Information graphics
If you can't picture it, you just don't understand it well enough…
Information graphics are an omnipresent vehicle of information transport. Few articles in science, politics and economy can avoid concentrating their content in statistical graphics, tables, pie charts or other little informative pictures that back up the headline of the article.
Info graphics are one way we deal with complexity. Like a product design, which shapes an abstract idea of "something" into a concrete case of our daily life sentiments, graphics comprehend an abstract flow of information into a concrete picture plot. This character makes them a powerful tool in the design and appearance of knowledge. Although omnipresent the epistemology of graphics and a sceptical, conscious approach to them is still no commonplace among the scientific and business players.
Sandra Rendgen, an art historian, and Julius Wiedemann, a graphic designer, put together a study entirely dedicated to the visual communication throughout history. Their book "Information Graphics" follows and reflects our need for visualizing information. So far as graphics do give an answer to the variety of data and information floating around us ("What do we do with all these data?" – "We make a picture out of it!"), the question remains what we are supposed to do with the new simplicity of all these graphics? The way we design information shapes its content. Graphics propose interpretations, in some cases foster one way looking at them over another. A critical approach to is therefore necessary and we will continue to write on this subject on further occasions.
For everybody interested in an interview with Sandra Rendgen in the German "art magazine" follow this link.
About talents and failures in the job-market
(Fotographed at a German student hall, March 2012)
A lot of my friends are fludding the job-market at the moment and I thought about the amount of uncertainties which are awaiting us. Maybe it helps to know some conditions, though critical ones.
Lynda Gratton, professor at the London School of Economics and expert on issues of the global labour market (see her blog and book on the Future of work) has shared some serious thoughts about contemporary labour conditions in our own society. The passage to be quoted speaks of some basic failings that contemporary "work soldiers", often trapped in a continuing myth of a life-work-balance, have to overcome in order to be productive in a sustainable way, for themselves and for their company.
"The first failure is a direct result of the joined-up global world that they are living and working in. This hyper connectivity means that there is always a client, a project, or a task that has to be finished. When your clients work around the world – there is always one time-zone that buzzing. We have left them at the mercy of extraordinary pressures. There are no boundaries, nothing that protects them from constant work. We've failed them because we have not protected them from the demands of a hyper connected world.
The second failure is a result of income disparity. When I was working in my mid 20's back in 1980, the average CEO in America earned 42 times more than the average worker. For many of the current Gen Y, the figure has increased twelve-fold to 531 times. That creates big problems because it sets out a 'carrot' that for most is unattainable if not downright unattractive. It's also confusing when few Gen Y's are swallowing the 'deferred gratification' creed – work hard now for riches in some indefinable time in the future. It also sways the whole work deal from working because it is interesting and potentially meaningful, to a deal that has at its centre greed and acquisition. When the whole deal is 'work here and you could be as rich as I' – the other parts of the work that could be fulfilling and motivating somehow seem less attractive.
We are also failing them because we have obstinately refused to dismantle the traditional vertical, hierarchical structures that some of us designed, and others inherited. Its been over a decade since we realized that uniform pay systems, constant office based work and inflexible working practices are toxic to a generation raised on more flexible ways of being. Yet despite the toxicity, we have simply changed around the margins rather than completely 'blowing it up' and designing companies in a more flexible and agile way.
And we have failed them because we have marginalised, discredited and been mean-minded about Gen Y's use of technology and social media. One of the most frustrating aspects of being a Gen Y in the employment of most businesses is the inability to bring to the office all the ways of being that are common place in their private lives. The way they link up with ease, or rapidly update each other on progress, or get members of their 'posse' to help them out, or use the whole world as a resource when it comes to getting things done.
Of course the truly awful aspect is that we have created socialisation processes within companies that are so pervasive and deeply embedded- that within two years these bright eyed Gen Y's are harassed, sleep deprived and depleted of energy." (Lynda Gratton, December 11, 2010)
Surprising dialectics in a McDonalds Burger
You always wanted Philosophy to be more practical? Well, what about spending some time of your first graduate year in one of todays many fast food restaurants? What about spending some time at McDonalds? Maria Exner, a young journalist for the German newspaper "Die Zeit", describes some epistemological lessons that can be pulled out of going once in a while to a McDonalds restaurant. Well, one has to do some contemplation there – but it's working.
