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I just published the first set of real, actual qualifying exams. I have heard on some authority that I have somehow passed, a miracle which surprises me as much as anybody. The results of this labor are posted here for your pleasure and as a warning for future generations to come.
Recent thoughts have led me to start thinking about how one might define “model” in a more precise and accurate sense. This is a first jab, so the definition may change a bit, but I think that the following set of qualities will probably remain important. I am also trying to construct a definition that will be useful for a scientific perspective, as well as perhaps an abstract literary one. This may be unusual, but I think ultimately more valuable:
Components of a model:
At a sufficient layer of abstraction, there may be no difference between entities and rules, but I distinguish them here to draw attention to the fact that entities describe the “what” of the model, while the rules will describe “how”. The separation of these seems to be important, but is also a significant difference between the traditions of object oriented programming. An object oriented approach to models probably could work, but would require some effort to resolve ambiguities.
Models and information: The information content of a model is stored in its entities and properties. It makes sense that, in observation, not all of the data content of the model is necessarily visible. Some of the procedures that may be enacted on the model might make bits of information visible to the interactor. Frequently, in terms of interacting with it, the interaction might also change the model’s state. The result of this is a construction of a black box, which may not be fully known or understood unless the model is open. A consequence is that some models may not be interpreted directly, but rather require interactors to make their own models of the model’s operation and structure.
A further consequence of the interpretation of models is that individuals build their own unique models of other systems, and the individual construction of a model is an intrinsically creative act. Developing a model is equivalent to the interpretation of something. In communication of models, there is a process of interpretation, re-presentation, and re-interpretation. As a result, communication turns into a giant game of “telephone”, where a model will ultimately change throughout its communication. Additionally, when someone begins to form a model of something, concepts might be blended with other knowledge and ideas, forming a hybrid model that is influenced not only by the presented model, but also by other internal and associated knowledge.
Models and metaphors: Linguistically, metaphors are often used to describe systems analogically. When metaphor is used to describe something, it invokes references and associations that connect the antecedent to the metaphorical term. Similarly, while models may be used to describe and represent something abstractly (which is not metaphor but representation), models may also employ structures (in the formation of their properties or rules) that are metaphorical of some other system. The resulting effect of this is that systems will reference each other through endless regression of metaphors. The use of metaphor is also a tool that an observer or constructor may use to interpret or develop a model.
Models and adaptation: When applied to adaptation (specifically of some other work or media artifact), there is a double-use of models. An adapted work will have a simulated model, and also a representative model. The first of these reflects the mechanics of the adapted material, while the second uses visual or context association to connect the adaptation to the original work. The two of these are separate constructions, but for an adaptation to be successful, both need to be addressed.
In games, there is a phenomenon known as “skinning” which takes the representational model of a game and replaces it with representational model from some other system (for instance, replacing chess pieces with characters from a popular cartoon). Jesper Juul writes about this in Half-Real, however, while the fiction or representational layer may be replaced, it also must be consistent. If the chess pieces are being replaced with characters from a cartoon about a family, it would not make any sense for the king piece to be represented by one of the minor characters, as opposed to, say, the head of the family. Even though representational layers are considered to be “arbitrary” they require a consistency in their analogy without which the adaptation falls apart.
Models and art: Contemporary art is interesting in how it relates to model establishment and interpretation. Art takes place at a highly symbolic level, and makes use of multiple layers, as is the case with adaptation. An art work or installation might make use of some internal model or system, but that is expected to be connected externally to other networks and layers of meaning. Analogy and metaphor tend to be used extensively in the interpretation of the work. Generally, the meaning only becomes clear when it is connected to other systems of meaning located in the history and traditions of art, philosophy, politics, and popular culture. This is notable because the connections and meaning are not established within the work, but rather outside of it. This places the work as one model, which is self contained, but makes metaphorical connections and relations to other external models. Bringing this in mind makes clear that isolated models are also tools for discovering meaning (as well as consequences, information, and relationships) in other, broader models and systems.
The time has come to ask an important question in regards to my research endeavour. Generally, I am not one to turn problems down or leave questions unpursued and unanswered. However, at this time, I need to actually pin down and begin thinking about what, specifically, I am going to write my dissertation on.
