I’ll start with a very simple question: what do you see here?
Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
Can You See the Innovation?
Monday, May 24th, 2010What makes for good linking: Rickrolling and where Steve Krug goes wrong
Monday, December 28th, 2009
Everyone who designs websites or theorizes the internet should think about linking at some point. My main subject here is transparency in linking.
Sense and reference, the two key concepts coined by the German philosopher Gottlob Frege in his seminal essay “Sinn und Bedeutung” (“Sense and Reference”) (1892) are extremly helpful for thinking about how linking works on the internet.
In his essay, Frege starts off by asking himself what makes a statement of the form a=b an interesting statement. After all, if a and b are the same (they are bound by an equal sign) then logically they must be the same object. And the statement “something is identical to itself” would seem to tell us nothing new. But it is because – and this is Frege’s point – “a” and “b” are different ways of referring to the same object, i.e. a and b have different senses, that the statement a=b is not simply tautological.
According to Frege, sense is the way a reference is given. The statement “a=b” tells us that both “a” and “b” refer to the same object. This sums up nicely the plot of quite a few popular plays and movies, and songs–where it’s about figuring out that two persons that are taken to be different – and present themselves as being different – are in fact the same. Think of the songs “The same girl” and the much earlier “Die da“, by the smart and ever smarter German hip-hop band, Die Fantastischen Vier.
In Die da, two friends tell each other about two girls they met and fell in love with. One of them calls her “the girl I met in a bar” the other speaks of “the girl I had tea with” etc. The way the two guys refer to the girl is different, but as it turns out (and you probably saw this coming), they have in mind the same reference, they are talking about the same girl. (Frege’s famous example was the “morning star” and “evening star.” For many centuries considered distinct astral bodies, modern observation had shown both names to have the same reference: the planet Venus). If this phenomenon is common, it’s endemic on the internet.
The phenomenon of expressions with different senses pointing to one reference has never been so important and omnipresent as on the internet today.
Each webpage with its unique URL can be called a reference. But there are millions of ways in which this reference can be given, and URL shorteners like tinyurl.com or bit.ly are tools to generate infinitely many new senses, different ways of giving the same reference. In other words: they generate links.
(One can also name a link whatever one wants as in a blog post, when you hover over a link. It can be described any number of ways as when instead of showing a URL when you hover the description can say, “link to hypios blog”).
So, while links seem simple enough because we are used to them, linking actually involves us in a complex phenomenon.
The basic issue: How transparent are links?
The basic issue about links is transparency. Links may be more or less transparent. People may try to induce you into thinking that a link points towards the website of, say, your bank and then direct (or redirect) you to a quite different page. Links may try to attract you to a page that you presumably don’t want to go to, like a harmless music video by Rick Astley. And then there’s of course the harmful ones, directing you to pages that damage your computer, or attempt to retrieve confidential information (aka phishing). Most non-transparent links simply want to get you to buy something or attract your attention. Many of the comments on blogs come with this kind of links (we filter the most obvious ones). It is because transparency is a security issue that bit.ly and wordpress now include previews of the page a link directs you to. But I’m not going further in the security issue here. What I’m interested in is the connection of transparency and user friendliness.
What's happening? Twitter changes the question.
Friday, November 20th, 2009
Didn’t we just post about Twitter? Well, yes, but as a philosopher, I can’t ignore what’s happening. (Pun intended.)
I’ve always preferred Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” to Twitter’s “What are you doing?” Here’s why:
- Twitter asks about “you”: the untrustworthy, insignificant ego.
- Twitter asks about what I’m “doing.” Action is usually not a philosopher’s strong point. Most of the time, we (the humans) do not doing anything interesting. Asking us what we do, provokes deeply annoying tweets about cooking spaghetti or somewhat unsettling messages about going into labor.
- Twitter is about the now. Well, yeah, RT @BuDa: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery. But isn’t Buddhism also going for extinguishing the self?
Twitter seemed to think all you do is important. Facebook’s question seems designed to keep you from being too prosaic. Do you really want people thinking your overcooked spaghetti is all that’s on your mind? Even if you occasionally talk about your dinner (and breakfast and lunch and snack and…) at least the question assumes you have interesting thoughts to share. So on this first level, Facebook seems to be for philosophers whereas Twitter seemed to think of you as an ego-driven stupid. But users weren’t. They shared much more on Twitter than what they were doing. And if they hadn’t you wouldn’t even know that the site exists.
Today, Twitter changed: “What are you doing?” has been replaced by “What’s happening?”. Well, Twitter is growing up—it’s no longer all about the ego, like a small child, it starts to be curious about the world around itself.
Of course, as the Twitter blog says, this isn’t going to change the way anyone uses the service; it’s quite the opposite. Like in the jeopardy quizz-game, where you have the answer and need to find the question, Twitter’s team got together, looked at all the answers for a few months and then they came up with the question people already seemed to answer. That is, the Twitter team starts to take into account how the users use what they have created. The new prompt reflects the actual use of the site, rather than its intended use. It never was the micro-blogging site they intended it to be, where people only told their friends what they were doing. It at once was a broader network where you could learn what’s going on, from election protests to planes landing in rivers.
Twitter may have changed the question, but the answer are still the same (and yet, always changing).