There probably isn't a translation of this article, but if you have some German basics, give it a try. You'll find a wonderful example how Philosophy enters into the economic realm. For a starter have a look at this McDo marketing production and then go the article (if somebody wants to have a translation I'll try my best to do it; just leave a message!).
Behind the scenes at a McDonald's photo shoot:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8]
Article: Das also ist des Burgers Kern
Notes on Nudging
or Why the "publicity principle" is their strongest argument
Thaler and Sunstein provide an interesting thought in the concluding chapter of their book on nudges. Guided by their principles of libertarian paternalism and their ground belief in"transparency" they reflect a maybe crucial doubt of the idea to nudge people, namely if nudging isn't manipulating people in a way that subliminal advertising does its job? It's quite a quandary if they point to their good will and hoping that all's well that ends well.
I'll quote from their defence that motivates a lot of thought in their book:
“Our own libertarian condition, requiring low-cost opt-out rights, reduces the steepness of the ostensibly slippery slope. Our proposals are emphatically designed to retain freedom of choice. In many domains, from education to environmental protection to medical malpractice to marriage, we would create such freedom where it does not now exist. So long as paternalistic interventions can be easily avoided by those who seek to adopt a course of their own, the risks decried by antipaternalists are modest. Slippery-slope arguments are most convincing when it is not possible to distinguish the proposed course of action from abhorrent, unacceptable, or scary courses of action. Because libertarian paternalists retain freedom of choice, we can say, with conviction, that our own approach opposes the most objectionable kinds of government intervention.[…] In many cases, some kind of nudge is inevitable, and so it is pointless to ask government simply to stand aside. Choice architects, whether private or public, must do something. If the government is going to adopt a prescription drug plan, some sort of choice architecture must be put in place. With respect to pollution, rules have to be established, even if only to say that polluters face no liability and may pollute with impunity. Even if states dispensed with both marriage and civil unions, contract law would have to be available to say what disbanding couples owe each other (if anything).Often life turns up problems that people did not anticipate. Both private and public institutions need rules to determine how such situations are handled. When those rules seem invisible, it is because people find them so obvious and so sensible that they do not see them as rules at all. But the rules are nonetheless there, and sometimes they are not so sensible.” (Thaler and Sunstein, p. 237)
The flipside of this sometimes "invisible" nature of choice architecture makes it prone to critic. Here is where the authors see the problem, when they are asking themselves:
"So do we embrace subliminal advertising—so long as it is in the interest of desirable ends? What limits should be placed on private or public manipulation as such? A general objection to libertarian paternalism, and to certain kinds of nudges, might be that they are insidious—that they empower government to maneuver people in its preferred directions, and at the same time provide officials with excellent tools by which to accomplish that task. Compare subliminal advertising to something just as cunning. If you want people to lose weight, one effective strategy is to put mirrors in the cafeteria. When people see themselves in the mirror, they may eat less if they are chubby. Is this okay? And if mirrors are acceptable, what about mirrors that are intentionally unflattering? (We seem to run into more of those every year.) Are such mirrors an acceptable strategy for our friend Carolyn in the cafeteria? If so, what should we think about flattering mirrors in a fast food restaurant?" (p. 244)
The good news are that besides their doubts they opt for a strategy which they name after a concept of John Rawls "publicity principle", that is exposing and defending publicly their proposals, which honors them not only as good scientist.
In the end there remain two convictions: 1. "understanding of choice architecture, and the power of nudges, will lead others to think of creative ways to improve human lives" (p. 252) and 2."nudging" is worth a continuous research! (Follow their blog under: http://nudges.org)
How to become famous by using cognitive ease? Or: The consequences of repeated exposure
He explains the mechanics of becoming positively recognized by others without actually any conscious agreement to the person's fame. To make somebody a star by simply putting him or her excessively on the media (and hence repetitiously in peoples consciousness) seems to be on first sight only a commonplace platitude. But the crucial insight is hidden in the analysis of Kahneman's quoted studies, namely that you don't need people's consciousness to make somebody famous. Maybe that's why some of the media puppets seem so deprived of any essence when checked by cultural critics.
