take it in the gut
Being trained as a scientist, I end up having some interesting metaphors rise up from the ooze that is my psyche. For awhile I've been working on a DNA replication metaphor for education in the 21st century, and have fleshed out a metabolic pathway metaphor for sucessful communication in the digital age. But for now, let me briefly talk about using physics to understand digital life. This is in part due to a blurb here
I have been thinking about quantum mechanics for some time, and the relationship to multimedia. That led me to string theory, and how that can tie in (pun intended). I'll flesh these out in another installment, as I want to talk about GUT, or the Grand Unification Theory. Einstein spent the better part of his career looking for an answer to how one can justify gravitational and quantum theory into one big answer. String theory looks like it might be a route to do that, but I want to think in terms of media. Right now we have a number of types of media elements (still image, moving image, music, sound, text, etc), and other parameters (temporal, spatial, interactivity, etc). These have been somewhat aggregated and disseminated in a couple of standard forms including the classic textbook, the electronic book, the song (and album), tv/movies, interactive computer media, etc. The problem is that each medium has it's own set of technological and social/psychological requirements, needs, and biases. While the objects used to create the media might be the same, how they are assembled, and how their meaning is manipulated and adjusted varies depending on a number of factors including the medium, juxstoposition in time and space, as well as the "reader" and their biases.
Part of the solution comes in thinking about media elements from an object model approach (yet another paper I'm working on). That hopefully can lead us to some central tenets about how things exist with each other within a "document" (whatever that is). But since each platform (the song, the movie, the book) are so different, is there a unifying theory that we can come up with to explain how media works in each? That's one of the things we're trying to figure out. And when you add devices into the question, things get even more dicey. The iPod was a clear hit with "the song" platform. But will it be with the video? Is it with the book (audio form, or read along with text)? Too many technologists try to leverage a sucess in one area, and create a version to do things it really shouldn't do. I don't have all the answers (yet), and I appreciate that sometimes you have to just "do the experiment", but I find there are too many people who don't even know what questions to ask before they start their answer.