As we braid our lives, we braid our modes: A belated Clive Thompson post

This post is going to be a little clipped, as it has undergone some serious attempts at thwarting me. After reading Clive Thompson's Smarter Than You Think (with all my notes in the margins), I lost the thing on the day I sat down to write this. Damn you physical objects! And then I wracked my brain to hash together a post with the few digital notes I had, pressed 'Save' on a draft in blogger, had blogger announce to me that it had saved, then came back the next day and the draft had reverted to my first few sentences. Damn you digital objects! 

You just can't win. 

Anyway, third time's the charm, and though this may not be as comprehensive of the text as I'd originally planned, by god at least it will be something.

Luckily, I've committed one of my favorite parts of Clive Thompson's text to my brain pretty extensively. That part has to do not so much with the notion of lifelogging, but the implications of it. The implications that nailed me were connections and shocking similarities in how we communicate experiences (or our attempts to recreate and attempts to evoke experiences and ideas) versus how we originally experience those experiences.

 Thompson shows that our default mode of memory tends to be very organic, braided, or what he calls experiential. As Thompson says, "When you visit Paris and have wonderful time drinking champagne at a café,  your personal experience is an episodic memory. Your ability to remember that Paris is a city and champagne is an alcoholic beverage —thats semantic memory" (116). In other words, the human brain hates trying to memorize isolated snippets. What it's really good at is remembering things in relation to every other thing. I hypothesize this has to do with the tightly braided nature of our bodies' senses. Hang with me here. 

Remembering way back to Porter, we talked as a class about how all texts are a series of cross-references; by means of our connecting and assembling them to other texts, we make sense of them. Every communication (i.e. 'text') links to and is threaded between other texts and ideas that we the writer and later we the reader have been exposed to. Reading Thompson's description of experiential memory, it makes a lot more sense to me as to why this is. Our senses are separate, but in the act of an experience they are indivisible, each contributing their own chord to the overall symphony of the moment. Our senses braid together our experiences into perceptions without even realizing it; it's only natural that when we go to recreate them (in any form) we can never rely on 'one modality' alone. There is no such thing as communication with one modality, or that is 'self-referential', just as (and perhaps because) there is no such thing as a meaningful experience in one modality, or sense. We build meaning from combination of experience, and communicate it in the same way. 

(A kind-of tangent: In his book 'The Spell of the Sensuous', David Abram makes the argument that this is why the mysterious, varied, and largely unknowable facets of the natural world are what allow us to live full and sensible lives: the more raw material we can braid experiences from, the more sense we can make in any other circumstance as a human being.)

Now for the fascinating implications of this. Because we cannot experience things monomodally, when we are faced with attempts at communication that utilize very limited modes (for example. alphabetic text, which, even though it utilizes its own slew of modes [spacial format, font/icon construction, paragraph arrangement, style, etc] is still relatively limited in the face of authentic experience engaging all the senses), our bodies begin groping for deeper connections. We take in alphabetic text with one sense—our eyes—but with that one sense engage all the others. Because we have built experiences for ourselves out of tightly braided clusters of sensory perception, even limited modes can invoke a lush wash of references with extremely little comparative input. Take the word "cold". Immediately, it's not just our eyes that are engaged; unless we're carving down a ski slope sans goggles, our eyes are more or less indifferent to the sensation of 'cold'. However, our eyes and their vision remember all the things that they have braided into our experienced we also relate to cold. We hear cold and we see snowflakes falling perhaps, maybe we smell wet gloves in a stuffy schoolbus, or feel snow that's fallen off of pine branches onto our neck and is now dripping down our backs. You get the picture. All of that latent sensory information is threaded (however vaguely and abstractly) through the word cold without we as writers even having to mention it. That's all stuff that readers bring to the table on their own. Of course, they're not going to reliably come to the specific imagery that I described just with the word 'cold'. That's where a few more sensory words and some specific imagery comes in. 

