Speed Data
In his essay on the limits of judgement George Miller, a founder of cognitive science, writes:
On first reading this seems evident. However, I think Miller makes a series of great cases for what I’ll call the benefits of fuzzy reality that can have direct impact on how we view the onrush of data. Comfort with fuzzy reality can increase our capacity to deal with increased information that seems to glut judgement and stymie communication.
Some people say the impact of increased information on people and the poor judgement that results is just a matter of filter failure. This seems true, but this way of looking at it speaks more to a mechanical apparatus between ‘us’ and information and characterizes our relationship to it within failure. Instead, I’d rather look at the situational, the in-body experiences that are enhanced by increased information and at what similarities to imagination there are at the maxed out threshold.
At the threshold it seems we do several things to compensate, many of them very vital to how we fruitfully imagine and act in the world.
Reading through Miller’s tests, he and his colleagues are able to ‘quantify’ the threshold for remembering numbers or amount of dots (and tones and saltiness), and for repeating back what you saw, heard or tasted. The way I read Miller is “dots, tones and saltiness” are things, and there are others, that we don’t immediately build symbol systems for; it’s harder for us to substitue these small things for bigger symbols.
Interestingly, the quantity remembered increases with words or faces. We recode these things more easily. We translate them from things to kinds of things. To varying degrees, we regroup or introduce sets as grouped symbol references.This recoding speeds things up and allows for faster processing, interesting mashups, imaginings.
This is in many ways the ruffle at the edge of knowledge. Recoding, creating sets, metaphors, analogues and groups enables previous “impossible” or unimagined relationships to emerge; in one sense it’s called creativity or innovation. It’s the way we “make up” the world. It’s how we realign differences and connect with strangers.
Even so, decoding or making sense of these new codes, or sets or relationships can be a real bear. Decoding upends systems as much as or more than the challenges of presented in recoding. How do I share this vision of the world with people whose experience is bound by lack of water, or daily war, or invasions of privacy? In this way recoding/decoding seems to me the real filter failure. So, it’s not just inputs but it’s the outputs – the communication of new ways of experiencing information – that creates the lag-time in adaptation or adoption new ideas, of creating real change…
What seems to be occurring in the onrush of data is the need to create communicable contexts out of already huge groups or sets of bits— the need to create balanced, relevant and shared meaning. In this onrush, the more we flexibly regroup this onrush of information the more we can gain comfort in fuzzy reality. Imagination becomes the privileged mode of engaging the world.
By simply looking at the explosion of data as a growth of what Miller would call our “channel capacity,” our ability to substitute, build new groups, make new meaning, instead of being overwhelmed by an impossibly small level of granularity and filter failure, we can grow to create immediate groups of relevant meaning that accelerate understanding, imagination and creativity.
In this way data becomes transparent, accessible and reimagined. It’s seen as already part of our modes of meaning making. Through a practice of regrouping we can flex imagination and gain capacity to communicate. Within this practice data is as fast as the speed of re-imagined life.
