Another Non-Listless Summer

So, it's getting to be a ritual, me providing Roy Christopher with my selections for his annual summer reading list feature. My picks were included on his Summer Reading List, 2015 post on June 22nd, along with those of about 20 others, including Howard Rheingold, Steve Jones, Peter Lunenfeld, and my friend and colleague Paul Levinson, as well as Roy himself, and you can read them all, if you care to, by clicking on the old link and taking a trip down to his website.

Of course, as a public service, I will also reproduce my list here, on Blog Time Passing. So here it is:

I have great admiration for poet and essayist Diane Ackerman, and this summer I plan to dive into her most recent book, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us (Norton, 2014). I also want to catch up on one of her earlier volumes, Deep Play (Vintage, 1999). And this may seem like something out of left field, but my list includes Revolution for the Hell of It (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1968) by Abbie Hoffman, partly out of sixties nostalgia, but mostly because I understand that Hoffman was under the influence of Marshall McLuhan, among other things, and I’m curious to see how much media ecology he incorporated into his own ideas about subversive activity.

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I imagine it would be appropriate to include a book on reading in a reading list, and I’ve included Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (Penguin, 2009), which comes highly recommended. To balance out a book on literacy, I have also added a book on orality, Myth, Ritual and the Oral (Cambridge University Press, 2010) by the great anthropologist and media ecology scholar, Jack Goody. Of course, reading also includes rereading, and I plan to return to J. T. Fraser’s seminal volume on the study of time, Time: The Familiar Stranger (Tempus Books, 1987), in preparation for a research project I’ll be tackling in the fall.

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It seems that the term affordances comes up quite a bit in discussions of technology and media these days, and I think it will be worthwhile to go back to the source, James J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Psychology Press, 1986), as it also constitutes an important contribution to the media ecology literature. Additionally, I think I’m going to learn a great deal from Zhenbin Sun’s recently published Language, Discourse, and Praxis in Ancient China (Springer, 2015), and I think the time is right for me to tackle Bruce Kodish’s massive Korzybski: A Biography (Extensional Publishing, 2011).

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One of the books I am most looking forward to reading is Where Seas and Fables Meet: Parables, Fragments, Lines, Thought (Guernica, 2015), by B. W. Powe, a leading Canadian poet, literary theorist, and media ecologist. Another is J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). And for a science fiction fix, Paul of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (Tor, 2008) should do nicely.

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 And there you have it, my 2015 Summer Reading List, for what it's worth. And since you asked so nicely, here are my previous lists: 

• 2012: Some More Reading List 
• 2013: S'more Reading Listed 
• 2014: Some More Reading for the Summer 

Perhaps you will find something of interest in these lists, or maybe this will move you to make a list of your own. As Jack Goody has make clear, lists are a format, and a medium, that were made possible by the invention of writing, so it is only appropriate that we use them in the service of reading, and reading, and reading some more...

Google Glass iMenagerie

Back on February 4th, I posted an entry under the heading of An i for an Eye that included some discussion of Google's Project Glass. Just to refresh your memory, here's a video showing the current state of the technology, which was posted last month:



As you can see from the title of the video, the emphasis is on the camera function, although elements of Google search are also incorporated. This is a bit more modest than the original vision (sorry for the pun) Google had presented (as I noted in my An i for an Eye post), but in any event, it was back in February that Google released more details about the project. Here are some excerpts from a short article on it in Deutsche Welle, where Google Glass is described as "a smartphone-like product that is controlled by voice commands":

Controlled by voice commands, the small set of eyeglasses project information unobtrusively to a tiny display screen attached to a rim above the right eye. The glasses run on Google's Android operating system for mobile devices.

Google Inc. first sold the glasses to computer programmers at a company conference last June where Google co-founder Sergey Brin first demonstrated the device. The company first began developing the glasses in 2010 as part of a secretive company division now known as Google X.

As the device is hands-free, Google Glass is supposed to make it easier for people to take pictures or record video wherever they are. Wearers can also conduct online searches by telling Google Glass to look up a specific piece of information.

Google also posted a YouTube video Wednesday showing people wearing the glasses while skydiving, riding a rollercoaster, dancing, skiing and even swinging on a trapeze.

The mass-market version of Google Glass will cost less than $1,500, but more than a smartphone.

