Breathe In, Breathe Out

Information Wants to Be Embodied

We attended a performance by author David Sedaris at a local theater a few months ago. I had heard Sedaris a few times on public radio's This American Life, but didn't know much about him. For an admission cost of $95, I wondered what kind of performance he'd give us.

I guess I was expecting a kind of stand up routine or lecture. Instead, Sedaris mostly just read from a manuscript he was working on. And he was visibly editing the script based on audience reaction.

I loved every minute of it.

Had you told me beforehand I was paying good money to observe a guy editing copy, I probably would have dismissed the whole idea. After all, I could listen to Sedaris for free on the radio or borrow one of his books from the library.

What would make me happy to pay for something I could get for free?

Kevin Kelly couches the question in slightly different terms, but does a great job explaining in Better Than Free. He starts by making the point that the Internet creates copies of everything digital. This makes stuff that can be digitized more or less free.

But there's a paradox here: superabundant copies become free. However, when this happens, it's the stuff that can't be copied that becomes scarce and valuable.

Kelly calls the stuff that can't be copied "generative qualities." He lists and elaborates on a number of them in the essay. For the David Sedaris performance, the thing I was paying for was embodiment:

At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps you'd like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good. What about dwelling in your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same room? There is no end to greater embodiment. Sure, the hi-res of today -- which may draw ticket holders to a big theater -- may migrate to your home theater tomorrow, but there will always be new insanely great display technology that consumers won't have. Laser projection, holographic display, the holodeck itself! And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive.

It's a bit ironic that I found Kelly's essay in my news aggregator, available for free as are the hundreds of feeds I read regularly. Would I pay for this essay? Sure, if it were in a more permanent and convenient form like, say, a book. That would add a generative quality of accessibility, and make it worth a few bucks to me.

But it would also add the generative quality of findability, perhaps exposing the essay to readers who might not find it on the Internet. According to Kelly, findability is one of the value functions by aggregators. Not the software programs that process RSS feeds, but the organizations that package talent and information. Part of the bargain here is the aggregators (producers, distributors and labels or PDL), offer avenues to direct attention to the information being produced.

I think Kelly himself kind embodies this quality with his websites and books. He's also part of the lineage of that grand aggregator of information from the 1960's, The Whole Earth Catalog.

And if Kelly wants to come read from his manuscript , I'll happily buy a ticket.

Book Learnin' Don't Always Work

Here's one idea about why it's so difficult to learn or master physical skills for most of us:

In a way, “Just do it” is profoundly counter-cultural. Westerners are used to learning from the outside in. Our motto would be "Explain it first, then attempt it." Or, "Don't do it, yet." Get the abstractions right, then try to apply them. Become a knowledgeable expert, then impose your knowledge on the body. Learning from the Inside Out

OK, let me see. At the top of the backswing, the wrists should be cocked how many degrees, did you say? And precisely 62.4 percent of my weight should be on my right leg? Let me check the illustrations in the book again.

Yea, right. You can substitute your own sport or performance skill here, but the principle is the same. It's difficult, if possible at all, to learn or advance this way.

I discovered this quote in a very interesting website that I discovered while researching for a longer post on vision and balance that will be forthcoming. As part of that research I looked up the website that accompanies Scott McCredie's excellent book Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense. Among the resources McCredie lists is Go Animal where I stumbled upon the quote above. I'm looking forward to exploring it.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning

Eyes (and Other Senses) in the Back of the Head

Ever heard of peripersonal space? It's "the bubble of space around a person's body that his brain as part of him in its map of his body."

Body map? Yeah, it turns out that the human brain is filled with representations of the body and the environment it finds itself in. The maps are for both sensing and for moving. It's these maps that you use to move your arm or leg, and not the muscles that reside there, at least not directly.

Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee beautifully and clearly describe the ideas of body brain maps in The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better. I just finished an initial reading yesterday, and I plan to have much more to say about this wonderful book. Lots of very rich Feldenkrais-related material here.

But what reminded me of it was this New Scientist post on an experimental headband that helps its wearers sense physical stuff around them when blindfolded. There are even some video illustrations. And the New Scientist post mentions other sources of information about this sort of contraption.

It's not hard to predict that these sorts of haptic devices will be widely available, probably pretty soon. What'll be really interesting is when they hit the consumer market. All sorts of athletic applications, I'd think.

But most interesting to me is what kind of effect it'll have on kids as they develop. Maybe the term "eyes in the back of the head" will be more than a metaphor in the future.