Managing Information Overload

I was just pointed (via someone I follow on Twitter) to an article in the Harvard Business Review about how damaging information overload can be. It mentions a September 2009 article titled “Death by Information Overload” and cites the stress this puts not only on individuals but, as a result, on organizations.  But as author Alex Wright tells us in his book titled Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, this is not a new problem.  Here’s how the dust jacket summarizes the book:

Today’s well-documented ‘information explosion’ may seem like an acutely modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation–or even the first species–to wrestle with the problem of information overload. Long before the advent of computers, human beings were were collecting, storing, and organizing information: from Ice Age taxonomies to Sumerian archives, Greek libraries to Dark Age monasteries.

I do recognize that the problem is especially intense these days.  Part of this results from the possibilities that social networking provides for expanding and enhancing our own brain:  members of one’s PLN (Personal Learning Network) become an extension of one’s own mind in a manifestation of an emergent form of collective intelligence.   This is the “memory of the future” that Wright envisions at the end of his book:  “As people find their way online, they seem to coalesce into small groups. . . .Small, self-organized communities [emerge] around common causes and shared values” (236).  I would call these “memedoms”:  a socio-political entity that exists outside of conventional markers of identity (country, political party, etc.), one that is bounded by the contours of a particular idea or “meme.”  Witness the followers of Rush Limbaugh who call themselves “ditto-heads” because they merely repeat verbatim what the master has spoken. . . The ideas that are channeled your way depend on who you’re following on Twitter, whose blogs you read, what RSS news feeds you receive, whose slideshows you favorite on Slideshare, and so on.

Information Overload has gotten so bad that there is now an Information Overload Research Group, complete with its own set of resources that point you in endless directions toward… yes, more information–in this case, about information overload!

I suggest one way to deal with this in a presentation about a concept I developed called “mnemonomics“:  the management of memory.  If we think of ourselves as part of a larger, emergent collective or group intelligence coalescing around certain memes or concepts, then we become part of a larger whole, doing our part, whatever that happens to be, to perpetuate the meme (as when I published a letter to the editor about the upcoming international day of action for climate change organized by 350.org).  As the idea of mnemonomics suggests, we need to learn how to manage this larger, socially-networked memory that we now have available to us.

The problem is similar to the age of print literacy, when people walked around with shirts that said, “So many books.  So little time.”  Now the shirts say, “So many social networks.  So little time.”  Same difference?

Infinition: Thinking-Fractal

I wrote a poem a while back called “Axiom: A Mathematics of Poetry” in which I parody the opening chapters of G. Spencer-Brown’s The Laws of Form. The first line introduces a new concept that I created called “infinition”:

It shall be taken as given the idea of infinition. The idea of infinition stands in direct opposition to the idea of definition.

Then, as in chapter one of the Spencer-Brown book, I provide a definition:

Infinition is the act of making indefinite or unclear. That is to say, while some uses of language attempt to clarify, others attempt to obfuscate.

The poem then continues with instructions to make a poem, introducing “canons,” “conventions,” and “principles” much like The Laws of Form does in its opening chapters; these kind of “mathematical” moments attempt to define poetry from its moment of creation. Interspersed within these various defining moments are “infinitions,” poetic moments that obfuscate, that use metaphor and imagery to open up or make blurry what the definitions try to distinguish or clarify.

I later realized that this concept of infinition, which I playfully created for the purposes of this poem, could be introduced in the context of electracy as a simple analogue of electrate thinking. If electracy is a kind of thinking that emerges from or opposes (to some extent) literacy, and literate thinking has as its modus operandi the goal of defining, distinguishing, and clarifying, then “infinition” can be seen perhaps as a kind of electrate definition.

Or, to phrase it as Greg Ulmer might, infinition is to electracy as definition is to literacy.

As a kind of image-thinking, or thinking through or via images, electracy invites the kind of ambiguity that literacy loathes. Ulmer’s work (in Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy for example) steers us toward this kind of thinking that is already happening, that is at the core of inventive thinking, as in Einstein’s “wide image” of the compass:

Part of the value of Einstein as a paradigm is that his theories are imaged by a compass. The story of his compass becomes a parable for our own search , in that we must find our equivalent of the compass–the scene that we recognize as having this guiding role in our orientation to the world and to life. (27)

For Ulmer, “invention is an ecological process” and therefore we must attend to the various institutions of our lives (family, career, entertainment, community) in order to tune in to potential new ideas that can emerge from cross-over (in the way that metaphor suggests “crossing over” or “carrying across”). His books provide “heuretics” for invention, and they work: using his CATT(t) method back in his graduate theory course in 1987, I independently discovered the image of the rhizome (for me imaged as a watermelon) as a model of thinking differently, before knowing anything about Deleuze and Guattari.

