Contemplates, Detractors and Mutual Understanding

I and those close to me have noticed for many years that i am not completely “normal.”   Initially this lack of normalcy was chalked up to the fact that i was an only child.  Or that my intellectual aptitude was different.  Or that my parents were quite young when i was born.  Or any number of other factors, including the fact that i am male, from an entirely blue-collar background, the grandchild of an abusive adult alcoholic and many other factors.  This lack of normalcy manifested itself in many ways.

My parents have often recalled that, as a young child considering whether or not to do something wrong, that i would actively calculate whether or not the “crime was worth the time.”  When the payoff was good enough, i would commit the crime and do the time, often without complaint.

Later on in my teen years, my best friend and I would spend hours (often in the midst of a game of “21″ or “horse” on the basketball court) talking about what it was that made our friends, family, politicians, celebrities or other people tick.  We were fascinated with people and their actions, and with the connections between the two.

Throughout High School and College, though i loved to be around people (i was relatively popular with classmates, and went to lots of public events, parties and other get-togethers), i would frequently take off for solo trips – sometimes for days at a time – to the beach, to the mountains or to the woods where i would write poetry, read, or just think – sometimes about people, sometimes about myself and sometimes about the the ultimate nature of reality.

As long as i can remember, though i have enjoyed travel, i have generally found just as much novelty in exploring local environments or in meeting new people close to home with different ethnic, socio-economic, religious and intellectual characteristics.

I have from a very early age seen serious sports as a type of performance art, have really felt that all people are deeply equal in the eyes of their creator and should be in the eyes of their fellow people, and that it is logically impossible for me to always be right.   I have always believed that diligent, excellent work was important (though i did not always act in accordance with this belief).  People have always often told me that i am hard to “rattle,” emotionally, but other people (sometimes the same people) have noted that i tend to do things with passion.  I often am very un-impatient in long lines or delayed flights, as it gives me time to observe people as they deal with interesting social situations.

The combination of these characteristics might have been painfully enigmatic for me except for the fact that i could actually feel the combination, and have had many years to come to terms with the enigma.  Too, i have no good option but to accept this odd set of characteristics, since they seem to be the “me” that has been developing (philosophy wonks might say “being constructed”) for many years now.

Other people, on the other hand, have not fared so well with this enigma – often becoming confused in their analysis of the unifying theme, if any, which might serve to shed light on who i am.

I think i am realizing now, at the age of 38, what one of the major unifying themes might be:

Contemplation

Oft understood to be a hermit who goes to the woods or a mountain to live a life of thought separate from the world, “contemplates” have been popularly misunderstood.  Really, a true contemplate (without getting into a deep philosophical discussion here) is a person who can and does “contemplate” – views or considers with continued attention : meditates.  And this sort of meditation can occur anywhere.  It can happen on a delayed flight or in a long line.  It can occur in a local bar with a group of friends or it can occur alone on a New Hampshire mountaintop at sunrise.  It can occur on a basketball court or standing, as a 2-year old child, in front of the forbidden stereo knobs as he contemplates, meditates on, within his limited capabilities, the deeper dynamics of a moral/ethical situation before him.  In every situation, though, the contemplate has a constant longing to look beneath the surface, to understand the underlying dynamics, to get at the non-obvious things of life.

Detractors

The behavior of the contemplate can be problematic for those who are not  familiar with their way of being.  Their behavior often appears to be at best odd and at worst unhealthy.  For example, to the more extrinsically oriented, the contemplate can seem detached from her emotions when she does not immediately join a popular cause, when she does not immediately reciprocate when accosted, or when she is calm in the midst of pain or tragedy.    To the more prestige oriented, the contemplate’s lack of self-promotion can appear wishy-washy, and his lack of mutual back-slapping can make him seem withdrawn or unappreciative.  To the more fundamentally oriented, the contemplate’s unwillingness to immediately accept popularly-accepted norms seems loose and dangerous.

Mutual Understanding

There is no easy way to create mutual understanding between the contemplate and the not-so-contemplate, and perhaps there is no need, but i continue to search for ways.  It is worth noting that neither the contemplate nor the not-so-contemplate hold a higher position in my judgment.  The difference between them is not one of value, but instead of orientation to the world which then manifests itself in spirit and behavior.

Second-Order Guts

In a recent conversation with a fellow PhD student and Erik Stolterman, it occurred to me that many of us who are working within the field of design, especially within a technical field, face a unique challenge.  The challenge is that we need to develop “Second Order Guts.”

First Order Guts
In case the meaning is not immediately obvious, here it is: It takes a great deal of guts (First Order Guts) for me to accept, in my own work and life, the premise embedded within design philosophy that it is necessary, and even good, to act in the world without access to all of the information which would make it possible for me to lay out a perfect, solid, long-term plan and then to execute that plan.  This takes guts because i and the people around me live in a world which, for many reasons, still want to believe in the concept of the “long-range plan” and the notion that there really are solid, right answers to everything if we just look hard enough.

