“A lot of people think or believe or know they feel (experience) — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling (experiencing). Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel (experience). Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel (experience), you’re nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
Buckminster Fuller, from “Critical Path”
The computerized information revolution is mostly amplifying the little part of our minds that we could call the analytical or logical mind. Left brain. You know, where we try to focus on some facts in order to deduce their logical consequences. The same part of our mind that is incapable of focusing on more than 5-7 different things at the same time.
But we’re not getting much help for the bigger part of our minds, the sub-conscious, the intuitive, the wholistic, the right brain. Which probably is atrophying rapidly.
Oh, the internet world has lots of raw material one could be creative and intuitive with. But it is not particularly wired to amplify our wholistic, intuitive way of seeing things.
I get back to dimensions again. The space of information we now live in has a great many dimensions to it, many more dimensions than we’ve lived in before, many more degrees of freedom. Yet all our tools have only a very small number of dimensions to them, and many limits and restrictions. You move around on the net and read documents, you can get lists of them, organize them on your desktop. You use an assortment of different applications that all have their own features, limitations and peculiarities. Much of that is cool. But all of it either has too few dimensions or not access to the data I’d want to see.
I’d want to not just have access to 100 billion articles, but more direct access to the actual information sources. Visual, auditory, kinesthetic channels, digital channels, all the raw numbers. And I’d want to be able to organize and visualize that as it suits me. Again, not as a catalog of articles, but as a mostly visual information space with many dimensions. And, since I can’t make sense of it all alone, I need ways of navigating in multi-dimensional information spaces shared with others, and model shared meaning within them.
I’d certainly need the semantic web along the way there, or something better. A universal way of storing information so that it can be cross-related with any other information at will.
As to how to look at it, I don’t know how exactly that will look, but I do know it has to be several quantum leap paradigm shift orders of magnitude above the collaborative newspaper interface we have to the net today.
It can happen in many small steps, of course. Google Earth and iPhone multi-touch interfaces go in that direction. Simple intuitive ways of accessing vast amounts of information quickly, without it ever getting complicated. More clever inventions like that might take us somewhere.
Anyway, back to Heiner’s article a bit. He references some concepts and terms that hint at some of the thinking needed. And envisioned solutions like:
COGNITIVE PANORAMA
A conceptual superstructure that defines and identifies topics as logical places, displays relations and connections within these topics or issues”
This concept has been introduced by H. BENKING. The following comments are BENKING’s explanations, plucked from a series of papers and lectures (see bibliography)
“The cognitive panorama is a metaparadigm to counteract cyberculture’s anticipated impact due to its: 1)open-ended universality, 2) loss of meaning’ 3) loss of context”
It is now obvious that we risk drowning in an ocean of incoherent data which could lead us to total conceptual anarchy.
According to Benking, the proposed cognitive panorama “allows us to embody and map concepts in their context and develop common frames of reference”
Such a conceptual superstructure ” helps us to locate and become aware of: 1) what we know or miss, 2) where we are and what we think, 3) where we miss, underuse or manipulate information. By avoiding a “flat” chaotic mess of data which leads to the known “lost-in space” syndrome, we actually define cognitive spaces.
Through reflection on conceptual positions, outlining and embodying situations or topics (logical places or containers) we can follow meaning into embodied context and semantic spaces, and also scrutinize abstract “realities” by exploring participatory and collaboratory approaches.
®Conceptual navigation; Convertilibilty of meanings; Ecocube; Harmonization; Knowledge map; Underconceptualization
Yeah, I’d like one of those.
I think humanity has the potential for a great evolutionary leap, or several. But just like software lags years behind the capabilities of hardware, our information structures lag years behind the actual information. I hope we somehow can catch up, so I can feel a little less blind.
source: Ming the Mechanic
BU SİTEYE ERİŞİM ENGELLENMİŞTİR
ANKARA 1. SULH CEZA MAHKEMESİ, 12/03/2008 tarih ve 2008/251 nolu kararı gereği bu siteye erişim TELEKOMÜNİKASYON İLETİŞİM BAŞKANLIĞI’nca engellenmiştir.Access to this web site is banned by “TELEKOMÜNİKASYON İLETİŞİM BAŞKANLIĞI” according to the order of: ANKARA 1. SULH CEZA MAHKEMESİ, 12/03/2008 of 2008/251.
our freedom of the internet is again put under restraint…first it was because of pkk propaganda and now its insults against Ataturk, but I dont seem to buy it because regardless of the offensive content which is in no doubt a minority, the Telecommunications Ministry is not prudent enough in their policy’s, as the authority’s concerned should be able to communicate with youtube to find a way to clean out the offending material…we might not have the luxury to be apolitic in a world of injustice, but when it comes to artistic concerns, and access to material that is productive, I really prefer not to take any notice in political content.
…the old (and new) ’music of climax’ is no longer the prevailing model. for all things are now equal and no one thing is given any priority over any other thing.
merce cunningham summed up the implications of this situation where priorities no longer exist, where every item is of equal value, as early as 1952:
“now I can’t see that crisis any longer means a climax, unless we are willing to grant that every breath of wind has a climax (which I am), but then that obliterates climax being a surfeit of such. and since our lives, both by nature and by the newspapers, are so full of crises that one is no longer aware of it, then it is clear that life goes on regardless, and further that each thing can be and is seperate from each and every other, viz: the continuity of the newspaper headlines. climax is for those who are swept by New Year’s Eve”
source: audio culture-readings in modern music, towards (a definition) of experimental music, michael nyman
an encounter with one of my pursuits; alternate visualizations of sound via Edward Tufte’s, Sparklines: Theory & Practice.
“With the dissolution of the last utopian project of Man in the name of Communism, the great specter that once haunted Europe and the rest of the world has all but vanished, leaving in its wake an ideological vacuum that is now being filled by the tentacles of globalization with its ecumenical ambition. As humanity has become mesmerized by the triumphant spell of capitalism, what remains less apparent in the aftermath of this dissolution is that the world is moving incipiently toward a threshold that is far more radical and fantastic than any utopic vision since the dawn of the Enlightenment”.
“The evolution of life and intelligence on Earth has finally reached the point where it is now deemed possible to engender something almost out of nothing.ii In principle, a universe of possible worlds based on generative principles inherent within nature and the physical universe is considered to be within the realm of the computable once quantum computing systems become a reality. For the first time, mankind is finally in possession of the power to change and transform the genetic constitution of biological species, which, without a doubt, has profound implications for the future of life on Earth”.
.journal of architecture and computation culture at http://futurefeeder.com/