There are pros and cons here, right? Just because our experiential memories are tightly braided and easy to recall, doesn't mean that they're accurate. As Thompson says, though our brain's recall is instantaneous and hugely comprehensive, it contains very limited accuracy as far as nailing every detail every time (32). And of course since communications in this definition need to rely on reader's experiences rather than our own to convey our ideas, notions of true control go out the window. But on the one hand, readers have their own experiential memories that are more vivid, beautiful, and full than anything any combination of communicative modes could convey, let alone transfer (I'd argue that there's no such thing as communicative transferral, being as how all communication is collaborative and dependent on these others' experiences, as we're seeing). We can whip up some specific, inclusive imagery (not just poetically, either: in any genre—whether through uses and benefits outlined in a grant proposal, tangible steps taken in a scientific lab or report, applications for pedagogical theory to real-life, or sensory descriptions in poetry and prose) and others'  experiences will take them out of our hands and make them their own. But on the other hand, this requires a relinquishing of control that a lot of traditional writers aren't ready to embrace. 

What I'm planning on arguing in my CPE is that the more we relinquish that control and let other's use their own vivid experiences to build true meaning, the more meaning our communications will be able of instigating. 

The trouble with trying to count to three via online videos.

How much lagtime is possible before communication
is no longer communication?

After watching these talks I had the curious sense that, like a perfect heist team, each was filling in each other's gaps with their own points and skills to make a truly robust network of ideas. In the end, I had to admit that I could see how it might (hypothetically) change the world.

The main theme here I found throughout—the latent potential of human possibility which arises in particular conditions of shared interest—fascinated me. It made me think differently about the definition of a team, how all it really takes to make a team are the three constituents Chris Anderson talks about—the crowd, the light, and the desire. With McGonigal moving from those constituents to the potential implications, I thought these two talks were the backbone of this quartet. 

Although I bought into Anderson's three constituents for networks, one hesitation I had was the extent of his jump to how effective Internet video was in being able to utilize them. For example, though I thought that his forwarding YouTube as the printing press for oral communication was spot on… But I think that in saying video globalizes oral communication jumps to some conclusions as to what oral communication actually is in the first place. You'd have to agree, first of all, that online video is analogous to face-to-face communication, when I think this is a stretch. Rather than actual communication, I think that online video is closer to what Clive Thompson would call 'experiential memory', only shared or communal experiential memory—what Wikipedia might be described as doing for 'semantic memory'—rather than true face-to-face communication. As Thompson wrote, in Aristotle's Phaedrus, "Semantic storage was shifting from inside the brain to outside" (117), and for Gordon Bell and his peers doing their 'lifelogging', episodic memory was going in the same direction. These internet videos are a huge reserve of communal memories—they let us share memories, I feel, mores than truly communicate with them. 

What the printing press did for alphabetic text with its shared written ideas and symbolically-induced experience, online video's tightly-braided modalities does for visually-induced experiences and the storage of experiential memory.  (even though I would argue that alphabetic text can contain just as vivid of experiential memories too, but since more freedom is given to the reader as far as what experience he or she gets out of it, it's perhaps less authentic to the original experience than what the tightly braided modes of video can capture—as Anderson's example with the 'Jove' platform proves). 
It's true—watching videos and being able to respond to them weaves a lot more information (and information the human brain decodes in very adept ways, as Anderson states) than alphabetic text.  Videos can contain nuances of expressions to inflections to gestural implications—the whole gamut. But our ability immediately respond and control the flow of information as we would be able to in true face-to-face communication is severely clipped. The comments and responses possible are, though quick, not immediate, and like Anderson says, they're not exactly as eloquent as or as information-packed as a face-to-face reply might be. Of course, we toss videos back and forth across the web (oftentimes even targeted at a single entity) with gusto and great speed— but at its heart the conversations here are, like alphabetic writing, done only in retrospect.

