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POSTMODERNISM | Noah Brier

Quotable

A bunch of quotes roughly about non-linearity presented linearly.

March 4, 2008 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 9 COMMENTS

To be honest I have no idea what this is about as I start writing, all I know is that over the last half hour I have had a wonderfully serendipitous reading exploration that I felt like sharing. There may be conclusions to draw, there may not, I won't really know until I'm done writing.

It started with a quote from Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal of the world wide web. In discussing why he was doing this, Berners-Lee explains that the storage system for ideas must mirror the ideas themselves. As he wrote:

In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes. For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a "web" of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system. When describing a complex system, many people resort to diagrams with circles and arrows. Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where circles and arrows can stand for anything.

This reminded me of a quote from Black Swan that I emailed my Mom recently:

These nonlinear relationships are ubiquitos in life. Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand. Yesterday afternoon I tried to take a fresh look around me to catalog what I could see during my day that was linear. I could not find anything, no more than someone hunting for squares or triangles could find them in the rain forest...

In other words, the internet and it's non-linear foundation is much more "normal" than the command and control hierarchy that was previously imposed on information.

So, next I read a Wired interview about memes with Dr. Susan Blackmore. She explains that "Memes are using human brains as their copying machinery" and goes on to say:

Up until very recently in the world of memes, humans did all the varying and selecting. We had machines that copied -- photocopiers, printing presses -- but only very recently do we have artificial machines that also produce the variations, for example (software that) mixes up ideas and produces an essay or neural networks that produce new music and do the selecting. There are machines that will choose which music you listen to. It's all shifting that way because evolution by natural selection is inevitable. There's a shift to the machines doing all of that.

I don't even know if I'm ready to tackle that one. It's just one of those things I know is important. I also find it interesting in the face of the next quote I read from Anil Dash who wrote: "I've been obsessing lately over what it takes to make change happen, in both culture an technology. And the answer to me seems to increasingly be the embrace of iteration." In reality, this is also what makes life. Evolvution is not anything if it isn't the embrace of iteration. So what is the impact of machines that evolve? What can we learn about our own behavior and evolution? (These are all questions Blackmore addresses in the interview).

Continuing on I came to Zeus Jones writing about the advantages of just the kind of iteration Dash was discussing: "... because of the fact that it's very difficult to research services in the abstract - our research methodology has typically been: build, test and learn. Rather than spending lots of money in researching an idea, it's been far more economic to simply build the idea and then research the actual product." I can't help but feel like the reason all of this works better is that it's the natural way of things. The other architecture, as Taleb put it, is the square in the rainforest.

Finally, I turn to politics, and specifically a piece by David Brooks on Obama (via Steven Johnson). Discussing a speech in 2007, Brooks writes:

Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom-up: "And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!"

For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands of individual decisions, this is a persuasive way of seeing the world. For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.

Not even sure where to begin with drawing conclusions . . . Need some more thinking time. If you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them (about any of the quotes, or anything else for that matter).


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COMMENTS

1ted

there's too much to comment on, too many interesting points for my feeble brain to pick out one, although i was struck but what a high level of discourse you have with your mom. all i email to my mom are pictures of the kids and comments about the weather.

March 5, 2008

2Eric Nehrlich

I really like the Obama quote and his vision of bottom-up order. It's something I want to believe in. I don't know if it can, but Shirky's book is starting to convince me.

I also like the tie in to iteration and evolution. Evolution only works if you have lots of iterations...or if you can spread the iterations over a large population (parallel processing). Bottom-up works because more good ideas are iterating than can be articulated by a single person. As Shirky puts it, publish then filter.

As you say, more thought necessary.

March 5, 2008

3O.S

Funny to read this and then Faris post. Without going in too deep, and there were a lot of quotes to comment, It touches on something that I've a) tried in campaigns and b) been thinking a lot about; transmedial storytelling in advertising. I'm a believer of less simple and "value-proposition-over-and-over-advertising" hammering. To drop pieces of a bigger story here and there would/could be much more interesting. The only thing is that this unlinearity together with another subject you wrote about (cost of interaction) and my thoughts on that being that the cost of attention has gone up, that the two don't rhyme well. With the cost of attention up (and people not giving a shit about a lot of things) maybe the hammering style is more effective. I hope not, and I don't know.

March 5, 2008

4Steven Kalifowitz

Not sure how this fits in, but as soon as I started reading your post, I thought of a book that a stranger gave me on an airplane a few years ago, The Principles of Native American Spirituality. In this book, there is a bit of talk about how it is Western philosophy that is fundamentally linear, and that Native American philosophy (as well as Eastern) is fundamentally circular / cyclical.

Makes one (me) wonder how different the world would be if the populations who control the world weren't based on Western philosophy. One could take that a step further and ponder whether Western philosophy was necessary to gain control (or at least the illusion of control).

Blackmore's quote, "We are so ego-centric. We think of ourselves as the center of the universe. We need to do a flip and see us as a player in a vast evolutionary process, which we're not in control" is rather interesting in this context. While under the illusion that we're in control, we are unable to step back and observe the world around us - and often want to organize everything and develop linear stories to explain what we don't understand.

March 6, 2008

5Jay, writer Memberspeed.com

I'm honestly having a bit of trouble grasping some of the quotes and the whole iteration matter . Perhaps it's because I'm more informed with today's politics that I find myself being able to relate with the last quote better. It is in this last quote that reinforces my support for Obama. What the world needs now is not a leader who can fight all its battles but someone who can help the world stand on its own. This trail of thought is what separates Obama from the rest of the candidates, me thinks.

March 7, 2008

6Toad

I've always liked David Brooks-- his book "BoBos In Paradise" is a classic- but he seems to be nailing the dynamics of this election left and right. He's one of the few commentators who is in touch with the massive class rift that's developed over the past 20-25 years and how that's changed the country from the middle-class America that existed in the post WWII years.

He wrote a brilliant column last month comparing Hillary and Obama to the way the upper and lower classes shop: Obama is an "experiential" establishment (Starbucks, Virgin, Apple) giving BoBos the feeling that they're getting something more with their purchase, while Hillary is a barebones experience (Safeway, Wal-Mart, AirTran) giving people what they need at a good price with no frills.

The Ohio and Texas primaries seemed to have proved him right.

As for linear vs. circular thinking, I suspect it's not an either/or proposition. Different situations call for different modalities. For examole, decision-making is more complex in non-linear thinking, so it's not the best methodology is situations where a series of rapid and firm decisions are required.

Finally- Zeus Jones' theory references one of my greatest frustrations with advertising. Far too often we use the Build-Test-Learn model instead of doing our learning up front so that what we're building makes sense.

March 7, 2008

7barbara

I have to agree with Toad re David Brooks, there's just a ring of cold, hard reality in his thinking. (I've got that 2/8 editorial, "Questions for Dr. Retail" clipped to the fridge :) Take a look at his nytimes.com op ed piece today re "Playing by Clinton Rules".

March 8, 2008

8Jeremy Abbett

I love a good quote. There like very short short stories. Check out suture.com for more Obama quotes.

March 13, 2008

9Jeremy Abbett

oops! typo in the above comment in the second sentence should be "they're" not there.

March 13, 2008