Excerpts from
DOORS OF PERCEPTION
mediamatic, Amsterdam 1994
Norbert Bolz (The deluge of Sense)
Splash and thrill are the standards of the modern pace of life. And I maintain that this speed-culture can't be reflected in books. The modern environment of texts changes incessantly. It is as omnipresent as the electric light. The message of electric light is the pure information of its radiation. That applies to mass communication, too: The true message of a piece of news is the inhuman velocity of its transmission.
The flood of information does not imply knowledge. Mass communication does not provide orientation. The deluge of sense does not make sense. On the contrary: the exposure to stimuli of information overload is strongest and most fascinating if the recipient is not able to make use of it. The history of the forms of communication proves that the medium is the message: information displaces the reciprocal forms of communication, and splash and thrill supersede information. So the principles of mass media broadcasting prevail: news value, brevity, everything within everybody's grasp - and, most important: incoherence between the messages. These principles render information immune from experience.
The selection principle that turns data into events is called sensation, splash, thrill. Mass media function as a kind of schematism. This schematism of mass media mediates between people and the contingency of the world. In other words: The schematism of mass media produces reality as an effect of selection beyond human experience. Furthermore it forms the operative fiction, that everyone takes part in a common reality of one world.
Gillian Crampton Smith (TheArt of Interaction)
We certainly seem to see a change in the balance of culture, from the symbolic, the verbal, to the iconic, the image-based. Western culture is already strongly oriented towards film and television. Interactive media will tip the balance further. ... Our challenge today is to discover, drawing on the tradition and techniques of the visual arts, how to forge a new language of interaction design. It is to incorporate in the design of software the judgement and skill of artist-designers to make user interfaces that are powerful, subtle and pleasurable. There are no recipes for interaction design. It is an art, for which there is no quick fix. The practice of our art is in its infancy and, as Kandinsky wrote in 1914, 'in real art, theory does not precede practice, but follows her'. We can draw practical and philosophical sustenance from two and a half thousand years of patient and passionate visual research. We see further and go faster if we ride on the shoulders of the past.
Michael Heim (Nature and Cyberspace)
Most people know the funny but true definition of cyberspace:"Cyberspace is where your credit card money exists even when your pockets are empty." People today are familiar with cyberspace and have come to put their faith in electronic computer networks, television satellites, electronic banking, and global phone connections. Like our money, our daily lives move in and out of electronic space as we watch international news, speak to long-distance friends, and read our airline destinations from computer screens. The word "cyberspace" now belongs to standard American English.
Bill McKibben: Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly, if at all is the result of a subtly warped perspective. Changes in our world which can affect us can happen in our lifetime not just changes like wars but bigger and more sweeping events. Without recognising it, we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change I believe that we are at the end of nature.
In hot pursuit of nature's secrets, humans had attained the knowledge promised in Francis Bacon's dream of a New Atlantis. But soon enough the Technopolis began losing some of its charm as the dream turned into an urban nightmare. Today, the debate continues as we worry about the holes in the planet's deteriorating ozone layer, as toxic wastes seep into our ground water, and as global economists seek alternate energy sources to replace fossil fuels. This is the actual context in which human beings have learned to pronounce the words "cyberspace" and "virtual reality."
Whereas natural things spring from seeds within seed-bearing plants and animals, the creations by artifice derive from the plans of an outside agent. Even God the Creator, according to medieval theology, works like an artist who designs the natura naturans so that nature can reproduce itself. Art has always gotten its meaning from completing, improving, or simply replacing nature, always by contrast to things that are natural. From this point of view, cyberspace is unnatural in the extreme. Cyberspace is pure human artifact.
"Not to muse is to think," wrote a Chinese sage. He goes on to warn:
It is a pity that our competitive Age of Institutions has placed such a premium on the
technique of thinking that, as a cultural group,
we are rapidly losing the art of musing. When
was the last time that you sat before the
fireplace on a crisp winter night or lay on the
grass on a balmy spring day and enjoyed some
delightful and thoroughly permeating musing?