I could see how our technologies are rising to this challenge, however. The up-and-coming social media site Periscope is coming close, where you are pinged when those you follow are giving live broadcasts which you can then tune into. Though it doesn't give the option to broadcast yourself directly back at them simultaneously, but Skype is an option but outside group chats your 'networks' can't grow too large. In that regard McGonigal's talk took it even further: with games, we can interact with people in increasingly realistic ways in real time. As virtual reality pushes further into realm of real-reality, we could start to talk about true face-to-face communication happening (and, more importantly, networks like the interacting street dancers happening) long-distance.

I think that a fascinating bypass of realism is the what games, social media, and all our other communication forms are doing currently: putting us into the same team. This is different from normal competition, where it's one on one or one against many. In a team, we do feel a sense of competition and urge to do better, but we're not just doing it to prove ourselves against others: we're doing it for the good of everyone else on the team. What's more, because there are others working within the team toward a common goal, it relieves the pressure from the individual, meaning that (like Dash's Oceans 11 reference or McGonigal's hypothetical heist team) everyone is contributing with their strengths. 

A fascinating combination of talks. 

Methods vs Theories

I was really excited for this Johnson-Eilola reading when at the outset he was talking about listing specific teaching strategies for dealing with this slew of new media. I thought in the beginning that he did a fair job in his ultimate consensus: we are "comfortable with postmodernism."

I have to admit that I was disappointed, however, that the actual strategies and teaching/exploration methods he lists really don't go out of their way to break any new ground or ever go beyond theory as far as what we could cover. His two main examples are symbolic-analytic work ("bringing together multiple, fragmented contexts in an attempt to broker solutions" (201), and articulation (which "situates itself within a postmodern context… (breakdown, fragmentation) as a cultural situation" and "provides a way for thinking about how meaning is constructed contingently, from pieces of other meanings and social forces that tend to prioritize one meaning over another" (202).
I thought the closest he really got to anything that would really have satisfied me was when on page 202 he says, "And would writing  teachers even recognize this text when they saw it?" I saw this as basically an admission that right now, all this exists almost exclusively as theory, and though we are getting more and more comfortable with that theory, we don't really have any new breakthroughs on specific practices, methods, or strategies that help us to apply these theories into truly fresh practices. It seems that, at the moment, the best we can manage is to use the same practices (writing, photographs, design, etc) in new forms (blogs, rich text documents, etc). But do these new combinations really count as new forms of expression, or just old forms of expression with new theories orbiting around them, especially when these theories don't seem to actually be influencing the forms much in ways that we can proactively control, only retroactively recognize?

In other words, it seems like down at its true nuts and bolts, all this "new media" we're working with isn't actually new. It's just new combinations of old tried-and-true methods of communication. By some definitions this is new of course, but even going back to Porter's Intertext, as Johnson-Eilola hints, doesn't completely line up here. This isn't so much 'making something new with old combinations' but 'applying new theories and ways of thinking onto the old recombining we were already doing'.  Even the Intertext still contains fragments of different texts in relation to a whole. It makes me think: if Johnson-Eilola and everyone else we've read so far don't have any truly tangible strategies, are we already actually using these recombined forms as effectively as we are currently able? In other words, maybe we're already more competent in the technical minutiae of New Media practices than we realize, since 'New Media' or 'New Writing' is nothing more than 'Old Media' or 'Old Writing' except with more and more possible combinations. In that case, the main tool we have, as Johnson-Eilola hints, is not 'new strategies' (we "wouldn't recognize them if we saw them") but instead what we really need to change here is our methods of thinking, or "be critical" of the system we've been participating in since cave-drawings, as he says on page 212.

