March 3, 2009
"Knobs, knobs everywhere - just vary a knob to think."
Reading Ch12 of Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas which Scott dropped off in my office this morning.
Hofstadter claims that "Making variations on a theme is really the crux of creativity." (235)
Think of a concept as a machine with knobs on it. Use the knobs to interpolate and extrapolate variations from the original concept. Example 1: Rubik's cube might have a knob of dimensionality that happens to be set at 3 in original. Example2: John Gould's dreamed of turning the listener of music into a conductor through a parametric multitrack playback interface.
But where does the set of knobs come from? What can get varied? Is there a fixed, even finite set? Hofstadter argues that extrapolation needs creative analogy and that changing context and perspective produces new sets of knobs. This shifting of perspective, "nondeliberate yet nonaccidental slippage," is at the core of creative thought. Hofstadter also labels this activity as producing "subjunctive variations on a theme" - I believe this is where Aran Lunzer took his notion of "subjunctive interfaces."
The key quote on reframing: "Context contributes an unexpected quality to the knobs that are perceived on a given concept. The knobs are not displayed in a nice, neat little control panel, forevermore unchangeable. Instead, changing the context is like taking a tour around the concept, and as you get to see it from various angles, more and more of its knobs are revealed." (239) Or: "[Good knobs come from] seeing one thing as something else." (251)
Example 3: Don Knuth's Metafont, which allows typeface designers to create parametric letter definitions. This parameterization is hierarchical: there are typeface-level controls as well as letter-level controls. But H~ argues (convincingly) that all these systems only ever explore sub-spaces. One reason: different styles of letters we all agree on as instances of the letter "A" have very different underlying structure - varying continuous dimensions will never result in such fundamentally different approaches.
"One of Knuth's main thesis is that with computers, we now are in the position of being able to describe nut just a thing in itself, but how that thing would vary." (240) An open question though is how accessible this parameterization process is for creators/designers: describing a parametric space of possible designs is a very different activity from producing a point solution within that space. An avenue for future research is pointed out: given a set of examples, automatically derive the structure of the design space within which they are embedded. That sounds hard, but interesting. "If we wish to enlist computers as our partners in this venture of inventing variations on a theme [...] we have to give them the ability to spot knobs themselves, not just to accept knobs that we humans have spotted." In his words, computers should help us explore the "implicosphere" (implicit counterfactual sphere or sphere of implications) of a concept.
H~ mentions "One Book Five Ways" - a book containing, side-by-side, five different edited versions of a single manuscript. This reminded me of Raymond Queneaus's "Exercises de style" which is made up of 99 variations of a common story.
Are variations fundamentally different from new themes? No, but they tweak less obvious, hidden knobs.
P.S.: Hofstadter needs an editor.
March 2, 2009
Here Comes Everybody - Sticky stories of social tools, topped with sprinkles of theory.
During some down time in New York last week I finally got to read Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody." Shirky's strong suit is balancing concrete stories with the principles behind those stories, distilled in concise nuggets of insight. A bit of social science and economic theory gets added to the mix, resulting in an engaging survey of the promises and limits of collaborative sharing and production with online social tools.
I found the early chapters (2-4) and the conclusion most valuable, with the highest aha-moments-per-page ratio. Here is my summary of the major points.
The second chapter, "Sharing Anchors Community," describes how sharing by individuals, aggregated through social tools, opens up new areas of value that are not served by traditional institutions. Coase, in "The Nature of the Firm," (1937) shows how hierarchical organizations can be more desirable than open labor markets. In an open market of individuals, transaction costs (negotiated agreements) rise sharply with the number of parties involved (squared? Flipside of Metcalfe's law?). Institutions use central control to lower the number of transactions. In return, they introduce managerial overhead. This overhead cost, required to simply maintain the institution itself, limits what kind of activities institutions can and will engage in. Activities below this "Coasean floor" (45) are valuable to someone, but their value is less than the cost of doing business for an institution. These activities are now viable because social tools reduce the cost of coordinating group action.
Chapter three tackles the complicated relationship between professionals and amateurs. A profession is a community that has its own world view and values: "a professional pays as much or more attention to the judgment of her peers as to the judgment of her customers". That focus on group-maintenance makes professions susceptible to miss changes in the core assumptions underlying the formation of their field. The prime example of course is publishing - where previously the hard part was to deliver content to the consumer, production and distribution are essentially free now. As amateurs, with the help of online platforms, can deliver the same value as professionals (see iStockPhoto), boundaries are blurred. But "mass professionalization is an oxymoron" (66) - professions are built on concept of exclusive group membership and shared beliefs/practices within group. So blogging is not a new form of publishing - it's an alternative to publishing.
Chapter four: In ye olden days, the structure of communication -- broadcasting (one-way, public) vs conversational (bi-directional, private) -- was bound up in the communicative medium (TV, phone). We can now mix and match attributes at will. As a result, many public pieces of information are in fact not "content" meant for public consumption - they are part of conversations. "Bloggers with a dozen readers don't have a small audience: they don't have an audience at all, they just have friends". But not all blog posts are about conversations: if you become famous, human cognitive capabilities limit you to to one-way broadcasting again - there's only so much information one can digest or respond to.
Relevance is always relative to the concerns of a particular community (Wenger's communities of practice are mentioned). Community members thus filtering collaboratively and AFTER information has been put online, an inversion of institutional practice.
The main argument of the conclusion is that any successful social tool needs three ingredients to work - promise, tool, and bargain. Failure in any one spells failure for the entire project. For Shirky, it starts with a promise of benefit to the user: what's the value of contributing to a new service? The promise has to be inspirational, concrete and achieveable. The key is to convince users that others will see value in the tool as well. Tools have to be tailored to their job. The two most important questions are: Will the group be large or small? And Is it short-lived or long-lived? Small groups tend to lead to convergent thinking, large groups tend to have divergent beliefs. The "bargain" is not about a good price you're getting, but rather the negotiated set of community rules that a user of a social tool agrees to. Here Shirky mentions Alan Fiske's basic modes of social collaboration, specifically equal participation, as an example of a bargain struck by a Flickr photo community. Finally, Shirky argues that all social tools have social dilemmas that come with them and some form of governance is required. Users take their bargains very seriously. When tool providers change the terms of the bargain unilaterally, backlash often ensues.
Some Choice Quotes:
"There is no such thing as a generically good tool; there are only tools good for particular purposes." (265)
"The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn't until they have a critical mass of adopters, adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear." (270)
"The spread of chap and widely available creative tools is sad for people in the advertising business in the same way that moveable type was sad for scribes - the loss from this change is real but limited and is accompanied by a generally beneficial social change." (209)