It does sound pretty cool, doesn't it? Of course, it also sounds like it will feed directly into our "almost infinite appetite for distractions" to quote from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisted, a quote that Neil Postman invoked in his Foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death.  

But holding such considerations aside for the moment, as well as Postman's most basic question, to what problem is this a solution? (the problem of having to hold a camera and/or mobile device with your hands), back on February 25, I was asked to respond to a practical inquiry. This was for Mike Daly's Today's Burning Question feature for the Adotas website.  Specifically, it was, Today’s Burning Question: Marketing Implications Of Google Glass, and here's how Daly introduced it:

Another day, another screen size!

On the heels of Google’s unveiling of new details about Google Glass, we asked our panel of movers & shakers: “How will online marketers capitalize on the impending availability of Google Glass?”

and here's my response:

“Google Glass will open up an entirely new world of first-person video that will radically transform the art of filmmaking and video production, journalism, public relations, and advertising and marketing. It will take a bit of time to adequately explore the possibilities of this new medium, and for audiences to become accustomed to the perspective, but ultimately it is a point of view that better suits the electronic media environment in that it puts viewers at the center of the action, rather than positioning them in an objectively distanced manner, as outsiders looking in (the point of view associated with reading and print media). As such, Google Glass is well suited for capturing the look and sound of an environment or surrounding, as opposed to smaller products that might be better displayed by more traditional camera-work, using for example close-ups, two-shots, etc. The strength of this new medium lies in providing a virtual sense of place, a sample of the experience of actually being there, and this will have immediate and enormous relevance for the travel and tourism industry. Google Glass is well suited for presenting a walk-through of an unfamiliar locale, a tour of a resort or hotel’s rooms and facilities, a vacation spot’s attractions, theme park rides and recreational activities, and modes of transportation such as a cruise ship or train.” – Dr. Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Director of the Professional Studies in New Media program at Fordham University.

You can read the other responses over on the Adotas page. But maybe to return to Huxley and Postman's point about distraction, and other concerns regarding new media, this next video handles the subject with great humor, and while the title, How Guys Will Handle Google Glass, led me to believe it might be a little to racy for this family-oriented blog, let me assure you that it is rated PG at worst:

And to return to a more serious mode, here's one more video, this one having been posted just a few days ago, CNET Top 5: Best uses for Google Glass. The first couple are not very impressive, but kudos for bringing up the negative effects in the midst of discussing some reasonable benefits that this new gadget might have to offer.

One last note that no one seems to be bringing up is the potential benefits the technology might have to offer to people with disabilities, particular vision impairment. If you could use the device as a hands free magnifier, and use voice commands to control the level of magnification and other factors, there would be no more need for bifocals and progressive lenses. And individuals with macular degeneration, like my mother, could switch back and forth between a very high magnification for reading to something better suited for moving about.

Oh, and let me conclude by noting that the title of this post is of course a play on the title of the Tennessee Williams drama, The Glass Menagerie, with the ubiquitous small i for internet prefix added on, to invoke a little pun on imaginary, because, after all, what this is all about is speculation, and the products of imagination. And if you don't care for my neologism, all I can say is that people living in Google glass houses shouldn't throw iStones...

An i for an Eye

I have been fascinated with the development of augmented reality technology (see, for example, my previous post, The New Hyperreality ), and believe that it will play an increasingly more important role for the future of new media. Here's a video from a news report that I haven't included in any previous post. It's a few years old now, but gets across the basic idea:



And yes, I agree with this report, it seems quite clear to me that hands-free is the most effective mode for using AR, rather than looking through your cell phone's camera, just as we tend to favor bluetooth headphones or ear pieces over holding the phone up to your ear. So this suggests AR goggles will be very big at some point in the near future. Now, here is Nokia's projection of a future development of a hand's free visual display, Nokia future vision:



The eyewear is a substitute for a screen in this instance, as opposed to at true form of AR where the actual world we're looking at is augmented by electronic data. A more complete picture is presented in Google's vision for the future, called Project Glass: One Day...:



And here's the write-up  on it:

We believe technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don't.

A team within our Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.