I've been reading a lot of David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, and in it he writes "it is first the sensuous, perceptual world that is relational and weblike in character, and hence that the organic, interconnected structure of any language is an extension or echo of the deeply interconnected reality of the sensorial reality itself" (84). In other words, both reality and texts of all kinds have always been interconnected, down to the level of the molecule and beyond. It's just that we're starting to realize it more and more. It makes me think, more and more, that nothing's actually changing except for our Aristotelian philosophies of mind and body (and even that change, admittedly, is glacial). However, it's that change that we really should be focusing on here, as I think Johnson-Eilola's lack of any true 'techniques' or 'strategies' attests. Of course on a broad level yes, we need to be thinking about how we consume texts of different kinds of continually evolving texts, from rich text files to video to music. But is seems like, for now at least, "being critical" about our methods and theories is the best defense we have, and the closest we have to real strategy.

Infographic Process Reflection

The first thing I found strange about this process was that, more than any other requirement yet for this class, I felt the form was given more priority than the content. I don't know why this paralyzing conundrum didn't come up in the A/V project; maybe deep down video is is more a more familiar form of expression to me than an infographic. The latter is certainly entirely new territory.

Needless to say, late Thursday evening when I found myself finally free from the hospital and the ensuing whirlwind of necessary atmosphere re-entering, I found myself with a form in need of content, and a disturbing lack of (or perhaps more accurately too many half-formed) brainstorms on what to fill it with. Late yesterday afternoon, I was still in the same boat.

When I sit down to write, I'm not sitting down to write because I want to "make writing". The form, in other words,  is not primary reason I am sitting down. I do that because I already have an idea which I am confident, through previous experience, that writing will allow me to convey. It will do this largely by getting out of my way, or appearing to, anyway, because of how familiar the form has become to me. In well-versed and well-practiced forms like this, the form and the content can play well together because I am used to them playing well together. I know the pitfalls of one, and the strengths of the other.

But infographics are new territory, like I said. When I finally settled on a topic, I knew a lot of the different things that I wanted to say, but being unfamiliar with the form (and limited by the technology; we'll get to that in a minute) I found myself falling back to ungainly middle strategies I've used in the past for posters, advertisements, quote pages, and the like. Looking back, I used a lot of typographical and color flair like I would with any of these mediums, and a whole-lot-of-not-flair in the one category infographics perhaps really shine: space.

To be fair, I was limited somewhat by this with the technology I chose. Being familiar with powerpoint and wanting to wade out into the sea of fledgling internet-apps, I chose Canva and, after about two hours when I was running into some serious limitations of template size, graphic and graph limitations, and the slow, slow, slow pace it made my Firefox run (It's not yet usable on Safari), I was wanting to flee back to the boxy familiarity of powerpoint with no shame. I admit I opened powerpoint up and played around for a half hour or so trying to imitate my design, but Canva did have one thing going for it: it looks slick, and that was something the poster-expert side of my brain was not wanting to give up.

I realized by the end that by exporting multiple canvases out of Canva you could potentially splice them together to make a single canvas, and at the speed the web app was running by the end I can see why they limit your size to what it is. But the whole prospect of conjuring some splicing wizardry plus making a whole 'nother canvas by that time was feeling like a bad dream, so I took the single canvas I had and called it good.

So, speaking of good, let's start with the bad.
Infographics are so called, at least in part, because of their lovely ability to have graphical pictures. Yet my entire project contains a grand total of one bottle (Although a sexily translucent bottle, if we're being honest here). Though Canva has an impressive array of icons, and though admittedly an impressive number of them are free, they're arranged in a way that is exceedingly difficult to navigate, and with my already limited space, none of them seemed specific enough or graphically useful enough to pull their own weight with the tight space I was working with. They were very general, and for the life of me I could find none that really lined up with what I was doing (Even the bottle, if you notice, looks more like glass than plastic, so even that was a stretch). Thus, limited by Canva's graphical selection, I relied a lot more on its sexy typography, and, limited by its set size, I relied a lot more on significantly less-sexy chunks of text rather than really spreading out and using the graphic to push and pull reader's eyes in unusual and enticing directions. My infographic reads, surprise surprise, a lot like a paragraph or a bulleted list or a slick informational poster — right back into territory I'm familiar with.