If we are to think of infinition imagistically, then, I would offer the Koch snowflake as a model of a kind of “fuzzy definition” or “fuzzy logic” or “thinking-fractal.” The idea is to start with an equilateral triangle and then to let each of the sides open out into an increasingly elongated boundary. It’ll be quicker for you to get the idea if you see the animations at the Wikipedia entry for the Koch snowflake. Here is a boundary of infinite length, which seems to be a contradiction: if something is bounded, it is typically finitely bounded, enclosed by a measurable boundary.

So the question, then, is how can this fractal curve help us to think differently? Can the model of the Koch snowflake open up thought, make it an act of infinition?

Don’t get me wrong: there is a place for definition. But there is also a place for infinition.

Liquid Theory

Just after posting my extended comments on “how concepts function,” which mentions a desire to explore fluid-flow principles and de Bono’s concept of “water logic,” among other things, I came across this post on liquid theory, inviting us to contribute to a liquid book, a call-for-collaboration in a wiki-book of philosophy: Liquid Books. Here we go!

How Concepts Function

I started reading the IEP (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) entry on “Concepts,” which starts by laying out “tasks for an overall theory of concepts,” one of which is to determine what the metaphysical status of a concept is. As I thought about Deleuze and Guattari’s theories, it occurred to me that they are not so much concerned about what a concept is so much as what a concept does: how it functions in a particular context or assemblage, what it accomplishes in solving a particular problem.

In fact, the way that this line of thinking started was by thinking, “If you stop to think about it…” But stopping is artificial: there is no stopping: the mind is going going going, a model of Bergsonian duration, and it’s when we “stop” to think about thinking that we develop a metaphysics of thinking, a model of the “being” vs. “becoming” of thinking. Deleuze is about thinking on the go, thinking as going, and going implies a direction, possibly even a destination (unless you’re a nomad, that is) and/or an agenda: are you stratifying or destratifying? Are you becoming more complex as an organization or is there a kind of chaos-ification occurring?

Thought, that is (to repeat myself), requires a context (what are you thinking about? what problem are you trying to solve?). I see this in their concept of the machinic assemblage: things themselves have fluid ontological categories depending on the role they play in a temporary assemblage of parts/wholes that come together to fulfill a particular purpose or desire. A bicycle tire on a bike, for example, serves as a mode of transportation; in a work of art, however, it serves as a mode of self-expression. In a different context, faced with a different problem to solve, it could be/come something else (in the way that car tires are used as the soles of shoes in third-world countries).

For D&G;, it seems that the problem they want to solve is the question of how to think differently, how (ultimately) to think creatively. Beyond this (and with them there always seems to be a beyond), they want to capture the boiling roiling moment of a phase transition, whether the moment when water freezes or when water boils… In the words of Jeffrey Bell, in his Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference,

A dynamic system. . . presupposes both the stable, structured strata that are in some sense *complete*, and it entails the unstable, unstructured, deterritorializing flows. As Deleuze and Guattari proceed to develop the implications of this thinking, or as they develop a philosophy ‘at the edge of chaos,’ they neither create concepts which solve, once and for all, philosophical problems, nor do they slip into a state of anarchical relativism. Rather, philosophy, as with a living organism ‘at the edge of chaos,’ must maintain both its stable strata and its unstable deterritorializing flows. Without the former, a living organism dies (or a philosophy slips into disordered nonsense and says nothing), and without the latter, an organism is unable to adapt and will also die (or a philosophy falls into a mindless repetition of cliches and platitudes). (4)

So there should be a give and take to thinking, one that allows for this kind of freezing (stratification, striation) then flowing (destratification, smoothening). Philosophical concepts, according to Deleuze and Guattari, function to facilitate such vacillations.

With all of this in mind, I declare once again my intention to investigate fluid/flow principles. An initial peek at the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology points to Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids, “rigid body dynamics,” viscosity vs. “viscoelasticity,” and the like.

And before closing this entry, I need to mention Edward de Bono’s Water Logic, in which he opposes the “rock logic” of the “Greek gang of three” (i.e. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, “who hijacked Western thinking”) with his concept of “water logic”: “Traditional rock logic is based on ‘is’ [identity: What is this?]. The logic of perception is water logic and this is based on ‘to’ [flow]. . . “What does this lead to?” De Bono concludes in a passage that might have been penned by Deleuze: “I write about the huge importance of concepts for water logic. It is concepts that give movement and flexibility in thinking. Such concepts do not always need to be precise because we are using water logic rather than rock logic, which depends on precision” (189).