This issue is critical because there are seemingly two diverging paths that can be taken. One of these paths goes down a route of educational technology, looking at how games or software (simulation, more particularly) can be used to convey information about a domain, exposing methodology and its underlying ideas. This idea is arguably more fundable, and is grounded in the fine tradition of educational technology. I think that this approach would reveal important things about how knowledge might be viewed and communicated. Extended further, it might provide a method for exploring how to generally communicate models through software and simulation.
The second idea follows a more “games and narrative” direction. The idea underlying this is adaptation, specifically applied to fictional worlds. While there are many narrative to game adaptations in certain genres (notably action or fantasy), not very many games are adapted out of other kinds of narratives, for instance social dramas, romances, comedies, etcetera. We know that these narratives are systematic in their own right, so the idea behind this research would be to develop a method for adapting these kinds of narratives. This approach would require identifying, specifically, a domain to examine for adaptation, and identifying a few works to make adaptations. While this idea would be risky, (admittedly dangerous in that I don’t want to follow Chris Crawford’s path and be faced with an impossible task). At the same time, were it succcessful, the idea also has the potential to make a significant impact on game industry.
For a variety of reasons, it is difficult to distance myself from either idea, and ideally I’d like to do a bit of both. A common thread may be find in the idea that both are tied to representing and communicating models. The real question is whether any hybrid of these two ideas is possible, useful, or worthwhile. And that is what remains to be seen.
I would like to look at the idea of a mental model and extend that idea outward, pushing it until it encompasses and overlaps some other ideas. It would be good at some point to actually define models, so that they coalesce clearly. There is probably a good mathematical formulation of it, but I can’t think of one right yet. I think a good way of imagining it would be to see a model as an organized system of meaning, which structures its domain, and also provides a lens for interpreting other things.
In that light, I’d like to turn to other conceptions that organize meaning, relationships, and the like.
Media is generally used in two ways, one can view media as a conduit for meaning (or content of some kind), which in turn is shaped by the medium itself. A picture, viewed through a TV screen is not a picture, but it is a picture on TV. The power of the medium itself to affect its content is severe, and many authors, notably McLuhan, have explored the idea of a medium as something that is endlessly regressed. If the “content” of a medium is another medium, we can look at models as media, and note that the “content” of a model is always another model. Baudrillard writes of the regressive quality of simulation (and simulation is really an “enacted” model). Without making too many conceptual leaps, one could probably come to the conclusion that models are media, and a medium imposes its own model on whatever passes through it.
Genre is a similar term, and is used as a classifier. The term usually defines conventions and styles. Genres can typically be understood structurally and also in a number of other ways. A good example of this is Propp’s morphology of Russian folktales, which identifies the structural components of the stories. Other genres may be defined in terms of style or conventions, rather than structure, for instance film noir. Genres can be used to categorize works or texts, and as such, they represent a system of features which describe models that encompass the works that make up the genres. While the converse may not be true, models do not necessarily define genres, genres are necessarily models.
What is interesting about examining genres is that while a genre might make up a system that has a model, individual works falling under that genre are also inherently systematic as well. Any work is necessarily systematic in some sense or another. As a result of this, it will have its own model, but by belonging to a genre, it will also be described by the genre’s model as well. The model of the work can thus be seen as a sub-model of the genre.
As a programmer, I’m also very interested in languages and APIs, each of which define their own representation of things. A language, whether a programming language, or a terminology used by a domain, represents a particular view and understanding of the world. Usually languages will construct meaning and relationships through metaphor. Through analogy, domain specific languages model their domain, and reflect inter-domain knowledge in terms of relationships from the external world. Languages do not generally classify, but they are constructive. Similarly, APIs may be thought of as subsystems of meaning within a language or domain. Josh Bloch described the process of designing an API as defining a new language. The API is a quintessential example of a model in use, not just because it is procedurally and symbolically represented, but also because it may be fuzzy around the borders, despite being symbolic. Furthermore, an API also denotes the essential purpose of a model, which is not necessarily to describe everything, but rather explain a very specific part of it.
Like APIs, models are also tools. It is interesting to reflect on early theories of new media, which centered around the conflict between looking at the computer as a tool versus a medium. If we examine this idea from the perspective of models and simulation, we find that tools and media are not so dissimilar in nature.