The good of course is that I do believe that it looks pretty. I think towards the end I was getting better at compressing complex information into the bare, slim essentials, which was a good lesson in itself. All told, however, I think that, like any new form, it's going to take a lot of practice before I can sit down not to 'make an infographic', but to have an idea and sit down to express it, 'in infographic form'.

Plastic Planet Infographic

CPE Proposal

So I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking on the sensual nature of language. (Not to be confused with "a lot of close reading and time spent with sensual language", which would be more erotic but probably less relevant to this email). Our discussions in class on the false borders between idea and structure have made me think about the fact that writing/traditional text, despite its abstraction and men's best intentions over the years, is not even close to being "removed" from the realm of the sensual (thanks, physics!). We access and experience texts and the ideas therein like we access and experience every other thing in our reality: through our senses. Not only that, but the act of sensing is by definition an act of individual creation. Writing, therefore, like Bernhardt would say, is more an act of 'leading' than 'showing', or, as McCloud would say, more an act of 'talking with' than 'talking to'. As both readers and writers, we tend to forget this, and I have a hunch that it leads to, at best, fumbling stabs by writers to hone what "good communication" is through trial and error and, at worst, some serious miscommunications, missed opportunities, and mistakes of intent. I want to know the extent to which writing is both inclusive of and dependent on the reader, and I want that to give me, as a writer, specific strategies and tools for making all my texts more engaging, effective, and accurate. (Though I suspect my current definitions of those words may melt in my hands as I go forward)

(And I'm suspecting texts in any form, but for sanity's sake let's keep our first focus here on alphabetic text)

To find out more about this and to shape my inquiry, I'm going to do as much reading as I possibly can between now and December. The texts I'm planning on starting out with are David Abram's 'The Spell of the Sensuous', our very own, good ol' McCloud (I have his other book, 'Making Comics', too), and Maurice Perleau-Monty's 'Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language'. I also have Perleau-Monty's Phenomenology of Perception on order and am most excited about that one, as so many texts I'm geeking out over are referencing it. 

What I'm most worried about is nailing down some kind of specific strategies to answer (I know you said don't use that word) to my question. Amassing theory is all well and good, but I want to distill that into tangible practices, and for that I think I would need some scientific data or math or something. Yikes. Worst case scenario at this point is that I'll just have to read even more to give my own hypotheses and conjectures enough weight that I can convince myself they're valid. I feel conversation with the pros (we have Zach Bean and Rick Bass at our disposal) will be about as "scienced" as we'll be able to get this shit. If anyone has any other suggestions for research, I'm certainly all ears.

As for what form this piece will take, right now I'm thinking that a multimodal essay (photos, charts, curious text screenshots and examples, etc) is where I'm going to start, but who knows — things might get trippy. I'm going to be talking a lot about experience and the senses, so a physical essay with physical non-essay components can't be ruled out.

All told, I'm excited to see where that part will go, but for now, I'm going to to try to amass some readings and see where she goes.

Form + Function

"Form follows function — that has been misunderstood. 

Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union." 

—Frank Lloyd Wright

In these readings' (and videos') discussions of idea and form, I got to thinking a lot about the inevitability of both. More specifically, I got to thinking about how everything we make has some body or form, however transient, and some idea or intention, however slight. We often say that something has more or less form, like alphabetic writing is more 'masculine' or photo albums are more 'tactile', but I think that making those distinctions can also be dangerous, because it suggests differences in how we consume things. Really, there's only one way we consume anything: through tactile or sensual experience.

Form (almost) minus function. (Body - Intent)

Therefore, instead of thinking about how we can make alphabetic writing more 'bodily', can we embrace the fact that it obviously already has body, and work to make the body that it has more effective without changing the medium itself?