Follow along with us at http://g.co/projectglass as we share some of our ideas and stories. We'd love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

Now here's one of their follow-up videos, Project Glass: Skydiving Demo at Google I/O 2012:



To be honest, I can't imagine going skydiving myself, and this seems somewhat less ambitious than the previous video, simply a matter of adding a video camera to the glasses to record whatever it is you're looking at. This also seems to be the case for this other video from Google, Glass Session: Madame & Bébé Gayno:



Using the glasses for a live streaming video chat, specifically a Google Hangout, adds something new to the mix, admittedly, and makes sense in this context. But for a regular video call, such as you might do via Skype, I guess you'd have to look in the mirror, a technique used in this next video, DVF [through Glass]:



 You can see that, in this case, the glasses provided raw footage which was later edited. Here's the write-up:

Experience the DVF Spring 2013 show at New York Fashion Week through the eyes of the people who made it happen—the stylists, the models and Diane von Furstenberg herself. All the footage you see here was filmed using only Glass, Google's latest technology that lets you capture moments from a unique, new perspective. See what happens when fashion and technology come together like you've never seen before.

So, yeah, it all seems pretty cool, especially if you want to document your life, an idea that began with written diaries during the print era, became increasingly more visual with the addition of photography, especially as cameras were made increasingly more accessible and portable, and continued with the introduction of home movies, home video cameras, and now blogging, tweeting, social media profiles, status updates, Instagram and the like. So this is just one more step in creating a complete record of everything we say and do, and see.

But this is a far cry for the AR depicted in the first video, and that's because those much more sophisticated Google glasses are just an idea for now, and the video does not depict an actual technology.  But here's one that's much closer to realization, iOptik - a glimpse into the future -vers 1.1:



And here's their write-up:

Innovega's wearable transparent heads-up display, enabled by iOptik contact lens technology, delivers mega-pixel content with a panoramic field-of-view. This high-performance and stylish eyewear is perfectly suited for the enjoyment of immersive personal media. The first part of the video is a CGI compilation provided by CONNECT, San Diego and the second part is actual footage through our system.

One big problem that none of the videos I've included here so far makes clear is that there are limitations to what the human eye can focus on at very close range, so it may not be possible to simply have AR glasses that work in the way depicted. Remember that with AR on mobile devices, the devices are held at a much farther distance from the eye than glasses are.  This is a key point that Evan Ackerman discusses in an article on the DVICE website.  And according to Ackerman,

The way Innovega gets around this problem is by modifying your eyeballs to focus much, much closer. Innovega has developed a special contact lens called iOptik that is completely transparent, except that it can refocus polarized light (like the light from a display) so that you have no problems seeing it. And it's not an either-or thing: with the contact lenses in, the world looks completely normal, except that you can suddenly see a high resolution display that's projected on a pair of glasses, superimposed transparently across up to 120 degrees of your field of view.

Ackerman also notes that while Google glasses have a long way to go, Innovega's innovation may be ready roll out later this year. For a more technical explanation, here's Randall Sprague, CTO of Innovega, in a video called I Can See for Inches and Miles:



As well, this iOptikCameraDemo video provides a somewhat dry, technical, but revealing demonstration of the technology as it interacts with human vision:



What's also quite interesting are the markets listed by Innovega for its optical technology. They include augmented reality, of course, interfacing with mobile devices, and immersive video and 3D gaming, and also simulation and training, which makes sense. What may give some folks pause is that their list of markets also includes "defense and covert operations" and "field operations for warfighters," but if you think about it, this should not be surprising, as all of new media, and communication technologies in general, have military applications. What is quite valuable in human terms, especially given our longer lifespans and aging population, is the market for low vision. This technology will be a great boon for those suffering from Macular degeneration, and similar problems.

One further question comes to mind, from a media ecology angle. McLuhan argues that changing the way we use our senses changes our sensibility, our thought processes, and ultimately our culture and social organization. And recent research backs him up by showing that reading, along with other types of media, actually rewire the brain. So how will this new technology affect our sense ratios, the balance of our senses, and our outlook on the world, individually and collectively? This could be the most radical shift in vision since the introduction of reading itself!

Slow Down You Move Too Fast...

So, time being somewhat of a theme here on this blog'o'mine, I thought I should add a post about this gadget I recently came across over on the DVICE website under the heading of Decelerator Helmet slows down reality, in real time. 

Now, who among us hasn't wanted to slow down reality at some point? So the idea seems to make a great deal of sense, on the surface, at least. And it seems to summon up those fantasies of having some sort of universal remote control where you can hit the pause button and the world around you freezes.  You know, like the Adam Sandler movie, Click, although that is more about fast forward and rewind functions.