Communities of practice are difficult to understand. When trying to build a model to represent or simulate some domain, it is necessary to understand both the theory of the domain, and the internal knowledge of its practitioners. The duality of this echoes back to the difference between information and knowledge, theory and practice. There are two types of knowing, knowing-that and knowing-how. When building models to be run by a computer, the first of these is rather easy to encode, but the second is much more problematic. The issue of practice opens a bag of worms that has no explicit or clear solution.
It is this issue of learning the practice of a domain that I am interested in. Much of the theory that comes about attempting to learn and document these domains involves developing layers of abstraction and performing a psychological study (usually through interviews and observation) to learn how the practitioners actually practice. I think this approach is useful, but flawed. I think that a lot may be gained through more anthropological means. In order to understand and model, the analyst must become a practitioner in the domain itself.
One example that I think is relevant in that case is the idea of the artist-programmer, the need for which has been emphasized by Janet Murray, Michael Mateas, Ken Perlin, and Mary Flanagan, among others. This is especially relevant in the games industry, where students coming from one discipline or another are usually taught to interact with the other half, but rarely are artists taught programming or programmers taught art. It is my opinion that this has led to a somewhat conceptual divide, preventing real communication and effective interaction.
Additionally, many communities of practice are often influenced only in limited ways by theory. They might develop a consistent framework of practice that may be interpreted as theory, but the practice may not have been informed by theory in the first place. Even in disciplines where all there is is theory, issues of practice become very important. An example of this is in the InTEL project, where we have developed a model of Statics in general, but more specifically, we have developed a model of one means of practicing it, originating from the instructors who we have been working with. This suggests that, in practice, there is no theory. Theory is what one might call a derivative model.
This idea actually makes a lot of sense when compared against a lot of critiques of classical AI. Dreyfus in particular emphasizes that human reasoning is all pattern recognition, and in essence, is all practice. He argues that theory enters the picture when a novice first begins to learn a skill, and is no longer referenced afterwards. I do not agree completely with his argument, but the idea of focusing on practice has merit. This may be used as a critique of models that examine theory in whole, but that does not mean that models are worthless. One may still build models of practice.
This introduces another dimension, though. If one cannot model theory in general, then one must model practice. However, practice is an individual phenomenon. No two practitioners in a domain will have the same approach to ideas and problem solving. As a result, modeling is a fundamentally creative act.
Calvin Ashmore
Qualifying Exam 0
Question: Discuss the relationship between media technology and cultural change with reference to a selection of new media theorists (e.g. Jenkins, Negroponte, Rheingold, Bolter and Grusin, Brown & Duguid). Is digital technology bringing about changes in our culture? If so, what changes and how?
Understanding Culture
It is not uncommon to hear about how technology and in particular digital media are changing culture and society. We hear that digital technology has the capacity to revolutionize democracy, and in the same breath we might hear of the capacity for corporations to restrict our rights and liberties. Professions of the liberating powers of social computing tend to come right alongside the ominous warnings that technology will ultimately enslave us all. Looking back, it is possible to tell that the emerging prominence of digital technology has led to a culture with different capacities and values than before, but exactly how to understand that change is less clear.
The ready availability of information has led to changes in the values and practices that surround information. While cultural institutions, many of whose deaths wereheralded by the coming prominence of digital technology,remain, these institutions have nonetheless been changed by the technology available to them. Before we can understand how culture as a whole has been affected by digital technology, we must understand how to approach culture to be able to articulate what culture is. When we understand what culture is, then we can understand its capacity for change.
Articulating culture is not an easy thing. We all live in it, and we are thus intimately familiar with it, but when struck to articulate it, we tend to be at a loss. Much like media, culture is always simply there, and it is tricky to understand exactly our relation to it. Clifford Geertz struggled to find this out and did so by relating anthropology with semiotics, revolutionizing the discipline. To Geertz, culture is a web of significance [1]. The process of understanding culture requires a kind of interpretation. Even when one exists inside of a culture, the issue of the fundamental gap of human understanding is difficult to bear. Wittgenstein wrote that we can never truly understand one another, but this perspective leads to one of irrecoverable alienation. Geertz argues that, culture is public meaning and common interpretation of relevant symbols.
