(Forgive if this is duplicate, some email glitches here and I've been
tyring to post this for a week!)
I have been following the discussion of Jay's paper with great interest.
In fact, I had the interesting experience of *dreaming* the paper last
night, and woke up with a strange visual experience of seeing things
moving at different rates -- exhilirating and a little scary.
One piece I'd like to pull at a bit: if you conceptualize the trajectory
of a timescale itself as an object, it has many qualities in addition to
speed/rate (Jay talks about some, including scope and scale). One set of
these is something like the qualitative nature of the information
exchanges across levels (the semiotics, as the paper indicates). These
themselves can be sparse or dense, big or small, simple or complex. Let me
try to ground this in an example. Growing up as a working class girl, the
math/science train at the school level seemed to go very fast, with few
portals of entry. Once I managed to get "on," it, it wasn't hard, but if
(it seemed to me at the time, and still does) I missed one opportunity,
the next would be a long time coming, if at all. I was able to stay on
the train during high school, but at the college level, I didn't know the
code for the entrances. So I moved to another train, the social science
one, that had many more kinds of doors, closer together, and moved at a
pace I could articulate with my life (needing to work odd jobs, do
community organizing, grow up). Occasionally I'd glance up and note that
the science/math train had rumbled by again. By the end of college, it
appeared to be entirely without entrances, as I was moving orthagonally to
it, not just at a different rate, but sideways.
So a question here is: what can we say about the properties of the
timescale as mediating object to explain this sort of thing? Clearly
people can use the representation of a time scale as an object for power
over others, or as empowering. Anatomy is slow physiology. A scalpel may
illuminate or obscure this. A CD Rom with speeded up anatomical slices
may illuminate or obscure this. Whether illuminating or obscuring depends
on the ...power of those yielding these tools? ....or...?
By the way a historical footnote on boundary objects: the original work
on boundary objects that I did in the mid-80s grew directly out of
observing how two groups (clinicians and basic researchers in brain
research) with different time lines combined data. Clinicians canonically
need answers quickly and instantially; basic researchers work on a longer
time scale with more formal data points.
Thanks for a great paper, Jay, and a great discussion, all.
L*
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