 
And then there was Clockstoppers, where the effect is a function of moving at superspeed.  That was a somewhat innocent version of the fantasy.  A more mature, albeit in certain ways immature exploration of the fantasy was the independent film, Cashback.  

But this invention is about reality, not fantasy. Or reality in a virtual, augmented, or simply altered sense. 

Look, there is nothing new about using technology to give us a view of reality that was previously unobtainable.  Think telescope and binoculars, think microscope and magnifying glasses. And prisms and kaleidoscopes, for that matter.  Not to mention the old mirror, mirror, on the wall. McLuhan stressed the idea that media are extensions of the senses that altered our modes of perception.

And for more traditional categories of media, the camera and photography gives us the close-up, and make that point-of-view commonplace. And if you think about it, it's a way of seeing that is impossible for the naked eye–if you got that close to something, you would be unable to focus. Of course, it is intrinsic to the very nature of photography that it captures a frozen moment in time, a snapshot of reality. And after photography comes the moving image, which adds slow motion and fast motion to our repertoire of unreal realities.

So now, let's take a look at the next step in time distortion.  Let me start with the write-up in DVICE:

The recent Judge Dredd reboot showed us a world in which a drug could dramatically slow the world down with pleasurable, or horrific effects. Now a very real inventor has created a helmet that simulates that kind of real-time slow motion perception, but without the druggy side-effects.

Created by German artist Lorenz Potthast, the Decelerator Helmet allows the wearer to experience the real world at a slower speed that can be adjusted using a small, handheld controller. Potthast embedded a small computer and head-mounted display inside the helmet, with an additional display on the outside of the device, presumably to allow onlookers to see what the wearer is seeing.

Now, if you're thinking what I'm thinking, then words like, uh-oh, or huh??? are running through your head. This certainly doesn't look very advantageous, or like it would be much fun, does it? Well, let's get the rest of the brief write-up from DVICE:

Of course, crossing the street in a traffic-filled city with this thing on wouldn't be a good idea, but in almost any other controlled, assistant-guided situation, this device could deliver an amazing slo-mo vision of reality that has never been seen before. 

Potthast makes no mention of the software facilitating the device's functions, nor if he has any plans to take it commercial, but in the meantime you can see the Decelerator Helmet in action in the video below.

 Okay, so there's an admission that this doesn't seem like the most practical product in the world. But let's take a look at the video and see it in action:


 
And here's the write-up from Vimeo:

The Decelerator Helmet is a experimental approach for dealing with our fast moving society. The sense of vision is consigned to an apparatus which allows the user a perception of the world in slow motion.

In a increasingly hectic, overstimulated and restless environment are the calls for deceleration omnipresent. The inconceivably amount of information and influences in our everyday lives leads in many cases to an excessive demand.The idea to decouple the personal perception from the natural timing enables the user to become aware of his own time.

I'm just going to interject here that this is an interesting idea, and a worthy enough goal, but is the answer more technology? Or might it be alternatives like meditation, prayer, and/or going for a walk?  But of course I'm being silly, so let's return to that write-up from Vimeo:

In the inside of the helmet the video-signal of a camera is processed by a small computer. The slowed-down images are displayed right before the user's eyes via a head-mounted display and are simultaneously shown on a monitor on the outside. The helmet has three different modes which can be selected by a remote control: In the auto-mode time is slowed down automatically and re-accelerated after a defined interval. The press-mode allows the specific deceleration of time. In the scroll-mode the user can completely control the speed of the elapsing of time. The Decelerator gives the user the possibility to reflect about the flow of time in general and about the relation between sensory perception, environment and corporality in particular. Also it dramatically visualizes how slowing down can potentially cause a loss of the present.

Well, if you want to see some more pictures of this device, and read more about it (if you can read German), go check out the website.

As for me, this puts me in mind of an old hit song from my childhood in the 60s, The 59th Street Bridge Song, aka Feelin' Groovy, by Simon and Garfunkel.  Those were slower, more relaxed times, and I do remember my father driving us over the 59th Street Bridge as we traveled from our home in Queens (not far from where Simon and Garfunkel grew up), to Manhattan and back. And when I was in high school, I crossed that bridge when I came to it a couple of times on foot, as part of some marathon walks with my old friend, Marty Friedman. 

Much time has passed since those days, a lot of water under the bridge you might say, but it's nice to know that old Paul and Art can still sing it nice and tuneful:

  

And I know you wanted to see the lyrics, so here they are: 

Slow down, you move too fast.
You got to make the morning last.
Just kicking down the cobble stones.
Looking for fun and feelin' groovy.