With this in mind, the matter of understanding cultural change is a semiotic issue. Understanding change requires understanding how the relation of symbols changes with respect to each other. Systems of meaning might adapt and incorporate new elements, or they might become replaced by other points of signification. If semiotic systems are the means of understanding interpreting cultures, then cultural creations must be considered the artifacts and logical products of those systems. The work of art has in the past tended to take on various cultural functions, usually relating to ritual and mythic systems. Technology has necessarily aided the power of a culture to produce artifacts, and as a result the functions of those artifacts has tended to change.
The role of art within this is to represent the authority of the cultural creation. Historically, works of art have tended to represent their cultural value system. In the middle ages in Europe, art represented the authority and centrality of the soverign, but as the merchant classes began to emerge and take on cultural legitimacy, they used art to reflect their own emerging legitimacy as well.
Media and Culture
The role of media within culture serves another story.
When technology reached the level of accurate reproduction, the authority and power of the original is confused. Walter Benjamin found that mechanical reproduction could be used to change the function of art from one of authoratization to a political popularization [2]. Benjamin was fascinated by the ability for art to recast cultural values in new ways. This insight was merely a harbinger of the values of postmodernism in recasting culture. Reproductions are generally considered artifacts for consumption, consumer goods, products. It is the role of these to be distributed and widely consumed, thus reincorporating the symbolic value of the artifacts into the culture at large.
Mechanical reproduction was indeed remarkable to so many because of the perceived ability of the copy to affect the original. While the original could not be physically molested by the proliferation of reproductions, its cultural position and legitimacy could certainly be called into question. The emergence of digital technology only complicates things further. With digital artifacts, themselves being defined as long sequences of numerical data, the idea of originality and authenticity are totally lost. This is one way in which culture has been affected by media technology. But this is just one step. Media technology is certainly not only about specific works and artifacts. Media itself has become an object of considerable significance. Beginning with Marshal McLuhan, the media has become a focal point in the understanding of culture. The impact of this is especially clear with the advent of television.
Turning our attention to media specifically, at least in the sense that we relate to media, we can see that it too is highly representative of our cultural situation. However, the capacity that cultural products have to influence culture itself is greatly amplified with media, in the sense that it may be ubiquitous and pervasive. Where art and traditional artifacts may tell us the “what” of our culture, media tells us “how”. When the radio became popular in America in the 30s and 40s, culture became oriented around it. In the sense that culture is a web of significance, radio seemed to connect to all points on that web, effectively becoming its center.
While technology can affect the types of media that emerge, it would be a mistake to neglect the role that culture plays in shaping those technologies. A medium does not necessarily arise because of a demand for its content, but rather, it is shaped by various interests that have in the potential effects that a medium might have. Raymond Williams notes that the television was originally intended to be developed as a popularizing medium and a force for democracy, where individuals could broadcast themselves their perspectives on the world around them. However, it did not take a substantially long time for television to evolve into a medium with only a few heavily regulated, corporate channels [3].
Williams emphasizes to us that while culture became oriented around television, that orientation was not popular nor fully emergent, but rather it was carefully measured and controlled by the powers that be. The powers themselves were changed by television, but they were not displaced.
Digital Media Technology
A seeming effect of digital media particularly is the capacity to bypass these imposed restrictions. The discussion of television compares nicely with the recent popularity of internet video. Web sites such as YouTube purport to enable their users to take on exactly the role that Williams claims was deprived from television. Internet technology such as file sharing and other social networking seem to be able to enable dramatic cultural changes that were unfeasible or impossible before. With this technology, and with the recent trend for technology to emerge at a greatly accelerated rate, it would seem that new forms and ways of accessing and interpreting media will arise too quickly for any external forces to restrict or control their growth.
Nicholas Negroponte writes of this dramatic capacity for change in Being Digital [4]. To Negroponte, digital technology has enabled us to recontextualize the world in terms of information. When things are understood in terms of information, the physical instances of objects become obsolete and irrelevant. The transformation of atoms to bits would be total, and this transformation would serve to destroy and make unnecessary many existing institutions. Because individuals can easily access information and exert collective participation, national governments would be unnecessary, paving the way for a global culture of individuals. Furthermore, digital technology also constructs a simulated world in which children can play and develop practical skills for application later in life. The digital is a field which presents models of the world for children to learn and that they can use to solve problems, despite potentially varying approaches to learning.
