Seeing the letters is just the start of the reading process. Although our eyes are focused on the letters, we learn to ignore them. Instead, we perceive whole words, chunks of meaning. Once we become proficient at reading, the precise shape of the letters — not to mention the arbitrariness of the spelling — doesn’t even matter, which is why we read word, WORD, and WoRd the same way.
Until now most assumed that when we read both eyes look at the same letter of a word concurrently. But it was found that our eyes look at different letters in the same word and then combine the different images through a process known as fusion. We were able to clearly show that we experience a single, very clear and crisp visual representation due to the merging of the two different images from each eye.
Language tends to be stored in the brain to be processed in audio format, so besides reading the text we automatically convert it to speech in our own heads. After that the process of making sense takes place.
Studies have shown that when a word is checked against the storehouse of words in the brain – whether it is a written word or a word-sound – only the main part of the word is checked first, and then the ending is processed separately. For example, ‘sing’, ‘singing’ and ‘singer’ would all be checked against the base word ‘sing’.
Once we recognized the printed words we need to make sense out of them. Understanding how meaning arises from those words is of the most challenging tasks in cognitive sciences.
More on making sense and meanings can be found here and here.
There is an ongoing debate whether the new kind of reading experience provided by internet is beneficial or not. Some interesting articles are worth exploring: Is Google making us stupid and How is Google making us smarter. It would be interesting to incorporate the last scientific findings about how or brain reads in order to draw new and more accurate conclusions.
“Deep Attention” is characterized by the ability to concentrate on a single object for long periods of time. While “Hyper Attention” is the ability to focus on multiple tasks switching between each with relative ease and speed. Each style is considered a cognitive mode and is fostered and afforded by the media which gave rise to its birth. “Deep attention” can be attributed to the book while “Hyper Attention” is equated with the internet. These cognitive modes are looked at as being diabolically opposed similarly to the discussion that a rises around print vs screen techonologies. However what if these cognitive modes could be gaped? How could hyper attention assist deep attention and vice versa? What would this media start to look like?
I believe that cognitive modes of attention should be versale like that of leonardo device as a renessance man. The educational and pedigogical stance should embrace the two parts of congnition and build services and tools that enable the ability and affordance of each. When knowledge is not valued over its ability to be fast or slow what does is become?
Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods
In the New York Times article Kevin Kelly lays out the arguement that culture is under going a paradigm shift.
“Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.” Kevin Kelly
The ubiquity of screens is a force that is undisputable. The iphone alone sold 21.17 million in 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone). Now the access to screens and networked technology has unearthed a vast and unwealdy beast that has left entrenched media gasping for air. With many companies opting for abandoning ship rather then shifting or recognizing a location for improvement or cohabidance.
Capitalism thrives on competition and what better competition then between paradigms right? Kevin Kelly coments that in the age of computation we have entered that age of screen fluency, this in fact may be true but the line of thinking that book knowledge and screen knowledge or mutually exclusive undermines the ability of screen literacy to convey meaning. Oral culture may have been commodified by the literature and literature may be commodified by the motion picture and motion pictures may be commodified by screen and software but they are all connected. The separation from media type to media type is not fundimentally different. The two paradigms share the ability to convey knowledge through metaphor, storytelling and emotion. The difference is the speed and experience of that media.
Books are slow, pragmatic, (sometimes) linear and require exisiting visual experience to impact the narrative and comprehension, while screens are fast, hyper-linked, variable and use visual experience to impact. Books are quiet and blind, while screens are hyper and loud.
If its not a screen make it one with a projector. Technologies are moving onto every surface. With a projector and software, interacting with computation can occur anywhere. It is really unimportant what the material is as long as it can have an image projected onto it, anything can be the new computer. The notion that any wall or surface can be a computer or interface with which to engage with computation establishes a value on the visual outcome of a computer. A computer and its interface can be boilded down to just light projected on a surface.
A computer is a type of machine and exisits with in the applied history and design spectrum of other machine. When a computer becomes just a screen or just light on a surface it neglects to recognize the importance of many aspects that make the use of a machine useful fun or engaging. Take haptics for example.
