Week 1 Reflection & Discussion
Part One:
Valued points from this week’s readings:
Tiidenberg motivates that metaphors function conceptually to reflect but also construct our experience of reality. Internet metaphors cluster into social, functional and social groupings which help to frame new cultural spaces of meaning around us, but also serve to divide us.
Innovation stands on the shoulders of invention. As Walker describes, invention is first, but innovation is often best, evolving existing processes and inventions to drive positive economic and user outcomes. If invention brings something new to the world, innovation changes it.
Cerf asserts that our ubiquitous internet culture descends directly from the telegraphic tradition of the 19th century, retaining many of its original vulnerabilities concerning privacy, reliability and the hazardous liabilities which arise from being more connected to others.
Valued points from this week’s videos:
Metaphors help shape our understanding of cultural change, but also expose the invisible infrastructures and questions of equity within and between communities. As Jeffrey Young argues, such common idioms are often outdated and even cruel in their blaming of victims of oppression.
Baym describes how new forms of communication herald both opportunity to form richer relationships, but also carry risk of communication becoming shallower. For those experiencing these changes, it is challenging to understand these changes while concurrently living through them.
Lakoff and Johnson motivate that our conceptual system, our way of understanding and describing experience, is largely metaphorical. It structures what we perceive, and shapes the world around us. That the structure and systemic nature of metaphor determines thought itself.
Part Two:
Connection to a key theme: How do we understand something as a new technology?
New technology is ubiquitous, and the pace of digital change can often feel overwhelming. Yet we use metaphor to help make sense of our relationship to this change, our understanding of personal consequence, and to describe our experience to others. We fat finger mistakes while typing. Struggle with the uncanny valley of artificial intelligence. We store information in clouds and search for hot spots. Such linguistic shorthand frames new forms of cultural meaning between us, but also divides and excludes. Metaphor is itself personal. It’s our own clustered experiential code we lean on inside the sense-making cacophony of cultural change.
But new itself is often conflated and used interchangeably between invention and innovation. We innovate our way out of a problem rather than invent a solution. What we experience as new is rarely invention, but more the strategic combination and assembly of existing products and experiences to form something with more deliberately intentional and often crisper positive user value and economic outcomes. Innovation is cumulative, additive and incremental. It can take great leaps forward, but those leaps rarely start from zero. Innovation changes the world rather than introduces something new into it. It brings scale to new in ways that invention cannot. What’s celebrated inside of innovation is execution. The ability to take an idea and scale it. Monetize it. But in doing so, use of metaphor and innovation around new can be exclusionary and promote rejection and resistance. It’s new for some. New changes definitions of privacy, intimacy, interpersonal dynamics and hierarchies. It reshapes cultural norms, especially around communication. And most challenging of all, can only really be understood in retrospect.
Part Three:
Open Questions
When we articulate the difference between invention and innovation, we frame it as a discussion of understanding cultural change and new. But new for who? Even as popular technology scales, there are those who are left behind and excluded, and also those who actively resist. Even the ubiquitous global scale of social media sharing does not include everyone. Devices are cost-prohibitive economically, but new also often comes with the unforeseen consequence of psychological and social cost. Inside of new there is an inevitable collateral cost. The question here is the same - for who?
New is exciting. We thrill at the first we see time and space collapsing inside of Uber. We marvel at the logistics of Amazon’s same-day delivery. And we delight at the features of our upgraded smartphone. Yet all of these experiences are ones of privilege, and rest upon enormous invisible infrastructures optimized by technology, but ultimately powered by people. Uber still needs the driver working late into the night. Amazon’s warehouses still need the cheap day labor of those who pack the shipments. The materials which build our smartphones are harvested from some of the poorest areas of the world. What economic, social and psychological responsibilities do those benefitting from these products have to those powering them?
Discussion: New For Who?
Tweet:
Tiidenberg motivates that metaphors function conceptually to reflect but also construct our experience of reality. Internet metaphors cluster into social, functional and social groupings which help to frame new cultural spaces of meaning around us, but also serve to divide us.
Why is this important?
When we articulate the difference between invention and innovation, we use metaphor to frame it as a discussion of understanding cultural change and new. But new for who? As we learn from Young's example of bootstrapping, even as popular technology scales, there are those who are left behind and excluded, and also those who actively resist. There are those who never had boots to begin with. When it comes to metaphors there is the motivation towards sense-making and clarity, but there is also invisible cultural motivation which excludes. The meanings we construct are personal. New is not new for all.
Even the ubiquitous global scale of social media sharing does not include everyone. Devices are cost-prohibitive economically, but new also often comes with the unforeseen consequence of psychological and social cost. Inside of new there is an inevitable collateral cost. The question here is the same - for who?
How does communication in 280 characters change the way we share what we think?
While composition in 280 characters forces a necessary crispness and clarity in thinking, inside of a platform like X it is also an infinitely renewable resource. There is no limit on the number of tweets we can send, and as such no material limit on character count other than the need to separate our thoughts into individual elements. It motivates a brevity, but it doesn't really have to.
The difference here of course is that in the context of the assignment, we only get one, which forces not just the distillation and concentration of an individual thought, but it requires an editing rigor also of thought. We have to include only what we feel is most relevant, and most clear. As such, it sharpens our thinking, cleans it, and makes every word earn its place on the page in service of the thought.
Most of my professional 'thought sharing' happens in Slack, which has echoes of X in its demands for brevity and clarity, especially for those I need to communicate with. It doesn't have a character count, but there is an accepted cultural (or at least organizational) understanding around length. For me this is primarily motivated by the attention span of the recipient, rather than the constraint of the platform. More to do with speaking to those who have limited time rather than needing to box my thoughts into a character count.
