The Future of ISE--Abstraction
From Media and Informal Science Learning
The relentless growth in the quantity and availability of information is leading or will lead to another trend with many manifestations, namely greater and greater tendencies or trends towards abstraction versus concrete one to one correspondence with the physical world. Some of the expressions and potential consequences--or opportunities--we see coming from this include:
Contents |
Short-form communication
In the space of the last twenty years, interpersonal communication has moved from letters and phone calls to email to instant messaging, text messaging, and Twitter/Facebook entries (limited to 140 characters in the case of Twitter). One can argue that at least some of the words in longer form communications were superfluous, but the proliferation of shorthands, emoticons, slang, and haiku-like expressions all argue that short-form communicators are seeking to pack more meaning into smaller quantities of information, by definition a form of abstraction. As with multi-tasking (see below), another level of abstraction is added by the number of these threads of communication often being engaged in simultaneously or side by side.
On the plus side, creation of a new level of abstraction in language is a creative activity, likely to have other creative consequences, at least assuming that, like English itself, it's a task that's never finished. But the implications for other aspects of self-expression (because not all words in long form communication were/are superfluous) as well as the ability and desire for short-form communicators to take in information from others (such as science educators) that requires richer linguistics is not yet fully understood. It may be that entirely new ways to express information types that currently seem to require long-form communication will have to be developed, not only for natural short-form communicators but for us all, to the extent that we continue to need to take in more and more information.
Multi-tasking & hyperlinking
In the early days of the Net, it appeared Internet use was going to cannibalize television, and to some extent this has happened. But what has become far more prevalent is simultaneous Net/TV use and, more recently, what we call 'active multitasking' between the Net and TV in which the use of one medium is actually connected in some way to the use of the other.[1] In fact, the average child tells us he/she is engaged in at least 2-3 other activities "a lot" while watching TV, and the average Net-TV multitasker (a majority of kids) says he/she is engaged in at least 3-4 other activities "a lot" while watching television.[2]
To the extent these various information inputs are uncoordinated (because television and its advertisers have been slow to adopt 'surround sound' or 360 approaches and don't have control over simultaneous inputs like 'talking to friends on phone'[3] though they can impact what those friends are talking about), there would seem to be a necessary level of abstraction in the way users are processing and in many cases putting these inputs together. Even where there is coordination, the acts of watching television, playing a game, talking with friends and other simultaneous inputs are different enough that in general a frame created by a content provider to really encompass two or more of these communication forms seems bound to include a level of abstraction, either directly or in the experience of the end-user.
The continuous act of connecting (or even just juxtaposing) often disparate inputs, in turn, could lead to a cornucopia of creative effects (e.g. one could argue that the hyperlinking, multi-tasking experience made the creation of mash-ups inevitable), or it could be leading to mental or at least analytical chaos. The academic jury is still out. We also don't know yet what it's best to do with the abstraction multi-tasking creates or how to modulate it for better educational results. To a lesser extent, the same hopes and fears can be expressed about the typical surfing experience once users leave the search environment and begin clicking from site to site. Is hyperlinking helping users make more creative connections themselves, and are there strategies practitioners can employ that make this more likely? It's been many years since hyperlinked fiction (and non-fiction) first hit the scene, a lot of it wiped away by the first Net crash--have its lessons been thoroughly exploited, is there more to be explored?
Somewhere in between media multitasking and hyperlinking in terms of abstraction generation lies the new world of personal news feeds on sites like Facebook and Twitter, whose positive or negative impact on cognitive function has not really been explored yet at all. (Fellow participants, if you know of good research into the cognitive effects of multitasking, surfing, personal feeds, etc. please add here)
Sensory diffraction
As physical environments become more and more heavily tagged (with location-based text and other types of tags, including multimedia) and user interfaces are developed to make this information more accessible and compelling, the processing of this information, side by side or intermittently, with sensory information about the physical environment is likely to become increasingly intertwined and to interact in the human mind in interesting, novel, and as yet uncharted ways. However information from the physical environment is processed, it seems inevitable that the intrusion or addition (depending on how you view it) of virtual content will lead to interpretation that is at some remove from the level of concreteness that formerly existed, either "more real than real" (to the extent the tagged information actually adds to depth of perception in some way) or, as with unmediated multi-tasking, more formally abstract. In either case, how we see-or hear-the world will literally be changed (particularly for those who choose to take virtual world filters to their logical extremes), with all the creative and analytic nuances this implies.
