humans as data

Narrativization is a process by which we help provide the context that takes things from being a mere series of events to being story and history. However, this narrativization may not be limited to effects strictly within the text. It may, in fact, function as a version of hypnosis, according to Scott Adams, when it works in appeals to different senses and sense perceptions.

Certainly, there are some pretty good arguments for the unconscious mind affecting the conscious, but how far can you really take this sort of thing?

Neal Stephenson, who has used Bicameralism as a plot device, was the first person who came to mind, so I flipped through Cryptonomicon looking for stuff that met Scott Adams description of the techniques. A bunch of the lengthy digressions that sort of litter Cryptonomicon are full of the sort of appeal to the senses that Adams describes, which makes me wonder whether it was a deliberate technique for manipulation or just an accident of style. Some apparently would claim that Tolkein did something similar.

It makes me wonder how much of all this is tied to the overall topic of framing the message, though.

Technorati Tags: civilization, cryptonomicon, discontents, framingthemessage, hypnosis, lakoff, scottadams

One of the better google mashups I’ve seen recently. It remixes information available from a variety of epidemiology sources with google’s now ubiquitous mapping program.

Get Your Daily Plague Forecast:
A new website mashes health data with Google Maps to track global disease outbreaks. By Seán Captain.

It’s an interesting mashup because epidemiology information is very hard to assemble into a coherent picture, being based (as it is) on data about people in particular locations and suchlike. Reports linked to maps is probably clearer than the old agglomeration of report style that it used to use, especially given that you’re talking about locations on a global scale.

Malcom Gladwell writes in the New Yorker about how generalizations should be used to make categories. It’s important to be able to make accurate generalizations when one is buiding categories, he claims, because for real-world things like detecting terrorists or identifying dangerous dogs, there are real world consequences.

I found this interesting, reminded me a lot of the book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff. Lakoff writes about prototype categories, where category membership is a fuzzy concept. Explicit rules for category membership, like ‘terrorists buy one way tickets,’ ‘pit bulls are dangerous dogs,’ and other concrete rules like that are less useful in establishing membership in categories than general rules like ‘is there something suspicious about this person?’ or ‘does this dog (or the dog’s owner, apparently more useful) have a history of violent behavior?’

The key, apparently, is that some genearalizations are stable and some are unstable. Unstable generalizations are things like ‘drug smugglers buy one way tickets’ and ‘pit bulls are dangerous dogs.’ Drug smugglers can change their behavior, and it used to be other dogs that were the dangerous ones. (It turns out, according to Gladwell, that the most dangerous kind of dog is the kind that people buy to seem dangerous themselves, and this has varied from era to era.) So, the key to building a category is to figure out what are the stable generalizations and which are the unstable ones. Gladwell gives examples ranging from terrorists, to NYC subway searches, to dogs.
Anyway, I thought it made for interesting reading. I recommend it.