Metaphoria Digitalus

So far I’ve managed to stay out of pay-per-month MMORPG games. I played through my trial membership to World of Warcraft and silently let it expire without too much separation pain. I’ve resisted purchasing land in Second Life and locking myself into monthly fees — essentially a Second Rent. My There account is mothballed. I downloaded and deleted Dofus within a few hours. I must admit I’m pretty close to purchasing Diner Dash, but then that’s just a one time fee and a wicked fun game (try the free preview).

But now I read on Giga Gamez that Lord of the Rings MMORPG is in beta and releasing in 2007. Tara is reading the trilogy for the first time at the moment and her excitement is bringing me back to my far from tortured youth when I devoured that book of 1000+ pages in 72 hours. And then the Simarillion and then the Lost Tales of Numenore.

It’s just a matter of time before each of our guilty pleasures is worlded up, given a virtual economy and shoving it’s capitalist hands into our shallowing pockets. I’m just glad it’s sooner for me rather than later.

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I almost snapped my neck tonight at yoga trying to do a forearm stand. I crumpled to the floor after my legs fell beyond my center of gravity. In an effort not to land on the floor like a falling tree, I crumpled and came down on my neck, sending my left ear to my shoulder. While attaining this shoulder-ear position, my neck released a series of pops. They sounded like firecrackers in my head. The upside is that my neck feels looser. The downside is that the muscles in my neck strained to prevent the extreme stretching and are now cramped up. Yoga is not a relaxing activity. It’s quite dangerous in fact.

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Why is the future of technology focused on delivering content to me that I already know I like? Bill Gates, while speaking with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, predicted that one future direction of interactive TV would be to show me more news items that I like and less items that I don’t like.

Does anyone see the problem with the myopic vision of content? Will there be no more new experiences? Just amplifications of experiences that I have already had? Where will insight come from if not the juxtaposition of my past experiences with future experiences that conflict with my model of reality.

Technology should be challenging our thoughts, not building up a false sense of comfort and complacency.

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Robert Chisholm wrote the paper that I’ve had brewing in my head for a few months now. But he’s freed me up to expand the idea beyond the basic ground work to practical applications for metaphor.

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I have this impression that the people who worked on the Xerox Star at Xerox in the late 70’s and early 80’s possess an incredible intuition for metaphor. The desktop metaphor did not just appear to them, no. It resulted from numerous observation sessions. I have seen some proverbial sketches-on-a-bar-napkin insight leaps where the idea of the desktop as the guiding metaphor jumped forward another operational step.

Bill Verplank was working on the interface of the Xerox Star from 1978 to 1986. Today, his design process is fantastically succinct. It sums up as finding a motivation, gathering meaning (through metaphor) for that motivation, modeling the solution space and mapping the controls mechanisms of an interface to the hooks in the solution space.

According to Bill, the meaning of the design comes from the story that you tell about it and if you can spin a good metaphor, it will makes sense to people.

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More often recently, I feel like I am on the verge of some big insight. This insight must be the very same that so many thinkers before me have encountered. It involves the human condition and the role that we play in our own social evolution. Perhaps it will just be a fleeting glimpse of comprehension, to be undergone over and over again over my lifetime, but never retained save for that moment of revelation.

I predict the insight will be an understanding of how little I understand. That is not so profound. But to see the scope of what I do not understand, or to see how I might work to understand it, that would be a moment of intellectual pleasure as yet unsurpassed by me.

The saddest thing in this world is that with so much potential to aspire, create, improve and learn, so many people are locked into historically-driven cycles of violence and ignorance. An ignorance that feeds on itself with no organic analog because it is so unnatural and deadly. Lyotard’s notion of the differand succinctly explains much of the world’s current state. The differand refers to an unresolvable conflict between two groups. The conflict is unresolvable because the reality-constructing world-view of each group is so radically different from the other’s that no compromise or empathy is possible. Either the groups sever contact or they engage in war.

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Brent, a friend of mine at IU, recently told me about the publishing a blogger blog to a remote ftp site. So now I’ve got the thing on my URL with control over the directories and files. It’s fantastic. Good-bye Wordpress.

It is bleeding cold in Indiana tonight.

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