Hello lamppost,
What cha knowing?
I've come to watch your flowers growing.
Ain't cha got no rhymes for me?
Doot-in' doo-doo,
Feelin' groovy.

Got no deeds to do,
No promises to keep.
I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me.
Life, I love you,
All is groovy.  

Groovy sounds real old-fashioned now, I know, and it wasn't long before it became a cliché and fell out of favor. But it was very much a musical and technological metaphor, a reference to vinyl records whose grooves captured the vibrations or vibes that reproduced those groovy tunes for us to listen to. So, just go ahead and decelerate, and dig those grooves, man, dig those grooves... 

Hearing and Media

So, back in 2008, I was contacted by Kathi Mestayer about an article she was writing about hearing loss, as she had seen me quoted in the New York Times (see my post from back then, The Secondary Orality of Social Networking), and liked my comment about the primacy of orality and speech.  So I sent her an extended reply via email on the subject, which she thanked me for, and that was that.  At least until last November, when she contacted me again about an article she was writing for Hearing Health magazine.

As you may know, I have a certain interest in disabilities, albeit relating to autism.  As far as hearing is concerned, well, I did sacrifice quite a bit to rock and roll, but that's a story for another time.  But I do want to note that when I was a student, both graduate and undergraduate, it was still quite common for communication departments, many of which had a longstanding connection to the study of speech, to include faculty whose specialty had to do with speech impediments and hearing loss.  And while some real connections were made, for the most part the scholars had little or nothing to do with each other, and that kind of combination is rare nowadays in American universities.

So, anyway, we had a few telephone conversations and several email exchanges, and the article finally appeared in the Spring issue of the magazine. If you click on that link, you can see the magazine online at a rather interesting site called Issuu.  I find it a great example of Marshall McLuhan's observation that the content of a medium is another medium.  On this site, we see the attempt to faithfully reproduce paper media, magazines, newspapers, catalogs, calendars, brochures, even white papers, not only in the manner of the PDF document, but in simulating the three-dimensional look of documents, and the experience of turning pages.  

Arguably, this is an example of what McLuhan called rear view mirror thinking, trying to do yesterday's job with today's tools.  It does make sense, however, as a means of archiving and increasing the accessibility of documents whose primary form is print, and also as an alternative for print media that have decided to go digital because of the cost of production and distribution, but want to retain their traditional format.

Anyway, having mentioned McLuhan, it should come as no surprise that his name comes up in the piece, and Kathi went so far as to title her article, "The Medium is the Message," which takes on an entirely new slant in an article associated with hearing impairment and loss.

Because of the format used, I can't transfer the text of the piece onto this blog post in the form of block quotations, which would make for easy reading, but I can show you what the pages look like.  Here's the first page of the article:

A good opening, and clearly in line with media ecology thinking, as she quickly moves from the apparent similarities to the truly significant differences that make a difference, and McLuhan (and me), not to mention the Media Ecology Association:

Phatic communication is small talk, a form of ritual communication where the goal is not the transfer of information, or influence, but merely the creation and maintenance of relationships, social bonds.  In this sense, relational communication is in effect a medium, and from a media ecology perspective, it is in essence a medium.  Following Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues in The Pragmatics of Human Communication distinguish between the content and relationship level of communication, equivalent to the communication and metacommunication levels, and these correspond quite clearly to the distinction between content and medium that McLuhan makes.  Anyway, sorry to interrupt, carry on:

And there's that reference to the New York Times article that started it all.  And the quote from Helen Keller sums it all up perfectly (in my conversation with Kathi, I had mentioned that Hellen Keller, when asked if she would rather be blind or deaf, said that she would prefer to be blind, because people are kinder to the blind, whereas they tend to be annoyed with the deaf).  Vision objectifies, sound connects.  

Understanding the differences between the senses should also allow us to understand the differences between their corresponding impairments.  And that should allow us to better accommodate and aid individuals with disabilities, a truly worthwhile goal!

Hey! Hey! Baba!

I can't really explain it, it's just that the word "baba" was an inside joke among my group of friends when I was a teenager and young adult, one of those things where you just had to be there, and be a part of it.  It was used as a form of address, e.g., "and how are you, baba?" or more directly, as in "Yo, baba!" And also used as an exclamation, as in just simply, "baba!"  

