Comments on: More on visualisation and flight patterns and Generation M

By: marekj

marekj — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 06:38:22 +0000

Old tools are perhaps only old to you and me. The tools we are using most people relate to as playthings and magic, no? People’s lives are invested in the upkeep of the past, the preservation and constant polishing. It is amazing to see people in the office discovering the simple automation of excel data – to some it’s like magic, they have no capacity to go beyond that yet.
There is a fundamental failure of the education system we are dealing with, at least in US as I can see. By ‘education system’ I am pointing more towards the corporations where majority of knowledge about how life works is we know it is maintained. We are experiencing not really new tools as such. A new tool to most means the same but improved, a bit faster, cheaper and lighter etc… but now do you understand a new tool that with it introduces you too new world but there is nobody guiding you. It’s like we as adults are now learning to be children again because the world is so new, really really new.

By: Sutha Kamal

Sutha Kamal — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 14:06:51 +0000

Hi JP … your post triggered me to write a blog post I’ve been thinking about for a few days… (http://blog.suthakamal.com/2007/07/how-tech-changes-travel.html). I used a GPS wristwatch to track a recent trip through Europe, and layer the route atop Google Earth maps… a way to visualize and share a trip that I’d never been able to do before.

By: Michael Clarke

Michael Clarke — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:07:02 +0000

I don’t actually think evolution works that fast. Being an optimist, I don’t see any reason why old business “best practice” paradigms can’t be unlearnt (or why we can’t all join Gen M). The capacities there. The migration of the 25+ demographic to Facebook is one example of this happening. The rules of survival on a battlefield raw recruits have to learn (now that’s continuous partial attention) is another.

By: Peter Smith

Peter Smith — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:43:29 +0000

You say
‘we go back to using dead-paradigm slow-moving hand-crafted tools. Why? Maybe itâ€™s because we want to.’

Respectfully I must disagree.
We are real time animals. The hunter in us evolved to scan for quick changes and react instantly to them. It really was a matter of life and death. This is a vital part of our nature. And we still see this behaviour today in the vibrant sports world.

The instant reaction of the hunter is the result of a fast feedback control loop, in the first place, and the immediate responsiveness of his tools.

Past business practices (and technology) have thrown a deadening blanket over the hunter in us, muffling the feedback control loop, slowing our natural pace to a painful shuffle.

But this is not who we are. We have become conditioned to accepting it as normal.

The Internet paradigm is restoring the the fast feedback control loop that is a natural part of our existence.
Generation M, free of the burden of past practices, see this as the most natural thing in the world.

By: From care to caring: when Web 2.0 meets customer service | confused of calcutta

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 21:05:42 +0000

[...] while posting about something else, I commented (as an aside) about not being able to load something into my VodPod, and about the [...]

By: JP

JP — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 19:42:21 +0000

Tend to agree, Stephen. There is something about this noun-to-verb progression you harp on about, an “acting” versus “actor” feel about things, that feels right.

I need to keep on reading the references.

By: Stephen Smoliar

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 15:50:40 +0000

JP, presumptuous as it may seem, I would like to frame my point with an excerpt from Patrick Olivelle’s translation (for Oxford University Press) of UPANISHADS:
–
The central concern of all vedic thinkers, including the authors of the Upanishads, is to discover the connections that bind elements of these three spheres ["the ritual, the cosmic realities, and the human body/person"] to each other. The assumption then is that the universe constitutes a web of relations, that things that appear to stand alone and apart are, in fact, connected to other things. A further assumption is that these real cosmic connections are usually hidden from the view of ordinary people; discovering them constitutes knowledge, knowledge that is secret and is contained in the Upanishads. And it is this knowledge of the hidden connections that gives the person with that knowledge power, wealth, and prestige in this world, and heavenly bliss and immortality after death.
–
With this as context let me be so bold as to suggest that some of your confusion may be alleviated by applying some of (y)our previous thinking about nouns and verbs to visualization. That “world of PowerPoint presentations of scorecards and dashboards and RAG indicators, fed by Excel spreadsheets and simple databases, and with considerable manual intervention” is a world based in nouns. Even the dashboards are, at best, slow-moving. I would argue further that “Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder” are not “marching” us “into an event-driven society.” Rather, the increase in bandwidth simply narrows the interval between the snapshots we take, meaning that we are still stuck with thinking about state, relegating the (verb-based) transitions to the “gaps between the states.”

Let me argue further that we need this kind of verb-based thinking not only for the sake of a better handle on DESCRIBING processes but, more importantly, for the sake of REFLECTING on those descriptions. That is where the “working knowledge” resides, be it vedic or Socratic; and that is where, in my own not-so-humble opinion (!), Generation M fails us. An air traffic controller has to infer processes from limited displays and then make life-or-death decisions based on those inferences. No wonder the job is so stressful! Generation M may be able to juggle more “nouns” (so to speak) than an air traffic controller; but their “multitasking skills” amount to little more than time-slicing rituals. Making decisions based on reflection is just not part of the Generation M life style (which is why I am probably such an old fogy about this issue)!

Note, by the way, that Tufte’s third book on visualization is one of the better examples of honoring verb-based thinking. Its title is VISUAL EXPLANATIONS: IMAGES AND QUANTITIES, EVIDENCE AND NARRATIVE. I can think of no better way to seek out the dialectical synthesis of the noun-based and the verb-based!