Haptics (pronounced HAP-tiks) is the science of applying touch (tactile) sensation and control to interaction with computer applications. (The word derives from the Greek haptein meaning “to fasten.”) By using special input/output devices (joysticks, data gloves, or other devices), users can receive feedback from computer applications in the form of felt sensations in the hand or other parts of the body. In combination with a visual display, haptics technology can be used to train people for tasks requiring hand-eye coordination, such as surgery and space ship maneuvers. It can also be used for games in which you feel as well as see your interactions with images. For example, you might play tennis with another computer user somewhere else in the world. Both of you can see the moving ball and, using the haptic device, position and swing your tennis racket and feel the impact of the ball.
Light as a phonomonia is untangible. One can not touch light the heat they feel from lets say a light bulb is altogether a different sensation but the bodies ability to use the sense of touch to establish knowledge about an object becomes a strong and useful tool for interaction. Interaction with a projection on a wall or table or whatever just becomes interacting with light an altogether difficult thing. A user is not really interacting with anything rather the computer is recognizing the limited physical space to which is being projected and then compensating though the use of software and mostlikely infrared sensors located in the projector. This technology assumes that the interface of a key board is just too bulky and should be illiminated or disregarded as an experience from the interaction with the computer. However the interface and interaction with the keyboard is entirely a learned interaction and has been evolved from the collective consiousness of the typewriter and education itself. A vast and nuanced history that has both been accepted and retaught an established truth of interface. The QUERTY is not going to redically change but somehow the idea that the physical interaction with keys is unuseful for a user of a computer negelts the ablity of the brain to memorize phyiscal space and repeat actions known as muscle memory. The phyiscality of even the simple keys to which this post has been made would have been a much different experience for my hands if I were just to project the letters onto a surface. I would imagine that my fingertips would hurt after pounding them on to a hard surface and that I would have to use more of my sight in order to correctly locate my fingers over the keyboard. The ability of a keyboard to have sutle haptic clues allows me as a user to orient my self to the interface of the keyboard with much more ease. I am speaking of the tiny raised dashes on the f and j keys. Any thing projected can’t accomplish this nuanced yet setting and orienting feature of the keyboard.
I am dismayed by the thinking that a screen is that answer to all our needs when interacting with computation. What would a computer be if it was not screen? why do we need to interact with computation only in the visible sense? Why have computer moved away from the machines you engage and experience and into the the real of only see? All these question arise when I am confronted by technologies that imply and attempt to bring to truth that a computer is really just a screen when I think that it could be so much more such a better experience that light on a surface.
As I research and explore the ideas of conductive circuitry that could start to engage print media as a platform for interactive based computational experiences, I have started to explore the ideas of interactivity and affordance.
Interaction is based on the assumption that a user understands the applied action to accomplish a task. Something as simple as turning a light on can be made incredible complex by not hinting at learned and understood experiences. In Donald Norman’s book – “the design of everyday things” http://www.jnd.org/ he talks at length about the importance of visible interfaces and interaction parts know as natural mapping which comes from proper and natural arrangements for the relations between controls and their movements to the outcome from such action into the world. The real function of natural mapping is to reduce the need for any information from a user’s memory to perform a task. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_mapping) Essentially when a user participates in a task that action is the out come of a plethora of learned, cultural and socio-economic process that have been ingrained into the users understanding. The idea of natural mapping techniques allow things to be perceived as being intuitive. Objects that need no prior instruction. With contemporary electronics the cultural and social economic inundation of computation has started to become learned and performed by cultures at an extremely high rate and at younger and younger ages. The importance of this technology revolution is that artifacts like the cell phone etc have started to be perceived as naturally mapped artifacts with interactions not that unfamiliar to a user than the interaction of a door or a tea kettle.
The question is are the interactions that we engage with our computational electronics the right interactions? Can we engage naturally mapped ideas from culture to engage new and innovative products that rather than force the user learn a new system, are engaged to the perceived natural mapped system?
