At 15.08 -0400 98-05-13, Luiz Ernesto Merkle wrote:
>Your example of the fork is wonderful. A fork, to be understood in its
>use, need to be contextualized either in "the art of cooking" or in
>"pleasures of eating". It is not easy to be a chef or a gourmet, a good
>one. The development of cutlery and cooking appliances have change the way
>people cook and eat in the same way that their habits of eating and
>cooking have affect the development of these tools.
Nevertheless...
there seems to me there is, at least potentially, a qualitative difference
between the computer-as-a-tool and the fork-as-a-tool. A difference in
where boundaries between the inter actants are. I may not interact with the
fork, but I interact with the lasagna, using the fork. In the case of the
computer, this lasagna//fork-me boundary will(??) be somewhere IN the
computer.
On the other hand...
I'm forwarding from the past, a cautionary note by Arne Raeithel on the
subject of transparency.
see you!
The question's Eva
eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se
**************************************************
Date: 93-01-13 10:07:30 MEZ
=46rom: PO61170%DHHUNI4.BITNET who-is-at vm.gmd.de
Subject: so-called Transparency of Tools
To: xact who-is-at ucsd.edu
While I do agree with the general picture of operations that Mike painted
in his last note (the lowered artifact-apex becomes a seemingly direct
connection), I also want to issue a warning against using the metaphor of
transparency.
I learned this in recent discussions with Heinz Zuellighoven, who is a
software engineer basing his work on Heidegger's analysis of tools and
materials in "Sein und Zeit" (Being and Time) -- see lit-ref at the end. We
asked: "What does it mean that a tool becomes transparent? Compare gripping
a thing with the hand, and with a pair of pliers. In the first case, we
remain conscious of holding it with our hands and may direct attention to
how rough/smooth the thing is, or to how heavy, and so on. In the second
case, some overquick readers of Heidegger would apparently say that the
pliers cease to be visible in the sense that the second case reduces to the
first for the subject. This would mean that we again are able to feel
roughness and weight with our palms and fingers, the iron of the pliers
being just some sort of conductor with no other characteristic of its own
(like a glass pane for vision).
But this is patently false, and seeing this makes the difference between
Heidegger and Leont'ev on the one hand, and the followers of the
transparency metaphor (sorry: I do not have the name of the software
engineer who is usually cited here) and also Bateson on the other side. For
the subject the tool becomes an extension of her/his body, and the direct
connection to the object is now further outside where tool and object touch
each other. With the pliers, I feel the object with iron fingers,
literally, and roughness is not so easily perceived. Instead, solidity and
hardness tested by stiff and rigid metal is now in the center of the object
image. In this sense the "edge of the tool" remains visible all the time,
but as part of the present self-image, not as a separate object
(ready-to-hand, but not present-at-hand, >zuhanden<, not >vorhanden<).
Heinz convinced me that people who design software tools must keep this in
mind, because a literal understanding of the transparency metaphor would
lead them to offer "tools" on computer screens, whose "edges" are not
visible. But these cannot be incorporated by users like a good handicraft
tool whose edges are never outside our awareness.
In the pending discussion of Bateson's "Form, Substance, and Difference" I
will reiterate the point above with regard to his definition of what a
Territory is (for me: the complementary signs of the object at the edge to
the tool, for him: the thing-in-itself as described by natural science --
"billard ball pleroma").
With a transparent tool we cannot find a certain object with a definite
boundary, only the mapping of mappings of maps, around and around. With a
seeing/feeling/gripping tool concrete objects emerge from this endless
cycle, specific resistance co-defined by tool and counterprocess,
>Gegenstaendlichkeit< (object-ness) of which Leont'ev speaks then at
length, as does Heidegger IN THE LATE TWENTIES already.
I got carried away, sorry. Hope this remained understandable.
Arne.
Psychology U of Hamburg
Reinhard Budde & Heinz Zuellighoven wrote one chapter in the book >Software
Development and Reality Construction< edited by Christiane Floyd et al.
(Springer Verlag 1992). I do not have the volume here.
I also have a chapter there (>Activity Theory as a Foundation for Design<)
-- tools are parts of operational (or operative) means, i.e. of the
complete cycle of a functional system with the edge marking the point where
subject meets object.