Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 388.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 06:16:18 +0000
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@cogprints.soton.ac.uk>
Subject: Beyond Access and Impact: The Ultimate Benefit of
SkyReading/Writing
[You are invited to post your comments to the Amsci Forum and/or to
http://www.text-e.org/debat -- the multilingual, multinational
virtual-symposium dedicated to investigating the impact of the Web on
reading, writing and the diffusion of knowledge: "Screens and Networks:
Towards a New Relationship With the Written Word"]
Beyond Access and Impact: The Ultimate Benefit of SkyReading/Writing
Stevan Harnad
Human cognition is not an island unto itself. As a species, we are not
Leibnizian Monads independently engaging in clear, Cartesian thinking.
Our minds interact. That's surely why our species has language. And
that interactivity probably constrains both what and how we think.
Although Wittgenstein's argument that there could be no "private
language" -- because language is based on rule-following and rules are
shared social conventions -- is probably overstated and refutable, for
present purposes it is valid enough: Language is the main medium of
interaction of our species and it is fundamentally interactive,
dialogical. It did not evolve to leave us lost in subjective,
solipsistic thought. In terms of the time we spend doing it, conversing
probably exceeds all other forms of human interaction, including
feeding, fighting, playing, mating, and the "grooming" that some have
argued it has evolved to replace (Dunbar 1993
http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/05/65/index.html).
The origins of language have been the subject of much speculation
(Harnad et al. 1976
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/08/63/index.html),
but perhaps a few things can be said about it with some confidence:
Language began hundreds of thousands of years ago, and whether it
started as gesture and then moved to speech (Steklis and Harnad 1976
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/08/66/index.html),
or went straight into speech, the kind of adaptation it was was
undeniably an interactive one: Speech accordingly has a characteristic
real-time dyadic tempo. There is certainly some variation in the rates
at which people speak, the optimal speaking rates they understand,
their attention spans, their memories, etc., but, to a close enough
approximation, the timing parameters of a contemporary TV chat show are
probably representative of our species since very near the advent of
language.
There are consequences of this: Speak too fast or too slow, and I won't
be able to understand you. A subtler consequence (having to do with the
memory and attention-span factor) is that if you speak for too long,
I'll have trouble understanding too, and I'll only be able to respond
to what you said near the beginning of your speech, or near the end, or
to some selected portions that caught my attention in the middle.
Chances are that the adaptive value of language in the original
environment in which it evolved derived from relatively rapid exchanges
of relatively short strings of information, again more like a
conversation or a chat show amongst a few interlocutors than a long
lecture by one orator to a throng -- that came too, but it came later.
Although the adaptive scenarios people have proposed are without
exception mere speculations, they are all variants on the idea that the
utility of language must have been connected with its use in hunting,
tribal defense, tool-making, and/or training others (especially the
young) in these or other essential hominid survival skills. With the
exception of pedagogy (which was probably a later development), it's
hard to imagine these uses of language as consisting of long
monologues: Relatively short interactive comment and response were
probably the order of the day, performed at about the speeds we perform
them today. But even if primal conversations were one-sided rather than
interactive, a rate-limiting factor was how fast we could speak and
understand, and how big a chunk we could remember long enough for it to
have any useful effect (Miller 1956
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/07/30/index.html ,
Cowan 2001
http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/04/46/index.html).
So it is likely that because of real-time constraints on articulatory
rate, the speed of thought co-evolved with the speed of speech; their
rates converged on roughly the same order of magnitude (though one
hopes we thought a bit faster than we spoke) and were in phase. And
that's still the way things stand now, biologically speaking, for,
after the advent of language, the rest of the developments in the
linguistic arena were technological (and cultural) rather than
biological -- feats of "cognitive engineering," if you like: We
invented the new medium of writing, so words, and the thoughts they
conveyed, could then be transmitted beyond the reach of any individual
human's voice, ears or memory. (The oral tradition had done this in
part, but imperfectly, and only through the mediation of a vocal
internuncio.) Then we invented the medium of printing, so words and
thoughts could be transmitted beyond the reach of any individual
human's pen or paper (Harnad 1991
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/15/80/index.html).