Thinking About Thinking: Post-Continental Philosophy

I recently received from inter-library loan a book by John Mullarkey titled Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline. This looks at four contemporary philosophers: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and Francois Laruelle, all of whom, according to the author, deal with the topic of immanence in different ways in order to renew thought. The common denominator that Mullarkey identifies is that they all “show” rather than tell via diagrams, and he proposes a “diagrammatology” (W.J.T. Mitchell’s term) as a mode of philosophical discourse to “think immanence”:

And such images are never mere ornament — they are often frames around which whole arguments are set. . . . Diagrams have long been useful in teaching and learning logic . . . but now their foundation to all understanding has been highlighted through research in cognitive science and visual studies. Diagrams are ‘problem solvers’ because they ‘automatically support a large number of perceptual inferences, which are extremely easy for humans. (162)

Mullarkey’s conclusion points to the changes that a “post-continental philosophy” might induce in how we think:

What we are saying — and what a Post-Continental thought indicates — is that philosophy must take up the challenge of renewal and acknowledge the possibility that art, technology, and even matter itself, at the level of its own subject-matter, in its own actuality, might be capable of forcing new philosophical thoughts onto us. With that, however, there might also come a transformation of what we mean by philosophy and even thought itself. (193)

The transformation of thought itself: this is the theme of this blog and of electracy as a description of what becomes possible when fundamental changes occur to the communicative apparatus of a society. Mullarkey’s book, I am suggesting, offers thinking with and through diagrams as one way of of manifesting an electrate form of thinking.

Google Earth and Autocartography

I had lunch with John Craig Freeman, one of the organizers of the Invent-L Imaging Place conference I attended back in February 2007, my work for which has become the focus of this blog. He showed me his recent experiments with Google Earth, and I was intrigued by the possibilities for autocartography. The ability to embed youtube videos and other files in layers points to the map becoming an organizational interface for a kind of rhizographic, multi-genre autography. Here’s the slideshare file for my presentation on Autocartography:

Autocartography: Mapping the Selfhttp://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=autocartography-mapping-the-self-18306&stripped_title=autocartography-mapping-the-self

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: electracy education)

Further Dialogue and New Directions

My response to the essay rejection prompted a dialogue about possible directions the essay could take in the future and possible venues. I am indebted to Craig Saper for his encouragement, his tending to expression of my “genius.” After giving it thought, I concluded that I could develop the autocartography as a genre and use a map interface for my presentation. I’ve also ordered the book Lacan: Topologically Speaking, edited by my former professor Ellie Ragland. I had a course with her while at UF called “Madness and Literature,” in which I applied Lacan’s theory of psychosis to a breakdown I had while an undergraduate. Getting back in to Lacanian theory will be a challenge of course! But this could tie into my references to topology as a spatial metaphor for “imaging place”: in this case, the place of the mind. Lacan’s use of topology to “map” the mind might yield clues to how it could be used to image place as I presented it at the conference (now almost two years past!). In my presentation (you can find the slideshow at slideshare.net: http://www.slideshare.net/rsmyth/second-life-imaging-virtual-place-part2), I mention the conceptual metaphor “thinking is moving through space” and consider what would happen to thinking if the space through which thinking moved was a topological space, or a multi-dimensional space.

There is much to think about here!

Essay Rejection and Response

I received word that my essay didn’t fit the pattern of other work delivered at the Invent-L Imaging Place conference and that it needed major revisions. Here’s the email I received in full:

We’ve consulted with our readers and the general consensus is that your contribution is not yet ready for publication in this particular journal issue. The readers enjoyed your essay as did I, but they want a better sense of how it fits with the rest of the collection. The journal volume focuses on specific imaging place projects. The readers felt that you talked in general terms about fascinating aspects of imaging, and offered a wonderful experiment. They also thought it was two or three essays smashed together: one on Ulmer and Deleuze; one on The Quick Brown Fox; and, one on SL. Finally, they want you to make the essay more of a journal article and less a paper presentation by removing the references to the conference in the body of the text, and citing it, if you’d like, and putting those citations in notes and in a bibliography. It reads like a paper rather than an article at this time.

They saw your essay as a wonderful experiment about topology that would certainly fit in another issue, or something that might fit here if you were to provide a more elaborate answer of how your work led to new insights in imaging place specifically.

The specific changes requested would be to revise the essay with a discussion of how it fits with the imaging place focus. Then, the article would need to explain how the experiment with the Quick Brown Fox or the Ulmering of Deleuze led to new theoretical insights about imaging place.

All that said, I personally liked the essay, loved your performance, and think the work it considers worth publishing.

As you can appreciate, our timelines are very short: we’d need to have the revised contribution in hand no later than the end of the month (August 31) to facilitate one final editorial review. Please let me know if you think this is feasible and whether you’d like to proceed with such a revision. The editorial group would like to include your work, but only if the revision successfully addresses the issues raised above.

I responded as follows:

Sorry for not responding sooner. I have to admit to being very frustrated about receiving this one week before major revisions were due, at the end of a summer vacation during which I could have worked on such revisions. It was especially frustrating after having submitted the draft a whole year earlier–one of the few submitted on time, I think.

