Challenge of comprehension

From Information Highways to Songlines of the Noosphere: Global configuration of hypertext pathways (Part #2)

Differences: At this point the capacity of the user becomes an issue. Skills are required to move around the information society. People may have these skills to different degrees. Much has been made of Internet snobbery in response to "newbies" and their clumsy attempts at orienting themselves compared to the honed skills of hackers. But this is merely one aspect of the challenges of a learning environment.

The information society must necessarily cater for many kinds of need, many levels of sophistication, and many kinds of understanding -- to say nothing of the many languages which have not yet been adequately represented on the Internet. These will all tend to fragment the information society into sub-cultures, which can usefully be understood through biological metaphors as ecosystems and niches that may or may not be significantly linked to each other in a manner necessary for sustainable global community. How is the transition from simpler, or simplistic, forms of comprehension to deeper, or richer, forms to be understood and represented to those characterized by some particular level or pattern of insight? Some will favour metaphors such as initiation, others will distinguish the equivalent of information gurus and blackbelt information manipulators -- in contrast to the information luddites who find reason to reject the "amazing" advantages of the information society. For such people, those hooked on the Internet are usefully understood as having launched themselves into an orbit of the privileged -- away from the mundane issues and constraints of the earthbound, and of those "beyond the last telephone pole".

Flat earth understanding: One of the difficulties with the highway metaphor, is that any road is typically thought of as associated with a more or less flat surface, whatever the topography separating origin and destination. In fact, the higher the grade of highway, the flatter the surface and the less the influence of any intervening topographical features. There is a glib transition to "global" information highway by which the world is transformed into a "global village" -- again implying some form of easy (line of sight) communication or a "flattening" of the globe .

There is a dangerous metaphoric trap in such usage. With increasing globality, if the metaphoric implication is retained. Horizon effects necessarily render line of sight communication impossible. Such horizon effects signal important barriers to comprehension and communication. The facile assumption of globality, based on linearity without curvature, obscures this. It leads to what amounts to a "flat earth" understanding of "global" communications. This may appear to be viable if there is no need to comprehend the issues of different cultures, disciplines or value systems -- just as it is usually adequate to treat the map of a city or a country as flat. But it leads to severe navigational difficulties if there is a need to travel to other continents and to understand "where they are" and in "which direction they lie", or to adequately reflect experience that others act on radically different assumptions. This is as true of the conceptual world as it is of the physical world -- curvature implies differences in orientation and planes of reference as well as fundamental differences in perspective (although these may not be readily apparent).

Curvature: Introducing curvature into maps of knowledge is just as highly inconvenient as with physical maps. Hence the use by geographers of projections to represent curvature on a flat surface by allowing selected types of distortion. In this sense, to preserve the simplicity implied by linearity, people (if they are aware of the issue) may choose to effectively "live on a projection". It is over this flat projection that the information highway is currently understood to run -- especially by its constructors and "power users". The nature of any "edge" and the challenges of "circum-naviagation" are not considered.

As yet there is little sensitivity to the severe conceptual distortions that this introduces. Symptoms of this (and its denial) are the complaints of non-English cultures concerning the dominance of English on the Internet and concerns about cultural imperialism. Less obvious perhaps is the false conceptual proximity implied by listing competing schools of thought together on a single Web document. Ease of electronic access to them does not necessarily imply conceptual proximity amongst those concerned -- or that the menu ordering them in any way addresses the challenges of moving from one perspective to another. A telephone directory does not mean a community exists -- it takes no account of who cannot call whom, and who is unable to dialogue with whom. There is every likelihood that conceptual niches are created by the breakdown of line of sight communication.

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Challenge of comprehension