Writing and print were not only ingenious ways of preserving and
distributing thoughts, but they also freed us from many of the
immediate constraints of memory and attention span, because written
words could be read and re-read, allowing messages to be longer and
more complex than anything one could hope to convey orally. They could
also be written and rewritten, allowing messages to be more careful and
disciplined than anything the rapid pace of spontaneous conversation
could ever generate. But this lapidary property of the written word was
purchased at a price: The interactivity of speech was gone, or at least
it was slowed down to a pace that hardly seemed worthy of the word
"interactive" at all -- considering the speed, commensurate with
speech, of which human thought had already proved itself capable in the
oral era: So literality did, in a sense, make us more like monads
conducting monologues. To be sure, we were writing letters to one
another, and replying, sometimes on the same day, but it was rather
like what had formerly been a jig, danced together, turned instead into
a sarabande, danced in lugubrious alternation -- or, to pick a more
cognitive example, a long-distance chess game in which the players make
only one or two moves a day, and spend the rest of the time waiting to
learn their opponent's response: There was something profoundly
out-of-phase about it, or rather about the thoughts behind it, which in
real-time dialogue would have interdigitated instead of proceeding in
fits and starts.
The chess analogy is instructive, because, unlike a conversation, a
chess game often involves long periods of motionless thought, and being
rushed makes one play less well. Yet the game is interactive, and if it
were to be played with limitless time between moves, it would no longer
be the same game (and would perhaps no longer draw on the same
cognitive capacities). Slow-motion tennis would be even more obviously
a different game.
These analogies are imperfect, but the point I do want to make is that
in written dialogue as well as in slow-motion chess, apart from the
extra time one is happy to take in order to reflect more, there is a
great deal of dead time too, in which one's thoughts are idling,
waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Nor is the limitless reflection time an unmixed blessing in itself:
Necessity is the mother of invention. What would become of the
spontaneous wit of a brilliant salon conversationalist if each item of
repartee could be put on limitless hold for pondering before
transmission? Would dancing ability (in an age when dancing was still
interactive) or tennis prowess be the same if each move and each shot
could be preceded by hours of deliberation?
Again, chess, being cognitive, is the most instructive case: In
principle, given infinite time. every possible move could be tried in
advance, and hence the optimal one could be picked. But trying every
possibility is not usually the way cognition goes, and certainly not
what we regard as "creative" cognition: The cognitive "moves" we regard
as brilliant are not the ones that are a result of mechanically going
through all the possibilities, but the ones that somehow find a pattern
latent in all the dreary combinatorics, a pattern that swiftly and
directly generates a solution to a problem that looked hard until the
pattern was discovered
(http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/27/index.html).
The human mind occasionally discovers such patterns. It's impossible to
quantify this -- to say how often this happens, or how improbable and
consequential the patterns really are. Sometimes we discover things
through long, noninteractive reflection, to be sure. But, given the
evolutionary history and temporal parameters of language and thought,
it is probably safe to say that it is in real-time cognitive
interactions between minds that the resourcefulness of human cognition
is most firmly engaged.
This essay is by no means intended as a polemic for a return to an oral
culture, however! The power gained from the discipline of slowing
thought down to the pace of writing, and preserving it verbatim,
answerable for its validity not merely to the persuasive force of one
orator on one occasion, but the endless scrutiny of peers and
posterity, was probably almost as revolutionary a technological and
cultural advance for human thought as the advent of language itself had
been. But let us not forget that in exchange for those virtues of the
lapidary medium (writing) we sacrificed some of the virtues of the
labile one (speaking), particularly the possibility of minds
interacting at the speed of thought. Could one have the best of both
worlds?
Not in the medium of speech, which vanishes as it is uttered. Recording
it is no help, because what one really needs is playback and editing
capacity, for both one's own utterances and one's interlocutor's. And
by whatever cognitive engineering means one might secure this --
whether the playback/editing is in the phonological medium or the
graphemic one -- the need to do two things rather than one (i.e., not
just to listen and speak to one's interlocutor, but to monitor and
modify the record of what has been said by both parties) rules out what
might might have seemed to be the ideal solution, namely, real-time
interaction by writing.
It's not just the slow speed of writing that is the problem; even if a
speech-recognizer could generate error-free graphemes as fast as we
could talk, and even if we could read these as fast as we can hear,
this would still leave us back where we were with spontaneous
conversation: We would merely have an instant transcript, but no more
opportunity for reflection. It is in part for these reasons that --
except for quick, urgent messages -- most people find the real-time
Unix "talk" facility so unsatisfying. It's not just the frustration of
watching someone else's slow typing, and backspacing to correct typos,
or the bottleneck of one's own typing, but that one feels that if this
was just a chat, we could just as well have talked by phone, and if
careful reading and serious reflection were called for, off-line email
would have been better.
So is email just a somewhat accelerated form of ordinary mail (which,
as I said, even in the past sometimes had same-day turnaround)? And are
we irretrievably severed by the written medium from the interactivity
of the real-time dialogue for which our minds are biologically
adapted?
