Two as a metaphor06/22/2005 01:50 AM Bev Trayner gets appropriately complex about the intersections of
communities, languages, norms and metaphors. Here's a snippet:
Recently at two different conferences which represent two different
international communities I belong to I was aware of the genre
boundaries we are crossing in our work on communities, technologies
and learning. The combination of different modes and technologies and
a focus on emerging processes and diversity changes the whole nature
of communication. It also changes our ways of of working together,
what gets done, whose voices get heard, and where power lies...
Meanwhile, in my local community I have to develop another...
ZDNet:
"Ultimately, the convergence trend is not a revolution but a gradual
migration. And like wildebeest migrating across the Serengeti plains,
they may find themselves in some surprising places along the way."
(If you can't tell, that's from a piece about voice over IP in the
enterprise.)
Making Science Fact, Now Chronicling Science Fiction
Making Science Fact, Now Chronicling Science Fiction06/14/2004 09:32 PM Donna L. Shirley is director of the new Science Fiction Museum and
Hall of Fame in Seattle, where science fiction is used to spur
interest in science.
Popular Science | Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind?
"Science
is all metaphor", said Timothy Leary, philosopher and guru of
psychedelics, in an interview in 1980. In the last few years we have
been bombarded with metaphors, analogies, similes and personifications
such as:
Business is war, and politics is war, or
sport.
A leader is a
country or a company ("Russia says...", "The White House
responded...", "ExxonMobil believes...")
A poll or survey
represents public opinion ("Americans believe...")
Conservatives have a 'strict father' morality-driven
philosophy, liberals a 'nurturing mother' reason-driven one.
Business is organic, information has an 'ecology',
and
cultures, nations, communities and individual bodies are all analogous
complex adaptive systems.
The internet, communities and
networks, are webs or highways.
The brain is a computer.
Weblogs are personal, open filing cabinets, or
diaries, or
publications, or 'personal memories', and RSS is their 'delivery
truck'. Collectively, the documents of an organization are its
'corporate memory', enabling 'organizational learning'.
Our inability to deal with critical but
slowly-changing
phenomena like global warming or overpopulation is like the experience
of a frogthat unwittingly boils to death in a pot of very slowly
heating water, and civilization today is like a fast-moving car trying
to brake on a bridge covered in black ice headed for a 'crash'.
The change needed in human culture and behaviour is a
metamorphosis from today's larval stage to the future butterfly adult
stage.
The physical separation between the rich and wealthy in
our society, and everyone else, is 'corporate
apartheid'.
America under Bush is like a family that has been
repeatedly brutalized by a drunk father.
Outsourcing,
infrastructure-aversion, offshoring and cost-cutting has left Western
business 'anorexic'.
People don't vote, or get involved in
politics, for the
same reasons they don't exercise: The personal pain of the status quo
does not yet exceed the personal discomfort of making the
change.
We in the West are 'addicted' to wasteful, thoughtless
consumption and to perilous debt, fated to meet every addict's
catastrophic end, and Alan Greenspan is the ultimate 'pusher'; and
Bush
is a 'high roller' gambling addict, getting deeper in debt and betting
more and more heavily waiting for the big 'trickle-down' win that will
recoup his colossal losses.
What business needs is fewer 'prescriptions' and more
'recipes', fewer 'symphony conductors' and more jazz combo-like
collaborative 'improvisation'.
Ideas and beliefs and
behaviours can spread like viruses, 'infect' others and even lead to
'epidemic' change.
For now, let's not quibble over the subtle differences between these
four rhetorical devices. Metaphors, analogies, similes and
personifications are all comparative
devices used to assert substantive equivalence or similarity between
something that is somewhat complex and abstract, and something that is
much simpler or more concrete.
Use of these devices is a very human tendency: They make things easier
to understand. When used properly they can bring clarity the way no
amount of detailed explanation or information can, and do so very
quickly. They can also trigger the imagination, and produce brilliant
creative insight.
