Metaphoria Digitalus

Working on a startup feels like you’re standing at the edge of the ocean at high tide. The work piles up. You have 17 programs open on your computer and each browser has 20+ tabs. Your attention has the staying power of a fly in the rain. The work crescendos, crashes, drenches your being and then, suddenly, pulls back. Calmness floats in like fog in the bay. The calm is just the build up of the next wave. The calm is the next wave of work sucking up material render its abundant potential energy into kinetic force. The next wave of work is growing before you’ve had a moment to catch you breath, to orientate yourself. And then it crests and crashes and pulls back and grows again.

Does one try to escape the waves by traveling up the beach or out, into the water, beyond the shore? What does the metaphor suggest?

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“The social system is both maintained and modified in every social act. It is not a steady-state system but is-due in part to the innate inability of individuals to perfectly replicate social norms-in motion at all times, constantly vibrating” (Parsons 2003: 12).

This is analogous to how language changes as well. The image of “vibrating” social-norms is incredibly provocative. It suggests that they cannot possibly remain the same and that tradition is just a way of describing prior states of these norms. As a prescriptive exercise, tradition can do no more than channel the vibrations of the system, not control or dictate how they will emerge over time.

And some traditions have dubious pedigrees.

Parsons, P. Defining Cable Television: Structuration and Public Policy. constitution, 6, 5.

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Weick (2000:5) introduced me to the Schutz Test of Comprehension. This is a heuristic that you use to evaluate your own writing. The test assumes three types of understanding:

• simplistic
• complex
• profoundly simple

When we as authors understand the concepts we describe only simplistically, then we tend to hide in scientific jargon. There is safety in this mode of description because you make no bold claims [my claim]. Unfortunately Schutz provides no analog for complex understanding but I imagine this is similar to something like Foucault or Umberto Eco or Haraway (especially her), who tackle such radically different ideas from new frames of reference. Understanding them is like summiting a mountain in the dark. And I imagine that their own writing process is a similar feat.

I think we find profoundly simple understanding most often in physics texts written for general audiences, like The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene or Einstein’s Universe by Nigel Calder. It would be very easy to sink into the soft and familiar jargon of math and science when discussing higher dimensions and relative time. But these authors provide such beautiful metaphors and translucent examples to illustrate these grand ideas. When I want writing inspiration, I crack open Fabric at any random page and read. And it’s at least 40 pages later that I manage to put it down.

• Weick, K. (2000). Making Sense of the Organization. Blackwell Publishing: p.5.
  

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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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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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