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.