But these devices are often also misused and overused: Much of the
subtlety can get lost in the translation, as elements of the
comparison
that are not particularly analogous are simply omitted from mention.
Opinion polls do this by limiting respondents' choices and then
claiming the results represent public opinion. And they can be
dangerous, when used to manipulate and deceive, by distorting or
exaggerating comparability. Editorialists, politicians, advertisers
and
spin doctors do this all the time, equating dictators with Hitler or
dissenters with terrorists.
In a recent interview
in Edge Magazine that I
mentioned a few weeks ago, George Lakoff explained the tendency to use
metaphor this way:
When
Mark Johnson and I [studied] the cognitive sciences in detail, we
realized that there were three major results that were inconsistent
with almost all of Western philosophy (except for Merleau-Ponty and
Dewey), namely: The mind is inherently embodied. Most thought is
unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
The differences [when you approach philosophy from a cognitive science
perspective] are differences that matter in your life. Starting with
results from cognitive semantics, we discovered a lot that is new
about
the nature of moral systems, about the ways that we conceptualize the
internal structure of the Self, even about the nature of truth... We
are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of out
bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world
thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think
just anything - only what our embodied brains permit.
Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the
neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of
abstract reason. If this is correct, as it seems to be, our
sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can
perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made
possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied
interactions in the world.
So if business and politics are complicated and abstract, let's make
them simpler and more concrete, more physical, by describing them as
'games' or 'wars'. Games have simple rules and short time limits (wars
once did as well, when what was at stake was more defined and
realizable). Business and politics do not. Games and sports have a
clear winner, so when you're describing what 'winning' is like in
business or politics, you can use a sports analogy ("We wil defeat the
competitors on their home turf" or "Nature always bats last".) Wars no
longer have winners, but they are more serious matters than sports, so
when you're describing something that requires sobriety, you can
switch
to a war analogy. Everything
today that its proponent believes requires serious effort or entails
serious risk is described as a 'war'. And if you're a dim-witted,
drug-addled American president, you can even build a whole, simple
artificial world around that analogy, seeing and portraying your whole
existence as a 'crusade', taking orders and advice directly from that
ultimate personification -- the one that is so powerful its name is
spelled with a capital letter. Psychopaths love
analogies and metaphors, and get very good at using them for
manipulative purposes, which is one reason they often succeed so well
in politics and business.
The oversimplification and deception that result from misuse of
comparative rhetorical devices are, in my opinion, essential elements
in the 'dumbing down' of all of us, as citizens and consumers,
especially over the past century. We want things to be simple, because
it makes decisions easier and gives us more time to devote to other
things. We want reassurance that what we believe is valid, morally
and/or intellectually, so we can turn our attention as voters and
buyers to issues where we are less sure. But we don't want issues to be
oversimplified (even if that makes a decision easier), and we don't want to be lied to (even if
that deception is reassuring).
Even the brightest and most critical minds can be seduced by the
comforting and stimulating allure of these devices. Consultants and
employees making presentations to executives (in both public and
private spheres) are encouraged to simplify the alternatives to just
two in order to get broad approval quickly. They build metaphors and
analogies into the presentations that make difficult, complex concepts
appear absurdly simple, and to use the first and second person plural
form of verbs describing the organization to flatter the executives to
see themselves as the personification of the whole company. And, of
course, they use stories with protagonists the executives can relate
to, and antagonists that personify what they loathe, so that the story
metaphorically surfaces and engages their personal struggles as
powerful, self-aggrandized decision-makers. It's revolting to watch,
and epidemic (if you'll forgive the metaphor) in large organizations
and government bodies. But as organizational complexity increases
exponentially with size, and available information is less and less
adequate for competent decisions, and the organization becomes
increasingly unmanageable, it's irresistible. It's also one of the
reasons why large organizations, both public and private, are so
horrifically bloated, top-heavy and inherently inefficient:
Misinformed, underinformed, overconfident executives and
self-proclaimed 'experts' remote from the front lines (sorry, another
metaphor) inevitably make mostly bad decisions.