As I said, I can't really explain it, except to say that within my peer group there was a great deal of linguistic playfulness present, which of course is great preparation for being a media ecologist.

So, okay, having said that, on another, unrelated topic, the music from Disney's The Lion King holds a special place in my heart, as we used to listen to it all the time, when my son Benjamin was still a baby and I'd be feeding him the highchair, and when he was older as we watched the movie on video many times, saw it in Imax, and went to the Broadway show, not to mention seeing the Lion King attractions and parade elements at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.

So, I was quite tickled to have stumbled upon a YouTube video where the still frame displayed the words "Hey! Hey Baba!" and the images were from The Lion King film.  The name of the video says it all:  Soramimi (misheard foreign lyrics)-Lion King, Circle of Life.  So, here now--should I say hear now?--is the video and misinterpreted lyrics:

I was further delighted to see in the very brief write-up of the video the following statement:  "Project for The Cultural Nature of Language with Professor Bambi Schieffelin."  And no, it's not what you think, not because the name Bambi suggests another Disney connection (or sounds a little like baba).  It's just that I had met Professor Schieffelin, who teaches anthropology at New York University,  a couple of years ago when we were on a panel discussion together on the subject of literacy at the now defunct Philoctetes Center in Manhattan.  I wrote about the panel in two posts here on Blog Time Passing:  Literacy and Imagination and More on Literacy and Imagination (admittedly, not very imaginative titles for the posts).  

You might also contrast this English misinterpretation of lyrics in a foreign language with an example from another previous post of mine, Phony English, where there is a meaningless play with lyrics meant to sound like the English language.

And when you come down to it, after all that, is there anything left to say, except for...

Hey Hey Baba! 

Chronologie

Time is an underlying theme here at Blog Time Passing, and music, as an art form and medium, is very much a function of time. 

Visual images, pictures, paintings, sculptures, and especially photographs, can give us the illusion of frozen time, a captured moment, although, in reality, time's flow cannot be arrested, time still passes.  The moving image can also display a still image, an illusion of time stopping, and on video we can have the freeze frame, but of course time still passes for us as we are watching it, and for that matter, the image is constantly being refreshed by electrons and photons.  In the dramatic arts, actors, players, dancers, etc., can hold a pose, stand still, but time still passes. for them and for the audience. 

The eye gives us the illusion of timelessness in a way that the ear cannot.  As Walter Ong put it, "Sounds only exists as it is going out existence."  Whether it's speech or music, or the sounds of nature or technology, sound can only exist in time.  If you hit pause on your stereo, you don't get a freeze frame, you get silence.  Rhythm is an inherent dimension of music, even if the rhythm is arrhythmic, and rhythm is a form of time.

With that in mind, I think this music video by Jean Michel Jarre, entitled Chronologie IV, and posted to YouTube on October 23, 2007, is a welcome addition here:





My thanks to my old friend, Marty Friedman, for bringing this video to my attention.

Learning to See

In my previous post, Perception and Reception, I noted that the concept of information reception in communication and information theory, along with the process of abstracting in general semantics, are closely related to the biological and psychological process of perception.  Perception is not a matter of simply taking in information passively from our environment, but rather it is an active process of probing the environment, selecting what we will attend to, interpreting what we take in, and essentially constructing our view of the world. 

In War and Peace in the Global Village, Marshall McLuhan's 1968 follow-up to his bestselling collaboration, The Medium is the Massage (both books listing Quentin Fiore, who supplied the graphics, as the co-author, and both produced by Jerome Agel), he explains that patients who are born blind and later receive an operation enabling them to see cannot at first make sense of the visual data that their eyes take in.  All that they "see" are patches of light and dark and colors, and it is only through actively engaging with their environment that they learn how to make sense out of their visual sense.

This is exactly what Pawan Sinha talks about in this TED Talk that I am embedding below.  The first 8 minutes of the talk provide a poignant overview of the problem of congenital blindness, and his work aiding blind children in India.  It is very moving, and worth viewing in my opinion, but it is only in the last 10 minutes that he gets into the nitty gritty of how the brain learns how to see.

The brief description accompanying the video is as follows:

Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.

While the topic of autism is only briefly mentioned at the end, it is interesting to note the similarity between the temporary problem that the typical brain faces in making sense out of visual stimuli for the first time resemble the ongoing problem that autistic brains encounter in organizing and interpreting such data.

