Stop, here, and take a deep breath--and realize: the implementation of the Desktop Environment GUI--an office metaphor--has changed the real-world environment upon which the metaphor was based! Should we now say, "The embodied metaphor kills its medium"? (Is there an Oedipal-Freudian message lurking behind the latest flat-screen?)

More seriously: if we're not very careful in talking designer-to-designer, we risk applying our misunderstood successes to the wrong things. For instance, now creating a world of digital texts devoid of an appreciation for what writing is, resulting in a "world" made up of information mountains rather than "good books"; that is, something in a digital universe one must surmount rather a place in which one happily gets lost.

We rest on the laurels of the insanely great who came before us instead of creating something else--new information-handling rituals, altogether.

Rosenberg on Engineers and Artists

2007-05-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

“Is programming a kind of creative writing?" asks Scott Rosenberg, author of Dreaming in Code. His exploration of this question seems so counter-intuitive in the coding/programming worlds, that I excerpt some if it here:

"...The notions seems outlandish at first blush. Any discipline that involves complex mathematics and symbolic logic does not seem to share the same cubbyhole with poetry and self-expression. Yet the programming field could learn much from the writing world, argues Richard Gabriel, a veteran of the Lisp and object-oriented programming worlds who is now a Distinguished Engineer at Sun. ‘My view is that we should train developers the way we train creative people like poets and artists. People may say, ‘Well, that sounds really nuts.’ But what do people do when they’re being trained, for example, to get a fine arts in poetry? They study great works of poetry. Do we do that in our software engineering disciplines? No. You don’t look at the source code for great pieces of software. Or look at the architecture of great pieces of software. You don’t look at their design. You don’t study the lives of great software designers. So you don’t study the literature of the thing you’re trying to build.’”
“Gabriel’s enthusiasm for the notion of programming as creative writing is not purely abstract: in the 1990s, he took three years off from his career to get an MFA in creative writing and to write a poem a day...Gabriel is a radical in his field––’Everything we’ve done in software for the last fifty years should be literally deleted,” he says. Most programmers are not likely to flock to MFA programs...” (p.300).

And with this, INFORMATICS411 returns... :)