Re: November trains

Diane Hodges (dhodges who-is-at ceo.cudenver.edu)
Sat, 13 Nov 1999 08:43:10 -0700

xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu writes:

zounds!! thank you for this - it makes sense is ways that have
been eluding me thus far.
graci graci!
diane

>
>(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*
>_______________________________________________
>
>Department of Communication
>University of California, San Diego
>9500 Gilman Drive
>La Jolla, CA 92093-0503
>phone 858/534-6327
>fax 858/534-7315 email: lstar who-is-at ucsd.edu
>http://weber.ucsd.edu/~lstar/
>
>
>

' 'We have destroyed something by our presence,' said Bernard, 'a
world perhaps.'
(Virginia Woolf, "The Waves")

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, vancouver / university of colorado, denver

Diane_Hodges who-is-at ceo.cudenver.edu