There is also a very interesting point made here about the importance of dynamic input, that is visual motion.  I have long understood that it was active engagement with the environment, which require motion on the viewer's part, that was essential to the process of learning how to see.  The idea that it is also vital to view objects characterized by change and motion makes perfect sense to me.  It also reminds me of the fact that animals that lack binocular vision have to rely on motion to a large extent in using their eyes--this was a plot point in Jurassic Park, you may remember.

Anyway, let me turn the stage over to Sinha, who is well worth 18 minutes of your time:

 

The TED Talk bio for Sinha simply reads, "Pawan Sinha researches how our brains interpret what our eyes see -- and uses that research to give blind children the gift of sight."  A link to the TED bio page for Sinha includes a longer blurb which I find worthy of quoting here:

At Pawan Sinha's MIT lab, he and his team spend their days trying to understand how the brain learns to recognize and use the patterns and scenes we see around us. To do this, they often use computers to model the processes of the human brain, but they also study human subjects, some of whom are seeing the world for the very first time and can tell them about the experience as it happens. They find these unusual subjects through the humanitarian branch of their research, Project Prakash.

Project Prakash sets up eye-care camps in some of the most habitually underserved regions of India, and gives free eye-health screenings to, since 2003, more than 700 functionally blind children. The children are then treated without charge, even if they do not fit the profile that would make them eligible for Sinha's research.

Sinha's eventual goal is to help 500 children each year; plans are under way for a center for visual rehabilitation in new Delhi. The special relationship that Sinha has created between research and humanitarianism promises to deliver on both fronts.

"The first thing that prompted me was seeing these numbers, the humanitarian goal was just so evident."

Pawan Sinha

It is not everyday that you come across someone doing groundbreaking scientific research and performing great humanitarian work at the same time.  In Pawan Sinha's case, I think we have someone who is very much cast in the mold of Albert Schweitzer.  I wish him the best of success in all of his efforts.

Perception and Reception

In an entry I posted a year ago entitled Information Theory and Communication, I touched on Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, which had a major impact of the field of communication during the 50s and 60s, but was later pushed aside and has been all but abandoned.  And while it did not live up to its promise as providing a scientific basis for all communication study, it ought to be, in my view, an important component of any communication curriculum, along with the related notion of cybernetics that was introduced by Norbert Wiener.

When I used to teach introductory communication courses, I introduced information theory and cybernetics early on, and later I moved on to the topic of perception.  In doing so, I noted that perception was most often studied in the fields of biology and psychology, and that in the field of communication, the subject was typically referred to as information reception.  I didn't take the point any further, but between you and me, the reason for this terminology switch is that communication scholars are typically concerned with the sending and receiving of messages, whereas perception is about something more than receiving messages sent by some source, it's about taking in information from the environment through our sense organs.

Now, I don't think that it takes a brain surgeon or rocket scientist, as they say, to make the connection between the reception of information, as understood by engineers and scientists such as Shannon and Wiener, and the process of perception, as understood by biologists and scientists.  Making connections, that's what we do, or at least, that's what we ought to be doing, in the field of communication, and in media ecology, and general semantics.

So it seems that what was intuitively obvious to us philosophical and poetic types has now been discovered and confirmed by the more mathematical and scientific crowd.  Or so I've learned through the Technology Review website's Physics arXiv Blog (the X in arXiv stand for the Greek letter Chi, in case you didn't know, so that it's pronounced "archive"), in a post dated February 24th, and entitled, An Undiscovered Link Between Sensory Perception and Shannon's Theory of Information.  The post begins by stating that the "mathematics that describe both sensory perception and the transmission of information turn out to have remarkable similarities."  It then goes on to discuss what might be termed a mathematical theory of perception:

In 1834, the German physiologist Ernst Weber ... carried out a series of experiments to determine the limits of sensory perception. He gave a blindfolded man a mass to hold and gradually increased its weight, asking the subject to indicate when he first became aware of the change. 

These experiments showed that the smallest increase in weight that a human can perceive is proportional to the initial weight. The German psychologist Gustav Fechner later interpreted Weber's work as a way of measuring the relationship between the physical magnitude of a stimulus and its perceived intensity.


The resultant mathematical model of this process is called the Weber-Fechner law and shows that the relationship between the stimulus and perception is logarithmic. ... The Weber-Fechner law is important because it established a new field of study called psychophysics.