I think not. Although fast paperless mail was what email may originally
have been intended for, it has turned out to have some unexpected
consequences, opening up some revolutionary possibilities. First, let
us not under-rate the speed factor. In principle, for a message of just
about any length, it can reach my interlocutor the instant I complete
it. Second, it can at the same instant be branched to multiple
interlocutors (in principle, to everyone). These two factors, of speed
and scale are without precedent, but they are still noninteractive
ones, insofar as the speed of thought is concerned. Rhat is not all,
however. Instantaneous and flexible text-capturing, quoting and
commenting capabilities allow a form of highly focused and selective
off-line interaction with the text that does engage the real-time speed
of thought, and engages it interactively, yet in the lapidary medium,
and with precisely the playback/editing facilities that were missing in
real-time dialogue (verba volant, scripta manent).
Recall the memory and attention-span constraint on the length of a
particular utterance in oral dialogue: Run on too long, and your
interlocutor will lose continuity, forget, and misinterpret. One is
tempted to say (to a long-winded interlocutor): Why don't you just
write me a letter? Long-winded conversations, if they do not turn into
one-sided monologues (which are a fortiori noninteractive), are more
likely to be divergent duo-monologues -- each interlocutor in turn
launching off from some point in the primacy/recency memory curve for
the preceding peroration that they have just endured impatiently,
waiting their turn -- rather than convergent dialogues, which require
each interlocutor to be relatively brief and to the point (so it can be
ensured that it is the same point they are both addressing).
Well, in the quote/comment capability that email has made possible, a
long-winded passage can be given full attention (if it deserves it); it
is preserved verbatim, free of memory constraints, to be re-read as
often as one wishes; and, most important of all, it can be selectively
edited down to the specific points one decides to address in replying,
and the reply can then be focused on those passages, quoting them so as
to provide the full requisite context. One's own reply, too, has the
benefit of the playback and editing capability, and can be written and
rewritten till one feels one has gotten it right. Moreover (and it is
for this reason that I have dubbed this form of interaction
"skywriting"; Harnad 1990
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/15/81/index.html),
in engaging in this form of real-time cognitive interactivity with
electronic text, one can also keep in mind that it is not only one's
interlocutor who will see one's quotations and comments, but all the
others to whom the message was branched: This is like the benefit of a
trial by jury without the real-time pressure and stage fright of oral
testimony; or like a public debate conducted in writing; or like a
symposium and discussion likewise conducted in writing; but writing in
a new key: at electronic speed and scale, and with the powerful
playback/editing capability just described. Most important of all, a
permanent, public record of the interaction is preserved in the form of
a "Hypermail" Archive:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/
I realise that these resources are quite familiar to all of you, but
sometimes a thing has to be "made strange," as Schopenhauer termed it,
and looked at as if for the first time, if one is to see its true
properties and potential, particularly if it is something relatively
new that has become a familiar commonplace too quickly, as email has
done. The text-capturing quote/comment tools and conventions that have
rapidly developed in the past decade were not the work of cognitive
engineers, experimenting with and optimising emerging interactive
resources. They were simply co-invented out of expediency by emailers.
I'm not sure where the "> " convention for setting off quoted passages
started, but it quickly becomes unworkable with multiple levels of
quoted text, even when supplemented by preceding the ">" with each
interlocutors initials (see
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/rynne.html ). It was probably
born on Usenet and carried over to Unix mailers, or vice versa. It is
certainly not a successful piece of cognitive engineering, yet it is an
absolutely remarkable capability that deserves to be closely analysed
and developed, because it is the means by which the best of both worlds
-- labile speech and lapidary writing -- can be realised. But before
closing, I would like
.... [to describe] two anecdotes from my own experience that I suspect
will
resonate with experiences many of you have had too.
The first anecdote concerns my own first exposure to "skywriting": In
1980, there had appeared in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), the
journal I edit, an extremely controversial critique of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) by the philosopher John Searle called the "Chinese
Room Argument"
(http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/04/84/index.html). Most
people, including me, thought the Argument was wrong; after umpiring
several years of critical commentary on it in BBS, I was writing my own
critique of it in the mid '80s when it was drawn to my attention that
on "news:comp.ai" -- the Usenet chat group devoted to discussions of AI
-- a discussion of Searle's Argument had been going on for several
years.
I tuned in to see what had been said, and perhaps add my own critical
voice to the throng, but quickly discovered two things: First, the
critics were mostly not cognitive scientists but computer programmers
and students. Second, all of their Counterarguments to Searle were
wrong. Now I myself considered Searle's Argument to be wrong at that
time, but before posting my own critique I wanted to dispel the clouds
of invalid arguments that were in the air, so I took them on, one by
one (though often they were just variants of the same wrong reasoning
or assumptions or conclusions), and I consciously did so as if my
contributions were formal commentaries in a learned journal (even if
the postings I was commenting on had not been that scrupulous), except
that I adopted the Usenet quote/comment convention.
The results were quite remarkable. The archive of my own discussion
quickly reached booklength. I spent countless hours on the Net every
day, taking on all comers, patiently replying to different variants of
the same bad arguments a different way each time, so it might not bore
but inform the silent majority that I assumed were following all this.
(I still have no idea how many were "tuning in"; although Usenet's
Arbitron statistics estimate the total readership of each group, one
does not know how many of them -- and who -- are following a particular
discussion "thread.") And though my behavior no doubt had
obsessive-compulsive features, I don't regret the time I spent at it at
all: Necessity is indeed the Mother of Invention, and in the course of
that Skywriting Tournament, defending Searle against invalid criticism,
I came up with some positive ideas of my own, including a hypothesis
about what the real problem underlying Searle's critique of AI was (the
"Symbol Grounding Problem" -- its name was born as the subject of one
of the threads of the Searle discussion, and it has since become one of
my more important papers; Harnad 1990
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/06/15/index.html) as
well as a potential solution to the problem (Harnad et al. 1991
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/15/79/index.html).
It is unlikely that I would have come up with those ideas otherwise.
The essential features were the real-time interactivity, the
quote/comment capability, and the long series of determined
interlocutors. It has since occurred to me that the exercise might have
been even more fruitful if my adversaries had not just been students
and programmers, but the best thinkers in the field -- and that
eventually impelled me to start a refereed electronic journal
(Psycoloquy http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/ ) and to become a
polemicist for the online self-archiving of the refereed research
literature (http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm),
but that is another story. What's relevant here is that even with that
less than optimal demography, the interaction proved to be such a
powerful idea-generator for me. Nor was there any doubt in my mind that
the quote/comment feature was at the hear of it. Which brings me to my
second anecdote, mercifully shorter than the first:
It was around that time that I noticed that I -- a compulsive
reprint/preprint collector since the 70's -- completely lost my taste
for on-paper texts: If someone sent me a paper reprint, I would email
them to ask if they didn't perchance have an on-line version. Why? Not
because I find the current generation of VDU's any more appetising to
look at than you do, but because of the quote/comment (Q/C) capability.
I had become addicted to it as a way of interacting with text,
irrespective of whether it came from a "live" posting or a "dead" text
(even by a dead author!): Either way Q/C made it alive for me. The
technique was the same. Read it on-screen, save a back-up full copy,
then start selectively deleting the irrelevant or uncontroversial
passages, leaving only the skeleton of what I wanted to address in my
"reply". But who was this reply for? Well, in some case I could think
of it as being for the author, but usually that was not enough for
inspiration. So I set up some discussion groups involving multiple
minds, all interested in the topic under discussion. (A population of
Skyreaders is essential to the inspirational power of Skywriting.) And
as with the symbol grounding discussion, often -- not always, but often
enough -- the interaction would generate the germ of my next published
article. And meanwhile Hypermail Archives
(http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/) could serve as the
permanent SkyDocument of record (see also Hayes et al.
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad92.virtualmind.html
Flach & Powers 1993
http://cwis.kub.nl/~fdl/research/ti/docs/think/2-1/index.stm and
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?12.034 as well as Okerson
& O'Donnell 1995 http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html ) to see
how Skywriting can sometimes spawn terrestrial incarnations too.
[... text deleted]
In this essay I have suggested that the on-line text-capturing and
quote/commenting and self-archiving capability that has emerged in the
last two decades has created the possibility of combining the
discipline and reflectiveness of writing with the speed and
interactiveness of speech in a form of interactive cognition that is
sui generis and without precedent in human discourse and
inter-mentation. Whether with a live interlocutor or just an inert
text, the interaction can now take place at the brain-friendly, on-line
speed of thought, rather than at the lamentably slow, off-line
turnaround time that paper communication had dictated. Hence, in the
interests of developing a textual corpus on which to base this
revolutionary new form of interaction, what better course of action can
the scholarly/scientific community take than to make its all-important
refereed research record freely accessible online to one and all, for
open-ended cycles of skywriting and skyreading, forever?
Updated and revised excerpts from:
Harnad, S. (1995) Interactive Cognition: Exploring the Potential of
Electronic Quote/Commenting. In: B. Gorayska & J.L. Mey (Eds.)
Cognitive Technology: In Search of a Humane Interface. Elsevier. Pp.
397-414.
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/15/99/index.html
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free
access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the
American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
or
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
You may join the list at the amsci site.
Discussion can be posted to:
september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org
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