User:Cristinac/Notes2
all “pure” interactions must have:
- interruptibility: participants should be able to trade roles during the interaction, as speakers do in conversation, and not simply take turns in occupying the more active or more passive roles in the interaction;
- fine granularity: participants should not have to wait for the “end” of something to interact, with true interactivity being interruptible at the granularity level of a single word;
- graceful degradation: participants can still continue the interaction without interruption even if non sequiturs or unanswerable queries or requests enter into it;
- limited look-ahead: goals and outcomes in the interaction cannot be completely predetermined at the outset of the activity by either of the two parties, with the interaction created “on the fly,” or coming into being only at the moment gestures, words or actions are expressed;
- an absence of a single, clear-cut default path or action: participants in the interaction cannot have definite recourse to a single or “default” path, one available to them throughout the interaction without their having to make any active decisions for action;
- the impression of an infinite database: actors in an interaction need to be able to make decisions and take action from a wide range of seemingly endless possibilities (Brand 46-49).
from Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net:
- "The real promise of the Web and the net and the like [...] is to help satisfy the ever more pressing desire attention. To get attention you must emit what is technically identifiable as information; likewise for information to be of any value, it must receive attention.“
the five communication axioms according to Paul Watzlawick:
- One cannot not communicate: Every behavior is a form of communication. Because behavior does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behavior), it is impossible not to communicate. Even if communication is being avoided (such as the unconscious use of non-verbals or symptom strategy), that is a form of communication. “Symptom strategy” is ascribing our silence to something beyond our control and makes no communication impossible. Examples of symptom strategy are sleepiness, headaches, and drunkenness. Even facial expressions, digital communication, and being silent can be analyzed as communication by a receiver.
- Every communication has a content and relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a metacommunication: All communication includes, apart from the plain meaning of words, more information. This information is based on how the speaker wants to be understood and how he himself sees his relation to the receiver of information. Relationship is the command part of the message or how it is non-verbally said. Content is the report or what is said verbally. Being able to interpret both of these aspects is essential in understanding something that a communicator said. The relational aspect of interaction is known as metacommunication. Metacommunication is communication about communication. Relationship messages are always the most important element in communication.
- The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of the partners communication procedures: Both the sender and the receiver of information structure the communication flow differently and therefore interpret their own behavior during communicating as merely a reaction on the other's behavior (i.e., every partner thinks the other one is the cause of a specific behavior). To punctuate a communication means to interpret an ongoing sequence of events by labeling one event as the cause and the following event as the response. In a situation with communication, if one thing happens, something else always happens. For example, a female in a relationship with a male is feeling depressed. The male in the relationship with the female feels guilty. One who observes this situation might ask, "Is she depressed because of his guilt, or does he feel guilty because of her depression?"
- Human communication involves both digital and analog modalities: This axiom refers back to the use of non-verbals and system strategy explained in the first axiom. It is mostly related to the digital content of communication within a relationship.
- Inter-human communication procedures are either symmetric or complementary: This axiom focuses on metacommunication with two main components called symmetrical interchange and complementary interchange. Symmetrical interchange is an interaction based on equal power between communicators. In accordance to that, complementary interchange is an interaction based on differences in power. Within these two interchanges there are three different ways they can be used: one-up, one-down, and one-across. With a one-up communication, one communicator attempts to gain control of an exchange by dominating the overall communication. A one-down communication has the opposite effect. A communicator attempts to yield control of an interaction or submit to someone. The final message is a one-across communication. This communication moves to neutralize a situation. This is also called transitory if only one communicator is attempting this style. When two communicators use the same style of one-up, one-down, or one-across, it is symmetrical. If they are opposing one another it is complementary. This axiom allows us to understand how an interaction can be perceived by the styles a communicator is using.
snippets from 'The Noise of the Observer':
- The decisive identification, however, had already originated with Ludwig Boltzmann, whose work on statistical physics of 1094 made him the first to relate the concept of information to entropy, and to define entropy as "missing information", which one might measure as the number of alternatives still open to a physical system, after all the macroscopically observable information relating to it has been recorded. This already points to the model of Claude Shannon's definition of information as a logarithm of the number of choices present. A situation with two possible choices contains, as we know, a "bit", or binary digit, of information. Sixteen alternative messages characterise four bits of information, since 16 = 2 to the 4th power.
- Modern communication theory does not solely refer to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, however, its advance can also be found in the field of electric communication, in the transmission of signals through electric currents. After F. B. Morse's invention of telegraphy in 1832, which involved the transmission of messages through the presence or a longer or shorter absence of an electric current, questions immediately arose relating to the limits of the speed and precision of signal transmission. External currents are always present, which interfere with and disturb the signal being transmitted, thus impeding the differentiation between alternative signals. The disturbances caused by such currents, which were called "noise", clearly needed to be reduced as far as possible.
- Entropy is a measure of chance and of disintegration. The tendency of physical systems to be ever less organised, and to increasingly fall apart, is associated with entropy. The arrow of time, the irreversibility of time comes about as a result of entropy. Within the theory of communication based on information theory, information is defined as the number of available choices. If a situation is sufficiently highly organised, there are few available choices, the degree of chance is low and the system is pre-determined – hence there is little information. A chaotic (deterministic, non-linear) system, therefore, in contrast to a purely deterministic system, contains more information. since it has more degrees of freedom, available choices, incertitudes. Thus freedom of choice, entropy and information, defined as a logarithm of the number of available choices, all converge as concepts. The greater the freedom of choice, the greater the information, and the greater also the uncertainty. Noise, however, equally means increased uncertainty, so that one might mistakenly assume that increased noise means heightened uncertainty and hence increased freedom of choice, i.e., information. This is, of course, paradoxical. One thus needs a process that distinguishes desirable uncertainty (information) from undesirable uncertainty (noise).