The logarithmic relationship between a stimulus and its perception crops up in various well known examples such as the logarithmic decibel scale for measuring sound intensity and a similar logarithmic scale for measuring the visible brightness of stars, their magnitude.

Okay, so, so far we have this idea of psychophysics, which is maybe a little interesting, but maybe not, and maybe you're saying, hey man, I'm here for the blog, not the log.  So, the main point here is that this process of quantifying perception opens up the possibility of comparison with Shannon's quantification of information.  And that's what come's up next in this arXiv blog post:

Today, Haengjin Choe at Korea University in South Korea, says there is an interesting connection between the Weber-Fechner Law and the famous mathematical theory of information developed by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs in the 1940s.

Shannon's work is among the most important of the 20th century. It establishes the limits on the amount of information that can be sent from one location in the universe to another. It is no exaggeration to say that the world's entire computing and communications infrastructure is based on Shannon's work.

So yes, Shannon's work has always been important, and has become even more significant, and relevant, now that we are living in a digital, online, new and new new media environment.  Now, what does this have to do with perception?

Choe points out that the law developed by Shannon that links the amount of information that can be transmitted by a single symbol is also logarithmic. In fact, it takes exactly the same form as the Weber-Fechner law. 

What that means is that psychophysical phenomena can be treated mathematically in the same way as any other form of information transmission and so opens up a new and extensive mathematical toolbox that may provide new insights into the nature of perception .

Hey, I'm all for unlocking tool boxes, and I look forward to new insights as well.  Indeed, this may be instrumental in the development of artificial sensory organs and neural technological interfaces.  I have to admit that I once thought that that sort of thing, as posited in the science fiction stories of William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace (and inspired movies like The Matrix), was not feasible, but now it seems that we're well on the way to developing such technologies.  Whether the benefits of such developments outweigh the losses remains to be seen.

But back to the blog, which ends with the following point:

Of course, the idea that sensory perception is a form of communication and so obeys the same rules, is not entirely surprising. What's astonishing (if true) is that the connection has never been noticed before.

I guess it depends on what you mean by noticing the connection.  But hey, my hats off to Haengjin Choe for pinpointing the mathematical correspondence.  The post also provides a link to the abstract of Choe's "Proposal new area of study by connecting between information theory and Weber-Fechner law."  Here's how it reads:

Modern Information theory is generally considered to have been founded in 1948 by Shannon in his seminal work, "A mathematical theory of communication." Shannon's formulation of information theory was an immediate success with communications engineers. Shannon defined mathematically the amount of information transmitted over a channel. Meanwhile, psychophysics is the study of quantitative relations between psychological events and physical events or, more specifically, between sensations and the stimuli that produce them. It seems that Shannon's information theory bears no relation to psychophysics established by German scientist and philosopher Fechner. To our astonishment, it is possible that we combine two fields. And therefore we come to be capable of measuring mathematically perceptions of the physical stimuli applicable to the Weber-Fechner law.

And there you have it.  Now, let me further note that perception and information reception are aspects of what is known in general semantics as the process of abstracting.  In information theory terms, it means that something is always lost in the process of transmission.  In the field of communication, it's a common place to say that the message received is not the message sent.  In general semantics, the point is that we cannot perceive all that there is to perceive about any event or phenomenon.  We only take part of it in, only attend to a portion of what is out there, what is going on, leaving out some of the detail, filtering the information, selecting and simplifing.

Put another way, perception is more, even, than receiving information about the environment, insofar as reception suggests a passive process of taking in whatever comes our way.  More than mere reception, perception is an active process of meaning-making.  We process the sensory data, put the pieces together, interpret, and construct our reality.  This is how we talked about it in the media ecology classes I took with Neil Postman and Christine Nystrom, where we used the term perception, which is, after all, the clearest term to use in this particular instance.

Human beings are meaning-makers.  We interpret and make meaning out of the messages we receive.  We make meaning out of dots and lines   :)    ;)    :D     We make meaning out of the things we perceive in our environment, out of clouds, tea leaves, ink blots, animal entrails, etc.  We make meaning out of the random firing of our neurons while we are asleep (we call that dreaming).  We cannot not make meaning.  And I don't think that's a matter of logarithms.  But it is a matter for my blogger rhythms (oh, I know that's bad, that's bad, but you get my meaning, don't you?).