Let's make like Berlow and zoom out for a minute. Over on the visual arts side of campus, a subject that comes up a lot is the Bauhaus. This was a school of design that held the motto "form follows function". They believed that the form of an object — its design or physicality — should always be changed or messed with only if it did not negatively affect (and hopefully in fact benefited) an object's function, or intent. What's curious about the Bauhaus is that they were revolutionary in their teaching methods: they did not discriminate between the disciplines of architecture, design, construction, and art. Yet they insisted on polarizing form and function.

Like the paradigms we were breaking last week, we can see how easily these polarities crack. On the left and right I have two objects: the one, a drop of ink in a glass of water. It is a form, (almost) without a function — it has a physical body, is complex and aesthetic, yet its body and aestheticism is not aligned or condensed toward any particular function, or purpose.  The other is an industrial chair. It is a function, (almost) without a form. It has intent, it has a very clearly articulated purpose, but only (comparatively) limited thought has been given on its aesthetic, or its body. Put another way, those terrible school chairs you sit in all day have zero lumbar support because they're made with the idea of sitting in without taking into account how best to embody that function effectively.

Function (almost) minus form (Intent - Body)

Zooming back in a bit, we can see that this fails to take into account that by merely existing, something cannot escape the physical form. Form is how we experience any idea, or function/intent. And it fails to take into account that by merely being created intentionally, something cannot escape function, or motivation of purpose. If all this compartmentalizing and term-labeling has been confusing up to this point, this is why: as conscious, bodily beings we automatically want and need to merge form and function, we want to see them both as they are: indivisible. All distinction between them becomes fuzzy because, as with the clashes we're running into with Berhardt, McCandless, Solomon, and the others, you can't change form without changing function. And you can't have form without function. As McCandless goes into, by giving form to things, we can 'shape' the data — we can give it some body. By definition, form and idea are inseparable. You change the presentation, you change the idea itself. Therefore, data visualization is a way of changing that data. It is a way of personalizing data and controlling how people consume it. By singling out certain criteria, by showing things in certain groupings or patterns, we are giving it a new body and therefore a new life.

What I loved about Bernhardt was that he met alphabetic text where is (at least before he got into the Wetland flyer examples). He dissects the patterns (the forms) we look for in text, and how they are inseparable from and intrinsic to the meaning. He explains that in non-visual text, rhetorical control is exercised through "familiar strategies of essay composition… with each section performing particular functions" (67). However, on the next page he says that "this characterization of expository text is based on one sort of writing, that enshrined in the handbooks of our trade" (68). But the ideas are seeming to push that all discourses have a set of ethos, a set of expectations and requirements of varying strictness, and it is through these subconscious sequences of expectations and fulfillments or expectations and failures that meaning of a non-visual text is made or lost. Alphabetic-textual stories come in different styles, in other words: Lab report, novel, manifesto, constitution, poem, menu, screenplay, program code, crime report, personal notes, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

What I'm wondering is where that pattern means that down to the sentence, (down to the letter, if you want to get anal about it) form is essential to meaning. In bodies of alphabetic text, form is largely begotten by pattern, or the structure of repetition. This thing largely considered formless (Bernhardt uses the word 'homogenized') does indeed have a form, then, however much the masculine ideals in the past would like to say that through writing they have developed 'pure idea', or however much in this class we talk about 'improving' that homogenized text through photo, design, structure, or the like.

But I have a hunch that there's more magic to alphabetic text than just the forms we can see. Because there are whole other forms that arise as we make connections and do all that lovely internal closure stuff with text. That is what fascinates me about alphabetic text. Not its lack of form, but its latent form, the kind that can only be expanded by readers. No question, the forms Bernhardt describes are wonderfully useful in getting our meanings across. But our word choices within those visible forms create a form in our heads that is much less tangible, and more luminous.

Down to our cells, we are built of the union of form and function. Why can't our texts?