Models are a form of
analogy, simple representations of (perhaps) infinitely complex and
unknowable realities. As Timothy Leary's quote suggests, that's really
all science is. Scientific models are fascinating, they appeal to our
instinctive search for pattern, and they are occasionally useful. But
scientists, too, get overly enamoured of what are essentially
fabrications, inherently imprecise representations of reality. There
is
an insatiable desire to find the ultimate indivisible particle that
completes the model of matter, makes it 'perfect', or the grand
unifying theory of everything. The concept of a universe that is
infinitely complex, undefinable, endless, and infinitely varied is
deeply unsettling and unsatisfying to many scientists, who will go to
almost any length to argue (by analogy, of course) that this could not
be possible.
We have been so seduced by the power of analogy and metaphor to enrich
our ability to understand and conceive, that we have promoted conception to a higher plane of
credibility and value in our lives than perception,
and our denigration of the latter (and of instinct, that form of
knowledge that is intuitive and not consciously conceived) has led to
a
permanent 'detachment' from the sensory, physical world, to our great
impoverishment and peril. As philosopher Merleau-Ponty put it:
Synaesthetic [involving all the senses together] perception is the
rule
[among all life on Earth], and we are unaware of it only because
scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so
that we have unlearned how to
see, hear, and generally speaking, feel,
in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the
physicist sees it, what we are
to see, hear and feel.
Writers of novels and screenplays, likewise, are advised, if they want
to be successful, to 'get real', to physically describe their
characters
and environments, to use realistic dialogue, and never just say what a
character is thinking. A good novel transports you metaphorically to
another place (and sometimes another time). And bad novels and
screenplays push the analogy too far, oversimplifying the characters
to
grotesque caricatures of good and evil, oversimplifying and distorting
their artificially-constructed reality to emotionally manipulate and
'dumb down' their audience.
So today, the information (both fictional and non-fictional) with we
are bombarded is replete with analogies, metaphors, similes and
personifications, each intended honesty or dishonestly to help us
'make
sense' (yes, this time I'm being ironic, not metaphorical) of that
information.
What are we to do? If these devices are double-edge swords (oops), or
like a car (oops again), powerful and useful if employed cautiously
and
competently but very dangerous in the hands of the inexperienced or
the
deranged, should we play it safe and minimize use of them, and require
warning labels when they're used? That's pretty impractical, and there
are lots of other techniques available to manipulate people with
language, some of which have no redeeming value whatever.
The only practical answer is to learn (and to teach young people) to
recognize them, and to recognize them for what they are: Useful,
incomplete, imprecise shorthand representations of reality. We could
use some help in this, from teachers, from the media, from novelists
and scientists and politicians and surveyors of public awareness and
opinion. They are (sorry, can't resist) the most potent weapons in the
fearsome and wonderful arsenal of language.
Today your teacher announced
that your school is going to have a science fair and students are
responsible for exhibiting their projects. What do you feel?
Enthusiastic? Despondent? Dreadful? Fearful? Excited?" This statement
opens the Super Science Fair Projects site. Actually, whether student
or parent, science fair projects, while great ways to get students
actively involved in learning the scientific method and problem
solving, can be tough assignments. This site may help you with one of
the hardest parts: coming up with an idea. The site does a great job
of walking the visitor through the steps needed to plan and implement
a project, from Choosing a Topic, the Scientific Method, and writing
the Project Report. There are even tips on displaying your project,
rehearsing, winning over judges, and what to expect the day of the
fair. This is definitely a great tool to tap into when planning a
science fair project.[From The NSDL Scout Report for Math,
Engineering, and Technology, Copyright Internet Scout Project
1994-2003. http://scout.wisc.edu/]
Science.gov is the gateway to reliable information about science and
technology from across federal government organizations. Science.gov
2.0 offers groundbreaking, user- friendly technology enhancements to
the interagency science portal. While retaining the content and
advances originally unveiled in December 2002, now Version 2.0 will
search 47 million pages of government R&D results and present the
result to the patron in relevancy-ranked order. The new technology
sorts through the government's vast reservoirs of research and rapidly
returns information in an order more likely to meet patrons' needs.