I was also surprised that there wasn’t any room for something a bit on the edge in terms of form and content. While it certainly didn’t fit the pattern of other projects, I thought that it addressed questions that the conference topic raised and suggested future avenues for research and consideration. The references to the conference within the text were meant to ground it in the event of the conference, a grounding I thought necessary given the great abstraction of some of the content.

Perhaps some of you may know of a journal or venue that would consider it as is, given its strengths and faults as you have determined them. Or perhaps you plan a future issue of an IMAGING PLACE journal in which this would be a better fit.

Thank you for the time you took in considering the essay. And thank you for the great honor of including me in the conference–for squeezing me in as you did. I enjoyed the chance to move among the grammatologists once again and to lend my vision to the goals of the Larger Project–after climbing atop the shoulders of giants

I have to admit to wondering why they delayed so long in responding: was it to discourage me from working on a revision, since it was so different from the rest of the projects? But I have to assume that they were all just too busy to turn their attention to this work, and when the time came for them to do so, they left it to the last minute, as we all do–though I think that they had some idea of what they wanted to include based on the conference presentations.

The Speed of Thought

I am reading a novel titled The Speed of Dark, told from the point of view of an autistic man trying to decide if he should take an experimental cure for his autism. In the process of making his decision, he researches how the brain works, and at one point he reflects on what he’s been reading:

The book answers questions other people have thought of. I have thought of questions they have not answered. I always thought my questions were wrong questions because no one else asked them. Maybe no one thought of them. Maybe darkness got there first. Maybe I am the first light touching a gulf of ignorance. Maybe my questions matter. (40)

The reference to light and dark ties in to the primary metaphor that the title invokes: “the speed of dark” vs. the speed of light. The character thinks that darkness must be faster than light, since it is always out in front of light, the frontier which light is penetrating.

I found this quite powerful. So much of academia is about distinguishing between those who have a right to answer the questions they ask, and those who do not–between those who even have a right to ask questions in the first place. The thought that my questions might matter, despite my lack of expertise, is heartening. I am reminded of Greg Ulmer’s pep talk on the meaning of acquiring a Ph.D. He called it “a license to teach yourself,” an indication that you have gone as far as the institution will let you go and that you are now in charge of your own education.

Later in the novel, the character speaks of thinking in terms of speed:

I do not know what the speed of thought is. I do not know if the speed of thought is the same for everyone. Is it thinking faster or thinking further that makes different thinking different? (240)

I have considered the question of thought-speed in the context of Deleuzian philosophy in my other blog:

I actually woke up this morning and, while in that half-haze of sleep and waking, starting thinking with Deleuzian concepts. I thought of how schizophrenic thought happens at high speed and wondered if the speed of thought could be measured. It’s probably not so much “fast” thinking (as neuronal firing is an electrical phenomenon that probably happens at speeds defined by the laws of physics) as truly rhizomatic thinking, as thinking that branches out into new areas, creating new connections in the mind of the schizophrenic that are “abnormal.” It would be a kind of “cinematic” thinking along the lines of Deleuze’s “movement-image” (as described by Clare Colebrook in her excellent introduction to Deleuze, which I am reading now). But there is a kind of “speed” to it insofar as it creates an “intensity,” both in the more common sense of “being intense” (like wow, he’s intense, man) as well as the sense that DeLanda develops in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, in which something approaches a phase transition–starts to boil, for example. The schizophrenic as boiling-brain.

The real question, then, is how to boil our brains to schizophrenic intensity without “losing our minds”–a very real danger, as I have discovered for myself.

Learning and Mnemonomics

While at work, I am slowly reading Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment, the report published by the National Academy Press. The chapter on “Advances in the Sciences of Thinking and Learning” speaks of the fundamental components of cognition as being working memory and long-term memory. The following quote caught my attention:

Unlike working memory, long-term memory is, for all practical purposes, an effectively limitless store of information. It therefore makes sense to try to move the burden of problem solving from working to long-term memory. What matters most in learning situations is not the capacity of working memory–although that is a factor in speed of processing–but how well one can evoke the knowledge stored in long-term memory and use it to reason efficiently about information and problems in the present.

Thinking in terms of how our memory is extended by technologies of communication–books, libraries, the internet, social networking–this quote suggests that learning is not just a matter of how we access our personal long-term memory but also a matter of how we access our culture’s memory, as stored in these various media. How can we tap the long-term memory of this vast, mnemonic prosthetic and use it to solve problems in the present?

This also invokes Ulmer’s concept of “emeragency” which puts problem-solving and policy issues at the center of a “humanities of pragmatics.” The technologically enhanced human brain is truly a “limitless store of information.” As such, our primary problem as individuals in the 21st century–and as educators of students who need the information literacy skills to navigate this limitless store of information–is to develop methods for managing this huge palace of memory: the birth of mnemonomics.