Homage to Claude Levi-Strauss
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009In the last few months, most of our blog posts have been about issues surrounding Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing, web-communities, some were turned towards “pure” science, interesting facts, issues and figures. But the death of Claude Levi-Strauss (on October 30) reminded some of us of our backgrounds in disciplines like social science, philosophy and history… For most of us, Levi-Strauss was not just a familiar name, but an intellectual figure that truly influenced the way we think. And that brings me to my main point for this post: in what respect is Levi-Strauss’ thinking important (even if you’re not an anthropologist?)
The figure of “structuralism”
Levi-Strauss is the most prominent name associated with what is commonly called “structuralist” thinking. Structuralism is a theoretical approach that was born with Ferdinand de Saussure’s pioneering work in linguistics. Its general principle is to grasp an entity (such as language, in the case of Saussure), as a system of elements (rather than as a set of atomistic elements). To think in terms of the system means that each element can only be defined in terms of the relations (of equivalence or opposition) it has with other elements of the system. Take language, for instance. Saussure’s approach showed that meaning in language can be best explained not by assuming the “identity” or pre-existing “content” of the linguistic signs it is composed of (which, added together, make up a language), but by assuming the priority of the system, and the relations between the combined elements. In this case, meaning has to be thought of oppositionally (as the result of a contrast between opposing pairs) and differences between terms assume prominence. Saussure goes even further: we do not choose, when we speak, to combine certain elements of language. In language it is always a matter of pre-existing possibilities, combinations that form language itself (the structure) command social agents when they are speaking. The structure commands the agents, which is a very strong thesis.
In this view, structuralism is a fairly deterministic theory. From it’s origin in linguistic theory, Levi-Strauss’ theoretical & field work applied the structuralist framework to the problem of understanding how societies, and, in particular, non-western societies (like the South-American Bororos) worked. Structuralism proved an especially powerful tool, allowing Levi-Strauss to explain the meaning and evolution of social entities and the social system better than competing models used in anthropology. Other explanations were either historical (basically explaining the existence of a social entity by giving an account of how it appeared) or functionalist (a tradition represented by Boris Malinowski and Franz Boas that analyses social forms through the function they fulfill within society, e.g. marriage is for stable reproduction); both are tautological. That is, they don’t really offer explanations but just repeat our still unexplained preconceptions. Levi-Strauss opposes to these two theories an analysis that’s mainly relational: “examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents” is the mission of modern anthropology as he sees it.
De-Naturalization
Applying his method allowed Levi-Strauss to make powerful claims about social reality; in particular, he is widely known for his analysis of kinship. The claimed universality of the functionalist idea of family – father, mother, children – was directly undermined by Levi-Strauss’ analysis (as ethnocentrist and complacent), which showed that in some societies, for example, the figure of the uncle was more prominent than that of the father. Later work in theories of gender attacked the purported “naturalness” and universality of men’s domination in families, picking up on Levi-Strauss’ work in this field.
In which sense is the “structuralist” analysis of kinship novel? Here’s a famous example, developed in Structural Anthropology: let’s call “A” the relation between uncle and nephew; “B”, the relation between brother and sister; “C” the relation between father and son, and “D” the relation between husband and wife. Levi-Strauss discovers the following suprising fact: in every society, A is to B what C is to D. That is, Levi-Strauss shows that while the individual elements vary in their relations with each other, there is a certain invariability at the system-level. This conclusion is the result of the “structural investigation”: “the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity.”
A “handbook” against racism
Levi-Strauss’ work on “savage” societies, decomposing myths, symbols or social events that might appear totally irrational to us, made these phenomena more understandable. Decomposing the elements, he showed how a relatively small repertoire of meaningful entities are combined (each time differently) in myths, rituals, etc in different cultures and historical epochs. According to reknowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this analysis of fundamental units (say characters or plot elements) rather than the content, showed the underlying rationality of often stigmatized rituals, religious practices, etc… It was now harder to judge things that seemed at first glance strange or unfamiliar as absurd or barbaric. Structuralist analysis is a powerful lens, allowing the social scientist the possibility to see meaning as a construction out of universal elements–flattening the perceived differences between cultural productions. It’s this aspect of Levi-Strauss’ work that I take to be most significant and most durable: his books are, as Bourdieu said, a “very powerful handbook against racism.”
What’s a “classic”?
When a famous intellectual dies, you can hear, among other intellectuals, politicians, etc… a sort of uniformly reverential tone: s/he was a “classic”, a prominent public intellectual, a national treasure, extremely influential, etc etc. Some of them, with lots of nostalgia, might also say: “he was the last giant” (I think in France we’ve lost twenty or thirty ” last giants” this year alone). But, with Levi-Strauss’ death at 101 years of age, no one can deny he loss of an important intellectual figure. What’s really clear in this case was Levi-Strauss wide influence outside of his field, anthropology–his influence, that is, on the larger culture. No one, among philosophers, sociologists, historians, and even mathematicians (structuralism brought a lot to cybernetics, for example), could ignore his name; and most of them know a bit about its work. I think here we have something that can be said to be an objective criterion for what it means to be a “classical” intellectual figure. Given increasing specialization, it will likely be harder and harder to find individuals who’ve affected the progress of disciplines other than their own.
We pay him homage.
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