Skip to content →

echovar Posts

We dwell in language: Lakoff and the politics of the frame

Published March 2, 2008 by cgerrish

If you haven’t taken the time to listen to Dave Winer’s conversation with George Lakoff, it’s worth your while. If you subscribe to the Morning Coffee Notes RSS feed, it may already be on your iPod. Lakoff is a co-founder of the Rockridge Institute and a practitioner of what’s called cognitive science. He posits that “words matter,” and in politics they matter more than you might realize.

Lakoff investigates the currents of language, rhetoric and influence that swirl below the surface of our everyday language. Political language is by its nature adversarial; by various methods it attempt to persuade and influence. One view of campaigns and elections is that candidates have platforms that can be rationally evaluated. Here are the positions, which candidate holds the ‘right’ ones? The voter is a rational actor.

Can a person step into a frictionless abstract space where “facts” can be evaluated and decisions made outside of time and our mortality? Lakoff says no. Do people always make decisions that serve their best interests? No, they don’t. Lakoff has the political sphere covered, but this thread started much earlier. Look at Daniel Kahneman‘s Nobel Prize winning work in behavioral finance and economics.

While the sciences have only recently weighed in, the poets and philosophers have long understood this idea. How can we make “objective decisions,” when as TS Eliot says in Burnt Norton, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.” We dwell in language, it’s where we make our home and compose the stories that we tell each other everyday. And language isn’t neutral.

The idea of the frame is that by controlling the context and lexicon of a conversation, you can shade the outcome. For instance, if I ask you “when did you stop beating your wife?” and if you accept the frame, you will be left with a limited and incriminating set of answers. Political strategists and candidates attempt to do this to gain an advantage. The interesting thing about the idea of the frame is that it’s most effective when it’s hidden from view. When the frame is brought out into the light, and becomes a normal part of political rhetoric, it loses its special power.

Comments closed

We don’t know how to collaborate through the network

Published February 29, 2008 by cgerrish

Sharepoint is the collaboration model for Microsoft Office. It’s meant to save Office, because we work with teams, and teams are supposed to collaborate. But the problem is that we don’t know how to collaborate. Google has just launched Sites to provide a collaboration portal for Google’s business apps. But the fact remains, that most workers barely know how to operate the basic apps in Office. It’s one of the reasons that Google’s apps have a chance, they do less, but in many cases that’s enough.

There are many wonderful Wikis out there, but the best ones have a strong culture of collaboration. The form a social network with thier own customs. Corporate America doesn’t particularly like to collaborate in any deep sense. Sharepoint is used as just a slightly better version of email and shared network drives.

Considering all the money spent building applications in this space, you’d think it was fairly assured that the future state where we all collaborate is just around the corner. It may be a moment that never comes. Collaboration on a network is a culture, a social relation, something that requires practice. Most of the collaboration in business happens through people talking or through email, not much at all happens through the network. You’d think we’d be much better at collaborating with work than at play, but the reverse is true.

Comments closed

The commons and the cloud, the network and the tribes

Published February 25, 2008 by cgerrish

The commons and the cloud, its the direction many of us see the world of personal/corporate technology moving. We’re starting to trust the cloud to hold our data, keep it safe and secure and provide it to us where ever and when ever we need it. Although there have been some notable failures recently, we assume that things will simply get better and better. The richer the cloud and commons become the better it is for all of us. The internet itself was built to route around failures in nodes of the network.

There have been a few signals that not everyone has signed on to that dream. In particular, I’m referring to the undersea cables recently cut to eliminate internet access to whole countries. And more recently the attempts by Pakistan to censor YouTube that made the service unavailable to everyone.

As we grow more and more dependent on the commons and the cloud, we have to understand that not all cultures and political systems are compatible with the level of openness that currently exists in the network. Is it a future moment of science fiction where a war has broken out between the network and the tribes? Or is it something just around the corner.

Comments closed

As though language weren’t of humans, but eminated from the world around us

Published February 25, 2008 by cgerrish

Alain Robbe-Grillet passed away earlier this month. I first became aware of Robbe-Grillet as the writer of “Last Year at Marienbad.” I saw that film twice in one day. (At least I seem to remember it that way) There are a few movies I’ve found so compelling that I had to see them again right away. “Wings of Desire” was another one. The film lead me to the novels, and I read them one after another.

Robbe-Grillet’s writing seems very much of a particular time and place as I look back on it now. But what he accomplished was very important; it’s as though he created an element, a fundamental substance which were added to the periodic table of writing.

Comments closed