- Noise, therefore, threatens information in several ways. The classic communication theory of information theory or cybernetics firstly simplified the problem of noise by excluding semantic problems, and secondly. viewed it naively, for example, by interpreting the observer not as a source of errors but as a corrector of errors. In a way, it represents a partial retrogression to the time before the thermodynamic theory of entropy. The approaches of quantum physics and chaos theory to information and entropy, as derived from thermodynamics, appear to me the most promising for neutralising the paradoxes and aporia of the theories of entropy and information, as exemplified by Maxwell's Demon, Szillard's machines etc. because they place the problem of the observer at the centre of attention. The noise of classical communication theory is more or less the noise of one's own signal, where the observer acts to correct errors. The noise in quantum physics is the noise of the observer, unavoidably and necessarily producing errors.
- The world is only ever defined at the interface between the observer and the rest of the world, Thus, the observer's position, is a regulator that can be moved on a frequency between paradise (information) and hell (error). Information is therefore unavoidably observer-relative. Of necessity the observer creates noise., He can escape this noise of observation only by himself becoming a part of the information model.
- Observation by an observer is, therefore, no longer sufficient to increase information; rather, what is required is an increased correlation and co-variance of observers and observations. It is questionable, however, whether we can grasp these correlations.
- Quantum physics has acquainted us with the fact that in observing systems and objects we must not dismiss the role of the observer. Niels Bohr promulgated the famous theory that the act of observation in turn influences the very object of our observation. Archibald Wheeler went even further by saying that a phenomenon is a phenomenon only if it is also an observable phenomenon. Here, the informedness of the observer is of central importance. A condition noted by the internal observer is different from that which "objectively exists" and can be observed from the outside. Quantum Demon therefore describes the problem of the noise-generating observer within information systems.
- A quantum theory of cultural theory is sorely needed. We must part with the traditional historical notion that there is a pure and objective description of the occurrences in the world of the mind, where the observer's contribution to the phenomena under observation can be disregarded or subtracted. We must take leave of this cliché and this illusion. For, on the contrary, in the world of the media in particular, Wheeler's Theorem applies that only an observed phenomenon is a true phenomenon. Only what is represented in the media also exists. and the form in which it exists in the data space equally depends on the position of the observer. Thus, the critic and the theoretician of culture act, willy-nilly, as real-life observers. The observed object's own signal becomes inseparably mingled with the observer's own signal or noise.
- Information and the observer can no longer be divided . The noise of the observer, the indeterminacy-relation between information and observer is not arbitrarily reducible. In the present world, in which, from medicine to economics, access to information and the spread of information are gaining an ever-more fundamental and central importance worldwide, the above-mentioned limitations are particularly noteworthy, since quite obviously there is a danger; firstly, of mistaking noise for information and, secondly, of not eliminating this noise with any increase in the amount of information, but of increasing it, in accordance with the theorem of quantum- and endo-physics, where the internal observer does not know that he is an observer and takes his own noise for the information from the situation under observation.
FS in an interview with MF:
- FS: We have just finished the design of a font (NotCourier-sans), a derivative of Nimbus Mono, which is in turn a GPL’ed copy of the well known Courier typeface that IBM introduced in 1955. Writing a proper licence for it, opened up many questions about the nature of ‘source code’ in design, and not only from a legalist perspective. While this is actually relatively simple to define for a font (the source is the object), it is much less clear what it means for a signage system or a printed book. One way we deal with this, is by publishing final results side by side with ingredients and recipes. The raw files themselves seem pretty useless once the festival is over and the book printed so we write manuals, stories, histories. We also experiment with using versioning systems, but the softwares available are only half interesting to us. Designed to support code development, changes in text files can be tracked up to the minutest detail but unless you are ready to track binary code, images and document lay-outs function as black boxes. I think this is something we need to work on because we need better tools to handle multiple file formats collaboratively, and some form of auto-documentation to support the more narrative work. On the other hand, manuals and licences are surprisingly rich formats if you want to record how an object came into life; we often weave these kinds of texts back into the design itself. In the case of NotCourier-sans we will package the font with a pdf-booklet on the history of the typeface – mixing design geneology with suggestions for use. I think the blurring of boundaries happens through practice. Just like recipes are linked in many ways to food (tasting, trying, writing, cooking), design practice connects objects to conditions. OSP is most of all interested in the back-and-forth between those two states of design; rendering their interdepence visible and testing out ways of working with it rather than against it. Hopefully both the food and the recipe will change in the process.
from Disorganisation by Boyan Manchev (part of Depletion Design):
- In his Metaphysics, Aristotle distinguishes four different meanings of the category of potentiality (dunamis), and it is the fourth which is especially interesting to us. It is the most underestimated point of the Aristotelian definition of the potentiality, which is the opera-tion of potentiality as a counter-potentiality, as an intrinsic resistance which keeps things away from an undesirable development, a decline, a degeneration, i.e. which guarantees its movement towards the best (1019a 26-30; 1046a). The first three aspects being translated respectively by potentia, possibilitas and potestas, the fourth term does not even have a translation of its own in Latin.