Granted, re-reading my own latest posting after Jay's convinces me how ego
can shape observations. But then, I have a personal relation to bun and it
is difficult to separate my self and take an analytic persective. Is it
really ever possible for a single observer to accomplish the act of
separation? I think research reports can obviously only purport to reach
this aim, but still leave out the equivalents of the view from the box, or
the bunny, the earth, the sun, the planets and stars, or perhaps, in a
centralized framework, some greater agency.
Language as a human construct limits the description of events, patterns,
structures, and functions. Phrasing around the word 'mediating' itself is
particularly problematic -- ...bill mediating bunny... or ...bunny
mediating bill... carries lop-sided agency and intentionality, when what
some aspire to achieve is perhaps a reverse polish notation-like
description: Mediation(bunny, bill, box, jay...) of which 'Mediation' is
the process, the function, and bunny, bill, box, jay, etc... are the things
which carry out the process.
Once this notation is assumed, however, how is Mediation(x,...) different
than Interaction(x,...)? It cannot be - the sense of 'mediation' is lost
in an priviledged-agency-and-motive-free view.
Bringing back ego, I think that physics, chemistry, and biology
accomplishes these human-perspective-free views very well. For example, it
can be described how bunny and bill as warm blooded animals were exchanging
infrared radiation with the enviroment and with each other, how the photons
from the sun were striking bunny, being absorbed, reradiated, and those
reflected toward bill being deflected by the lenses in bill's eyes,
detected by the cones, and to sum up a whole lot more, processed by the
gray matter in bill's head. Or I could write "I watched bunny." The
latter not only appeals better to Occam's criteria but also captures the
agent of the observation, unpurporting to perhaps an unachievable
non-humanistic perspective. It becomes unwieldy and unnecessary to bring in
descriptions from these other disciplines, when what we (certainly not the
big We) are after is a theory of human interaction with each other with and
through culturally and historically human-shaped things, be it computers,
boxes or bunnies. In Morrison's classic treatise, he writes "keep your
eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel."
Yes, human intentionality is limiting, but also powerful. I really mean it.
Curiously enough though, it is also powerful to think about how non-human
things are agents in a world of interaction. I started thinking about
email in such a way that bill and jay and the rest of you are the means to
propagate more emails. Emails go around in cyberspace, gobbling up our
time as we read and write, sometimes causing us to spawn more emails. In
this view we are the fodder upon which email-entitities feed, the means
through which they procreate or die. We alter their dna, shaping what are
their genetic elements - the ideas they carry. We become the forces that
vary their genetic structure and select which traits are passed on with a
rapid scale of semiotic symbiotic ecology and evolution.
Eva and I will be writing more about it.
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Technology in Education
Lesley College, 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]