Second Order Guts
Second Order Guts are even more difficult to develop.  Second Order Guts provide us with the ability to recommend to other friends, family members, clients, students, organizations etc. that it is necessary, and even good, for them to act in a world without access to all of the answers.  I have experienced this many times now in conversations with leaders of small and large organizations who have asked for the “answers” to how they should use social media in their organization.  When my Second Order Guts have been firmly in-place, i’ve been able to persuade them to take a design approach by beginning to use social media based on a loose strategy, learning as they go (which is the best way to make sense of most complex situations).  At times when i’ve lacked the guts, though, i have wavered and stammered wanting to pretend that there are “right” answers and a “right” method.

I’ve noticed an increase in my second-order guts as i continue my research and as i talk to more and more people who are seeking answers, but i am quite sure it will be an ongoing challenge.

Of Newspapers, Content and Community

It has been well-documented that newspapers as we know them are in a major freefall in their ad revenues.

Sometimes the deeper value of something to its community of advertisers, readers, consumers, etc. is not obvious – particularly when that something has been around for a very long time. As an example of this problem, Marshall McLuhan once pointed out that IBM for many years assumed that their value was in making office equipment and business machines. It almost sunk them, until they finally realized that their real value was in processing information.[1] Unless I’m mistaken, newspapers have operated for years on the assumption that their value to readers was in great news content. I wonder, though, if their value was instead all along in giving people a sense of community – both geographic and interest-based (political, industry, etc). In 1835, Sociologist Alexis DeTocqueville wrote of America that

“They need some means of talking every day without seeing one another and of acting together without meeting. So hardly any democratic association can carry on without a newspaper.” [2]

Newspapers really took off in the late 17 and 1800’s – a time in the U.S. where the states were trying to make sense of their new found, loosely-knit country. Newspapers were really the only medium which could do that efficiently – to facilitate national communities of interest (what Tocqueville called “associations” like the political parties, etc.) as well as local communities (townships).

Perhaps what has been hurting newspapers of late (and I’m probably not the first to say this) is that they assumed that their value was in their news content, which as Esther Dyson[3] and others might say is an infinite good – producible and reproducible by anyone with a computer and a camera – even more so when there are groups of them, which happen to include experts in their midst, who are now empowered to publish at the press of a button.

Perhaps what newspapers need is to really get back to their deepest roots, where great content was only one part of their role in facilitating community-building, which is what people really paid for. I’m not exactly sure how they will do this, but i have some ideas which may be food for another post soon.

[1] McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: the extension of man. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

[2] Tocqueville, Alexis. [1835] 1988. Democracy in America. Ed. J. P. Mayer. New York: Harper Perennial.

[3] In 1995 Esther Dyson predicted that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”

HCI and Complex Systems in 4 Steps

An HCI colleague today asked me to define the study of Complex Systems – especially as it relates to the the study of HCI (human-computer interaction). Now the definition is still pretty hotly contested by mathematicians, cognitive scientists, etc. But this conversation occurred between two HCI folks. Here was my answer, as concise as i could give it (not because my colleague is simple, but rather because we didn’t have a lot of time). I think it bears writing down here for other folks who might be wondering about this. The reasoning works in four basic steps:

1. A system, as defined by some notable systems scientists, beginning with Marchal [1] is simply S=E,R. In other words, a system (S) is a set of elements (E) and a set of relations (R) between those elements. So for example, as far as an HCI researcher would care, the MySpace “system” might consist of the users, the administrators and the software and the relations between them all.
2. HCI has primarily concerned itself deterministically with the elements of a system – in this case the users or the administrators or the software. This is to say, that, at its core, HCI has assumed that, if it could know the elements of the system well enough, the outcome of that system could hypothetically be known.
3. Complex Systems has primarily concerned itself probabilistically with the relations of a system – the relations between the users and the administrators and the software in the MySpace example. So at its core, Complex Systems, because of the complex, unpredictable nature of those zillions of relations, has pretty much thrown out the hope of exactly knowing the outcome of the system, but instead employs its own methods to figure out the probabilities of different outcomes.
4. Complex HCI (term coined, i think, by Kevin Makice) will try to simultaneously understand both the elements and the relations in systems such as MySpace, etc. – and the ways that one affects the other.

To be complete and just to both disciplines, this post would need to be a great deal longer, since, of course HCI is not completely deterministic, and there are, um, complexities to the Complex Systems side that this simple 4-point post does not address. But the general gist is here, i think – at least as it currently appears to me.

..And from this, it is easy to see the potential synergies between HCI and Complex Systems, for the design of just about any software, web platform, mobile device now must consider not only each user or device (element), but the huge numbers of connections (relations) that will occur between that user or device and the millions of other potential users and devices with whom that person or device will connect.

[1] Marchal, J. H. (1975). On the Concept of a System. Philosophy of Science, 42(4), 448-468.

Welcome to My More Academicky Blog

For those of you who don’t know, i’ve been blogging pretty often over at the BigTreetop blog about various things having to do with business, social media, and the growth of BigTreetop.com. As i write in that venue, however, i’m frequently editing myself to ensure that the text is going to be useful to small to mid-sized business owners (the bulk of that audience) who only have a few minutes of time. So this blog is going to contain some meatier (read, deeper and longer reading) versions of some of the thinking on the BigTreetop blog – geared more toward the academic or toward the business owner with a little more time/deeper interest in my research.

I hope you’ll enjoy the reading!