Science.gov contains reliable information resources selected by the
agencies as their best science information. The Science.gov Web site
provides the unique ability to search across 30 databases as well as
across 1,700 Web sites. The World Wide Web consists of two parts: the
Surface Web and the Deep Web. Popular search engines can access the
Surface Web, but not the Deep Web. Among the resources in the Deep Web
are the huge databases created and maintained by the science agencies.
Using a "metasearch" technology, Science.gov 2.0 brings the 30 largest
of these databases together and makes them searchable via a single
query. This has been added to Research Resources
Subject Tracer ™ Information Blog.
Science
Science09/05/2004 04:26 AM
The most comprehensive presentation ever mounted on the life,
theories, and the social and political involvement of Albert
Einstein will be at the Skir
ball Cultural centerr, Los Angeles, from September 14, organized
by the American
Museum of Natural History, and revived
by Tom Teicholz. Incidentally, Discover magazine
dedicates the whole September issue to Einstein (subscription).
From Science To Sci-Fi
From Science To Sci-Fi05/04/2004 08:56 PM Want your collection pieces to be in the 2004 blockbuster exhibit
entitled "From Science to Sci-Fi, the art & design of outer space"?
Then click on through for more details . . .
Science.Ars
Science.Ars05/03/2004 11:47 PM The newly-renamed Science.Ars returns with news on cloning,
unpublished drug study data, meteorite forensics, private space
launches, and more.
Fraud in Science03/14/2005 04:33 PM It can’t happen here. That’s what most scientists will
tell you about fraud in science. Science is magically
self-correcting,…
What's up, Doc? Not the number of science Ph.D.s12/04/2003 08:27 PM A survey shows that the number of doctoral degrees awarded in U.S.
science and engineering programs continues to drop. Women, however,
are earning a growing share.
Jazzed By Science07/19/2004 10:10 PM CBS News Jul 20 2004 2:03AM GMT
Science Monday
Science Monday04/12/2004 02:14 PM In a slightly-delayed edition of Science Sunday, zAmboni covers
cicadas, a 3D ultrasound system, the rat genome, and even a Jade
Science Moment
Science @ NASA
Science @ NASA01/09/2004 09:55 PM The mission of Science@NASA is to help the public understand how
exciting NASA research is and to help NASA scientists fulfill their
outreach responsibilities....
Are You Ready for Some Science?12/18/2003 05:49 AM The originators of an all-science, all-the-time cable channel bet that
Americans will happily tune out charismatic chefs and shopping
programs for a little mind-expanding TV. By Kristen Philipkoski.
Science Commons
Science Commons12/31/2004 04:33 AM Science Commons aims
to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists,
universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other
scientific intellectual property and to share their knowledge with
others. Science Commons works within current copyright and patent law
to promote legal and technical mechanisms that remove barriers to
sharing.
Weird science
Weird science12/31/2004 04:43 PM It didn't take long for politicized debate to get roiling over the
nature of the tsunami disaster -- some of it rather murky. Steven Milloy of the Cato Institute and Junk Science.com is
now blasting environmentalists for "shameless exploitation" as they
"surf the tsunami tragedy" in order to bring attention to the problem
of global warming. Milloy wants to give the impression that he's
navigating through truer waters, but clearly he's looking to ride the
wave in a direction of his own:
"Science
is all metaphor", said Timothy Leary, philosopher and guru of
psychedelics, in an interview in 1980. In the last few years we have
been bombarded with metaphors, analogies, similes and personifications
such as: