Transforming Static Websites into Mobile "Wizdomes": enabling change through intertwining dynamic and configurative metaphors

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Transforming Static Websites into Mobile "Wizdomes"
References

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There is the interesting possibility that "site" may come to be understood as a static outmoded metaphor for the manner in which people and collectives find it appropriate to engage with the universe of knowledge. Site implies a particular location, especially the location with which the web user has some involvement and which may be deliberately constructed as an articulation of individual or collective identity. From there one can travel to other locations which others have configured to represent their's.

However, whilst the "site" may reflect considerable effort in articulating a static identity -- whether or not it has interactive facilities analogous to those that might be expected in a person's house -- it says nothing about the dynamics of how a person moves and how identity may be associated with that. There may be links to other sites -- like travel books in a home library -- but the dynamics and style of that movement are only partially represented. Even more interesting is the question of "who" moves. There is a sense that an abstract entity, a "visitor", travels to other sites as an observer, a consumer, a tourist -- along the information highway. Possibly some form of link may be brought back -- like a photograph or memento. Arrangements may be made to "keep in touch" through an exchange of addresses. As the person responsible for a site, one may in turn make arrangements to receive such visitors.

The question asked in what follows is whether more fruitful understanding of these processes would emerge from changing metaphor.

1From "site" to "vehicle"

Rather than constructing a site, and visiting other sites elsewhere in cyberspace, suppose the focus shifted to the "vehicle" in which one travelled. Such a shift in paradigm is evident in the case of people who choose to invest in a mobile home to travel their continent, possibly with little immediate intention to return to a particular physical location. The focus is then on the design of the mobile home (a caravan) and its capacity to move. The "centre of gravity" of identity is then with the vehicle and its enabling capacity rather than with some particular physical space. A similar shift in identity is evident in the desire of people to possess a vehicle that better reflects their sense of identity than the place they are obliged to dwell for socio-economic reasons.

But this possibility then raises the question of how exactly the design of a "vehicle" might be expected to be different from the design of a "site". In the design of a site, considerable effort is put into ensuring that it is a reflection of one's personal (or collective) sense of identity. The aim is to fruitfully distinguish its unique qualities from those of others -- notably to render it more attractive. Website designers now have considerable experience in building a site to this end -- respecting the basic needs of visitors -- navigational needs within the site, clarity of content, etc. If the site is a more personal one, holding notes, photographs and the like, less effort may be put into facilitating the experience of visitors and more into its security features -- exactly as with the priorities of a householder for whom the needs of visitors are not of major concern.

How then to think about the design of a "vehicle"? Clearly search engines may be appropriately considered as a form of "public transportation". They may even offer facilities to "personalize" the engagement with such transportation -- configuring colours, layout, language, skins, etc.

More challenging, as explored here, is the question of how the cognitive context and pattern, typically associated with a static website, might be transformed by conceiving of it as a personal vehicle for (experiential) travel through the universe of knowledge over time. It is one thing to have a (radio)telescope or radio to receive signals from distant locations (and to send signals back); it is another to be carried to those locations as in a space ship in which one lives and moves and has one's being.

One relevant innovation is the emergence of appropriately configured "avatars" as "vehicles" or "identities" through which to explore realms of cyberspace -- most especially in online gaming environments and virtual worlds. This is a reminder of how quickly society has come to accept the "reality" of what is purely virtual, notably in attributing a degree of reality to web "sites" and their corresponding domain "addresses" as "property" -- possibly of greater value and significance than physical property (at least to the proprietor).

In this respect the comment of Kenneth Boulding (Ecodynamics; a new theory of societal evolution, 1978) is especially relevant to the following exploration: \

Our consciousness of the unity of the self in the middle of a vast complexity of images or material structures is at least a suitable metaphor for the unity of a group, organization, department, discipline, or science. If personification is only a metaphor, let us not despise metaphors - we might be one ourselves. (p.345)

1Paradigm shift: knowledge vs wisdom?

It might well be said that websites are primarily designed to manage information, perhaps understood as knowledge and know-how. However, by comparison with services and facilities in any urban environment, the "information" may be primarily of an aesthetic or recreational form -- as with a videogame parlour. In the case of an interest group club, the focus may be more on emphasizing the values for which the group was organized.

More intriguing for this exploration is the extent to which the owner of the vehicle has it specially configured to enhance a specially cultivated set of ways of interacting with the environment through which it moves. One possible analogy is the extent to which a standard vehicle may be imaginatively "reconfigured" and "converted" as an expression of the personality and tastes of the owner. This partly reflects the emergent cocooning mentality that may be applied both to a dwelling space and to associated behaviours -- establishing a personalized distance and a controlled interface with the environment.

Such thinking is in accord with the widespread move to "gated communities" -- a contemporary version of the earlier move to "intentional communities". As physical sites, the latter were designed to enable a particular approach to life to be cultivated and enhanced. They may be associated with a particular ideology or set of spiritual principles -- possibly with the guidance of a political, ideological or spiritual "guru".

The question that merits attention is the extent to which the accumulation of knowledge, and knowledge about knowledge, evolves from a "knowledge management" priority to one in which the manner of interacting with that knowledge is cultivated and the organization of its essential principles highligted in the "pattern that connects". In musical terms, this might be the contrast between the capacity to play a wide range of music (from a library) and the insight into what music it is fruitful to play under particular circumstances. In what ways is musical taste developed? Such an "art of knowledge" might then be understood as "wisdom" -- the wisdom of appropriateness, in whatever domain.

Reframed in this way the challenge is to design an "all-terrain" vehicle capable of adapting dynamically to the circumstances of challenging experience. This points to the contrast with a conventional static website -- however many "user preferences" are offered there. It suggests a need to look to ways of ensuring that the relationships constituting any "knowledge" associated with the website are reconfigured dynamically in terms of a subtler pattern of invariance with which identity is associated. The "wisdom" which it is then valuable for the user of the vehicle to have enhanced is the "pattern that connects" the items of knowledge. In particular it is likely to be innovative emergent patterns that are most to be valued.

1Paradox: closed system wisdom vs open system wisdom

There is a curious, somewhat counter-intuitive, twist to the relation between:

• wisdom, considered very much as a closed system of a particular inspiration or tradition, that is believed to effectively explain the world and how to be in it. This has a predetermined static quality to it in which learning proceeds by some form of disruptive shock.
• wisdom, considered very much as the ability to function adaptively in an open system (cf Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams, Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything, 2006). Here learning is more continuous, possibly to be described as maintenance learning.

The distinction between shock learning and maintenance learning was notably one fruit of a study for the Club of Rome (James W Botkin, Mahdi Elmandjra and Mircea Malitza, No Limits to Learning: bridging the human gap, 1979), discussed elsewhere (Societal Learning and the Erosion of Collective Memory: a critique of the Club of Rome Report: No Limits to Lear

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