Negroponte presents an amazingly futurist view of culture that would be enabled by digital technology. And in this perspective, the culture produced by Negroponte’s vision is a semantic web in whose center lies the digital medium, but whose other ties are lost or broken. In this perspective, the digital is both the universal reduction of everything (atoms to bits), but is also the tool by which other all things are understood, its goal is to reproduce the world in terms of itself. Negroponte’s digital becomes Baudrillard’s simulation [5].
While Negroponte was remarkably insightful in his prediction of technologies such as YouTube and personalized advertisements, the gradual replacement of atoms to bits does not seem to have occurred (or even be on the horizon) in its totality. On the opposite end of the spectrum from Negroponte in terms of futurist predictions, Duguid and Brown write in The Social Life of Information, that information technology failed to change the world because of its failure to account for the existing social structure. They explain that the futurist “6-D” vision of “demassification”, “decentralization”, “denationalization”, “despatialization”, “disintermediation”, “disaggregation”, which predicted change at every level of the social structure, was inherently flawed because of its failure to account for the existence of social institutions [6]. If information is seen as a cause to everything, then change in the transmission of information will create dramatic results, but it is this very premise that is on false foundation.
Duguid and Brown extend their argument further and further, explaining that cultural institutions persist because they have evolved to function effectively for reasons that are not just due to information. If they are stable because they are supported by reasons other than information, then changes to media and information technology should not be especially threatening. They note in their conclusion that one should avoid tunnel vision, but without answers as to how changes to information might change institutions, even if it does not destroy them totally [6]. It seems to imply that if any changes do occur, they will not be relevant or significant.
This argument too is unsatisfying. It is clear that the internet has enabled significant cultural change, somehow, but Duguid and Brown’s reminder of the perseverance of institutions strikes a tender nerve. Neither is satisfying, but both are fundamentally upsetting. It seems that clearly, the web of significance in culture has been changed and affected by technology, particularly digital technology, but the points in the web that anchor down the institutions that make up the political aspect of our culture have not been changed. They have, at least been budged by the semiotic ties that surround the network of meaning, and often have taken up the power of technology for their own advantage.
Remediation and Convergence
The process by which one medium takes up the practices and conventions of another is termed “remediation” by Bolter and Grusin in their book of the same name [7]. Remediation occurs when a new medium seeks to adapt the legitimacy of its predecessor, or an old medium seeks to adapt the popularity of its successors. This perspective puts media as multiple evolving disciplines, resilient, but changing. Instead of dying out, media forms change and adapt. A converse to this is the idea of media convergence as explained by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture [8]. Media convergence is the quality for content to be spread and consumed across media. So, instead of having there be one single mediated instance of a consumer product, that product is spread and distributed across media. This has been a classic phenomenon (Disney is notable for its use of convergence), but it has taken on whole new dimensions with digital media.
It is worth noting some of the things that make digital media so special here. Digital copies can supposedly reproduce artifacts and make them accessible as never known before. Digital technology enables immediate communication and access of information and “content” in a way that puts others and objects ready at hand. Further, it has the capacity to explicitly simulate, and render processes and procedures very rapidly. Through its universality, digital media has remediated nearly every form of media that exists, and has become the center of media convergence. If any kind of media is to converge, it will converge to the digital. Digital media has enabled new functions as a system of artifacts, as well.
The gnomon to the puzzle is to remember Geertz and reconsider culture as a text. The content of culture is a web of significance, but the medium of culture is how that significance is played out in daily life. Using the lens of remediation changes how we understand the means by which media and technology is influenced by culture, and in turn, we might find that culture has begun to remediate the digital. While culture will certainly not be replaced by the digital, it is certainly not unaffected by it. If the digital is the medium to which all other media converge, so to goes the medium of culture.
References
[1] Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Basic Books, 1973.
[2] Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Media And Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
[3] Williams, Raymond. “The Technology and the Society” in The New Media Reader. MIT Press, 2003.
[4] Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. Random House, 1996.
[5] Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. MIT Press, 1983.
[6] Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. The Social Life of Information. Harvard Business School Press, 2002.
[7] Bolter, Jay and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 1999.
[8] Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2006.
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