Metaphor and mapping
The volume of Internet and other media information creates an ongoing hunger for information organization in general and information visualization in particular that seems only likely to increase. In the early days of the Internet, it was common for providers to seek to organize their own or the Net's content using metaphors familiar from the real world-the town, the store, the body, etc. To a certain extent, the overwhelming popularity of Google Earth and associated mash-ups is a continuation of this. But over time, it's become clear information is either too rich or too disparate to be well-organized via real world metaphors. As a consequence, the general trend online has been for organizing metaphors to become increasingly abstract. Since there's nothing inherent limiting mapping to physical geography, we can expect information mapping to become increasingly abstract as well. There have, of course, already been many attempts to organize and visualize information abstractly that haven't gained the kind of traction that Google Earth mash-ups have.[4] But we think the ever increasing pressure of information will, in turn, lead to more creative efforts and focus in this area.[5]
'Post-modern' games
It can be argued that as an art form, games have in some ways recapitulated the history of painting. Games had their 'medieval period,' dominated by board games which, like medieval art were abstract or abstractions partly by design, partly for want of technique. Carrying the analogy further, we're now in games' 'Renaissance period,' in which, as with Renaissance art, a plethora of techniques have emerged that allow games to increasingly approach complete realism in the processes they seek to depict. What comes next? In the case of art, the emergence of the photograph led artists to the realization that art needed to be something more or different than pure depiction of reality, which in turn led back to abstraction, but this time informed by the techniques learned in the Renaissance. As Picasso was fond of saying, "to do art, first learn to draw the human form."[6]
In the case of games, it may be the press of information and life that leads to an era of 'post-modern' games that synthesize the best of both previous periods. As John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts (America's largest game company) was recently quoted as saying; the videogame industry needs to "do more to appeal to the casual gamer," adding "we're boring people to death and making games that are harder and harder to play."[7]
Post-modern games, we think, are likely to return to a level of abstraction that makes them, like classic board games, easy for wide audiences to engage in, focused on the essence of the processes they are trying to depict, not on including every realistic detail, and in some cases even the ideal of the process (the most popular real estate simulation of all time is, after all, still Monopoly-real estate 'as it should be,' in the eyes of many--i.e. dealings with contractors and zoning boards not included). While simpler and therefore more abstract than many current offerings, these games will continue to borrow from a lot of what's worked in the current environment, and in particular will continue to appeal to serious gamers (who drive a lot of traffic, after all) by providing categorically different levels of engagement (Spore is a good example of this), as opposed to higher levels that are just more difficult versions of the same thing, with the higher levels in all likelihood approaching the realism of current offerings and perhaps even going beyond them, at least in the sophistication of the underlying code (if not what's graphically depicted), ideally by leveraging resources saved by starting from a base that's simpler overall. Starting from a simpler, more abstract base will also allow games to be more easily and widely repurposed, perhaps to the point where there is game coverage for all relevant state educational standards.
'Out there' differentiation
In 2003, Grunwald Associates released a study called Children, Families, and the Internet about new media use and desires of parents and children. One of our key areas of focus was a group of children we called online influencers (others have since called them promoters), kids who disproportionately tell others about places to visit online. What we've learned since then is that the kids we called influencers in 2003 would be ordinary children today--the 'viral velocity' (the rate at which children tell other children about sites) has increased at least 258% since then.[8]
The result of this is that any site of interest is quickly spread to the entire audience, led by influencers (who now tell 40% more other children about sites than they did in 2003[9]). The key words in that sentence are "of interest." What motivates influencers to tell others about sites they've found? Almost by definition, one would expect these sites to be significantly differentiated from others, since presumably influencers (who have a number of potentially 'uncool' attributes such as high grades and above average tendencies to respect their parents and teachers[10]) are looking to impress their peers by finding offerings the likes of which other children have never seen before.
And in fact our research confirms this. In Children, Families, and the Internet, we tested interest in a number of concepts, many of which still haven't been attempted by any provider. When one specifically considers the concepts that are the most abstract--i.e. most creative--there is particularly strong interest on the part of influencers versus other children, as seen in the chart below.
(c) Grunwald Associates, 2003
To be clear about what we're talking about here, 'online telescopes' were described as 'an "online telescope" that lets me look all over the world through a network of Webcams;' 'online parachutes' were described as 'a way to fly over the Internet and parachute in whenever I see something interesting;' 'international team games' were 'team games and activities where every member of my team is from a different country;' 'personality-based search" was described as 'a way to search the Internet based on my personality, how I'm feeling, or the personality of someone I admire,' and 'places to plant words, grow websites' were described as 'a place where I can plant words and watch them grow into websites.' And 'interest' was considered a 4 or 5 level of interest on a 1-5 scale. As far as we know, none of these concepts have been executed since 2003 (the closest might be Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope whose 'lens' is firmly fixed on the heavens, and, of course, in its own way, Google Earth).
The implications of this research is that there is continual pent-up demand on the part of influencers-the users who drive most of the Net's 'word of mouth'-for unusually innovative concepts. These influencers are continually scouring the web for innovation (they visit far more websites per unit time than other users64), and have their ears to the ground for innovation more than others (far more likely to check out sites others email to them and to do so more frequently[11]). The upshot is that new sites that want to get recognition will be forced to differentiate themselves more and more (particularly as time goes by and viral velocity continues to increase), which will generally push them to greater and greater levels of abstraction (since concrete, real world representations are among the least differentiated).
Implications for informal science education
Thoughts from other participants to be added here.
References
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The original draft of this article was written by Tom de Boor, Principal Analyst, Grunwald Associates. To access the article in its entirety as it was delivered on March 11-12 at the kickoff event for this conference, click here.