"The mere exposure effect does not depend on the conscious experience of familiarity. In fact, the effect does not depend on consciousness at all: it occurs even when the repeated words or pictures are shown so quickly that the observers never become aware of having seen them. They still end up liking the words or pictures that were presented more frequently." (Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, p. 67)
David Foster Wallace: ‘A voyage into our economic realm’ or ‘How to understand Business through Fiction’
Once you listened to D.F.W.'s reflections in his essays and arguments you come to understand step by step the realistic force of a fictional style today. D.F.W.' writing responds to specific features of our "lifeworld", often comes as a kind of voyage into the economic realm of the American Society of the 90' and thereby reconfigures and shake the cultural self awareness of his readers. The prominent staging of media-topics in his work is more than affirmative or a neo-postmodern technique. Imaging the televisual realm is a response, "an effort to impose some sort of accountability on the state of affairs in which more Americans get their news from television than from newspapers and in which more Americans every evening watch Wheel of Fortune than all three network news programs combined."1
The disfiguration and adaption of many televisual aspects in his works is part of a fictional technique that is more powerful than a brute realistic try to collect data of what people do today. What D.F.W. calls Image-Fiction has a reflective surplus, that takes into account a state of affairs of our cultural realm, that already blinds us and leaves us with a naïve realism. Let's listen to D.F.W. himself.
"Image-Fiction is a natural adaptation of the hoary techniques of literary Realism to a '90s world whose defining boundaries have been deformed by electric signal. For one of realistic fiction's big jobs used to be to afford easements across borders, to help readers leap over the walls of self and locale and show us unseen or -dreamed-of people and cultures and ways to be. Realism made the strange familiar. Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Walls fall-i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar-it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious Realist fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in demanding fictional access behind lenses and screens and headlines and reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, Image-Fiction is paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for "real" to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights."2
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1. David Foster Wallace, A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again, Abacus 2009 (reprint), p. 51
2. p. 51-52
What would Žižek think about our recent post?
"If our concept of ideology remains the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge, then today's society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way – one of many ways – to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them." (S. Žižek, The sublime object of ideology, 2nd edition, London 2009, p. 30)
High Entertainment or The art of appearing
Here is some taste of the art of media self-presentation:
"Some of us have been interested in Paris Hilton for the very reason that she appears to have no other content than the mechanisms of celebrity. Standing before us minus the distractions of apparent talent or ability, she, like Angelyne, is a concept, of her or someone like her. Other than occasionally mewing "That's hot!" (her own variant on bland Warholian endorsement), the woman has nothing to say, and yet for some time now she has succeeded in moving from media space to media space to media space, web to print to broadcast. Her "content" is her presence in that space, her access to it, her movement from one medium to another. Movement across the surface of the system that presents her is the only "meaning" Paris Hilton offers. Approve of it or don't, but hers is a very pure position. That she's from the upper class is crucial to her contentlessness. An heiress needn't engage the conventional middle-class success narrative. Neither does she seek change nor progress of any sort, as a middle-class person might feel compelled to do. Thus, not only "morally neutral" but refreshingly devoid of the needs associated with most who aspire to a place in media culture, the urge to comment muted, she is able to stand – more accurately, pose – in the foreground as a purer representative of the background. As a result, Hilton functions as a prism through which we observe the disturbing realities of our media system at work." (David Robbins, Chap. Self-Presentation)
The quality of observation
"The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man often remarkably incapable of analysis. The constructive or combining power […] has been so frequently seen in those whose intellect bordered otherwise upon idiocy, as to have attracted general observation among writers on morals.
Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic."
(E.A.Poe, The murders in the Rue Morgue)
First post – The end of the Internet
Why not to begin with the end of the Internet? A paradox worth spreading!
The end of the internet – follow this link: THE END