"Our visual classification of experience under subject headings is beginning to split at the seams. These are projective devices, like metaphor, to make the invisible visible by focussing the light of what is known on the dark of what is unknown. Yet every advance in every subject field has come from looking at the known with scrupulous care. Processes of deduction simply protect the known from contamination. But there is no deductive virus that will innoculate knowledge against the ravaging perceptual effects of moving images. There a time is fast approaching when students of architecture, physics, politics, biochemistry, or whatever, will likely find in moving images many of the modular aspects that inform model-making in their chosen field."
(Slade, Moving Images, 1970, p.l59)
Statistical classification schemes are like metaphors in that they illuminate. But what they illuminate (the data) was initially perceived, and hence subject to the biases of perception. The deductive process merely protects that bias from further distortion. In other works, if what is 'known', i.e. our assumptions or axioms, is misleading or plain wrong, our conclusions may be worse than worthless. This is well-known, but probably bears repeating. If one varies his/her perception, different data come into view, and illumination (i.e. classification methods) reveals a different pattern. The role of "moving images" then is to vary and sensitize perception.
"Now, however, in the electronic age, data classification yields to pattern recognition, the key phrase at IBM. When data move instantly, classification is too fragmentary. In order to cope with data at electric speed in typical situations of 'information overload', men resort to the study of configurations, like the sailor in Edgar Allen Poe's Maelstrom."
(M. McLuhan in Slade, 1970, p.99)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
"Problem-solving techniques can't tell us what the problems are."
(anon)