Siu in Ch'i: A Neo-Taoist Approach to Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), p. 25.
Thinking guided by the computer will grow narrow and sharp. But sharpness is not all. Taoist philosophers would have us keep in mind a more natural state, a more relaxed mental openness in which things can emerge unplanned and unexpected. Rather than consciously willing, we can enter a state of No-Mind no particular or consciously narrowed aim governs our attention. The musing state of mind operates on a plane that is more sensitive and more complex than consciously controlled thought. It is not wild in the sense of undisciplined or wanton. Musing is "not thinking" because precise thinking is merely a subset of the creative mentality.
Derrick de Kerckhove machines are becoming intelligent and in no time they will also acquire a self. We don't know that much about a self but we do know that it's not that difficult to programme one.
Bert Mulder We create more and more information, we create more and more tools to shape information, and we find out that we're left nowhere.
Should we follow Ivan Illich and call it 'specific counter-productivity'? The health system makes us sick, the educational system makes us stupid and the transport system immobilises us. The information systems make things meaningless. "We have met the enemy and he is us," Pogo would say.
How does information turn into information? until now we viewed information as a static product. And by ignoring its contextual relatedness we have surprised ourselves: all of a sudden we lose its meaning. But when we look closely we see that the loss of meaning is not a decrease of something, but the opposite: the increase of possible relationships. It devalues the existing one. How are we to interpret something when many interpretations are possible?
Experimentation will substitute interpretation. (Gilles Deleuze)
The information age creates new contexts for information. But what makes us feel homeless is that it de-constructs the old contexts of information.
How did we handle information before? Our standard context for information was people. People not only kept information, but integrated it and gave it meaning through the context they brought with them.
The development of computers de-constructed the human context and constructed a disembodied machine context. Information lives in machines. And since machines don't think or anticipate we have to do that ourselves, a task we are not used to. The implicit context is gone and we need explicit context management. The information age means is the availability of information in machines, not the availability of information for people.
Information technology dis-connects and makes things re-connectable in many ways. It moves things out of their known context and places it inside information tools to create new contexts. We never did that. We were used to one context that developed slowly and were never context hoppers. Look at our newspapers. They supply us with information and assume context. Reading the paper gives you information but doesn't give you enough to decide for yourself. Few people writing for papers place their contributions in context: they report events.
Meaning does not dis-appear; we have to identify it and make it real by ascertaining it. We have to choose the context that fits us. It's the problem of post-modernist (dis)integration. That brings us back to the title of the presentation: can we use design to restore meaning?
Context makes information meaningful. But if it means something to me, does that make it knowledge? There is a difference between knowledge and meaning. A work of art may carry great meaning for me and not consist of reasoning or give me a model of reality. It is not discursive: it cannot be expressed in any other form than itself. Artistic products are not discursive, they are evocative. They call forth meaning from the feeling heart. When we ponder meaning we should take both the heart and the mind into consideration. When we think about knowledge, we think about discursive systems and reasoning.
Knowledge
Knowledge turns up when we infer models from all our experiences. We recognise consistencies in our perceptions from which we can create models about the world. From these we can make predictions about that world that allow us to act.
We develop knowledge by examining our perceptions, categorising, inferring patterns and refining models about the behaviour of the things we perceive. We relate information to other information, and develop the patterns that emerge so that they are stable representations of the things we saw. We shift levels of abstraction. No longer are the individual chunks of information important, but the relations between them. These models then determine the way we look at the world and develop more knowledge. We cast them as a net onto the world and harvest our perceptions. The knowledge we have determines the knowledge we get.
When we talk about knowledge we tend to favour the knowing something. But 'knowledge' is not a single thing. We can distinguish different kinds of knowledge:
Knowing why something happens differs from knowing how to do something. Knowing whether something will happen is different from knowing something about something. We favour a context that is technological and disembodied. It makes us think in terms of propositional knowledge where 'true or false' carry greater weight than 'good or bad'.
To know why
To know that
To know something
To know whether
To know how
Jeet Singh: What would happen if we design something that help people do things that they've always done?