zenpundit.com

One of my most thoughtful blogfriends, Dave Schuler, is worried about the downstream cultural effects of a creeping cognitive reliance on visual media:. A selection from different posts on the subject by Dave:

“I Can Read a Passage in a Book 20 Times and It Doesn’t Click”

More On Visualcy

The Visual Imagery Society

The old methods of handbook and lecture don’t work anymore-the new crop of trainers can’t learn that way. They need visual training-simulations and hands-on. The performance of the new trainees was characterized in the feature as “improving”. No word on whether it’s come up to the standard of their old-fashioned literate predecessors

Not only are the arguments not subject to logical refutation, logical refutation may not be comprehended by those for whom visualcy is the primary communication modality.

What I find most concerning about this trend is that developments in government paralleled the transition from oral to literate societies. Divine and semi-divine chiefs and monarchs were replaced by representative government. Is bureaucracy the analogue in government of visual imagery as a dominant communication modality? Chaos? Autocracy? The only notable developments I’ve seen over the last couple of decades are an increasing tendency in the Western democracies towards bureaucracy as the operative form of government and a greater tendency to follow charismatic chiefs, the societal modality that John W. Campbell characterized as “barbarism”.

I’ll conclude this speculation with questions rather than answers.

• Is visual imagery overtaking the written word as the dominant form of communication, especially for communicating new knowledge?
• If so, what are the cognitive implications of the change?
• What are the social and political implications of the change in cognitive behavior?

As it happens, I have another thoughtful blogfriend, Dave Davison, who is a foursquare enthusiast for emergent visualcy technology. Davison was, if I recall correctly, involved in the development of some of the ambient devices on which Schuler opined.  A few representative posts from Davison:

MuralCasting – Improving ROA (Return on attention) -corrected 2.8.08

Logic + Emotion: Developing an Experience Strategy in 4 Parts

Too many ripples in the pond?

The problem with “visualcy”, as I interpret Schuler’s posts, is if it were to become a successor and replacement for the Western culture of  “literacy” that stretches back, with sporadic interruptions, to classical Greece. Visualcy, in the hands ( or eyes) of someone who has never learned to think logically or coherently in a textual format, is a dangerous thing as it powerfully lulls them into a false sense of comprehension. Visualcy, used by someone with the requisite analytical cognitive skills, would be a powerful tool for efficient data compression, synthesis and communication. From personal experience, I can attest that well constructed visual models can be a gateway to understanding for some of my students.

The underlying problem to this discussion is that too large a segment of our population never become truly literate as they pass through our public education system – they are disjointed “scanners” of words rather than readers who habitually fall prey to the maxim of “Garbage in, Garbage out”. What non-emotionally driven thinking they attempt based on information from a  text is often from significant misunderstanding; and if they do not have the good fortune to have teachers who can engage them with mathematics, they might never pick up logical reasoning at all.  Math instruction, I am convinced, despite my own struggles with that subject, is one of the “thin blue lines” holding our civilization together.

What to do ? The attractiveness of visual imagery would appear to be a neurological constant of our brain structure and the potential of visual analytics as field can hardly be ignored so our fallback must be attention to fundamentals. Education has to be a process that ends for the great majority in minds that are trained to think critically and creatively. We are maxing out our legislative strategies on societal and institutional accountability here and will have to contemplate greater emphasis on student and parental responsibility for the education of children than we have so far been willing to countenance.

I think I’m over the worst of my recent time crunch. In any event, I thought I’d put some effort into the blog tonight. Times like this, I wish Zenpundit was a group blog.

In politics, ambiguity, restraint and a lack of passionately held policy positions can be an advantage as the public wishfully projects their hopes and assumptions on to the candidate. Or it can simply mask the fact that the candidate has no well-thought out philosophy or basic command of the subject in question. This is great if it means the candidate is open to accepting well-considered “new thinking” but bad if the candidate simply picks up positions ad-hoc without really contemplating the downstream implications.

Senator Barack Obama’s recent sojurns in to trade policy on the campaign trail, which seem to be raw political appeals to rentier interests of the moment, are alarming economists generally associated with the Democratic Party ( Senator John McCain, the inevitable GOP nominee, isn’t any better informed on basic economics theory than is Obama – making 2008 a worrisome choice if the economy goes into the tank).

I’ve decided to follow John’s lead and hop back on to this platform once more as more of my blogfriends seem to be active on Twitter this time around.

Long day but a productive one.  Just realized that networking and leveraging attention is half the battle.

Pardon my slow posting, I have a couple of high priority projects colliding with a temporary but fierce squeeze on my free time. Some good things in the works that will be up in a couple of days. Short posts until then.