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In the 1980s many critics described
one of the key effects of ‘postmodernism’
as that of spatialisation – privileging space over
time, flattening historical time, refusing grand narratives.
Computer media, which evolved during the same decade,
accomplished this spatialisation quite literally. It replaced
sequential storage with random-access storage; hierarchical
organisation of information with a flattened hypertext;
psychological movement of narrative in novels and cinema
with physical movement through space, as witnessed by
endless computer animated fly-throughs or computer games
such as Myst, Doom and countless others. In short, time
became a flat image or a landscape, something to look
at or navigate through. If there is a new rhetoric or
aesthetic possibility here, it may have less to do with
the ordering of time by a writer or an orator, and more
to do with spatial wandering (Manovich 2001: 78).
In my three articles, I have suggested
there are more philosophical ways of understanding ‘information
management’, referring to the kabbalistic tree of
life. Information management, it seems to me, is a term
that is not confined to navigating business data or projecting
profit and loss forecasts. The tree of life is usually
construed in religious i.e. Judaic terms. But if we accept
the premise of a ‘spatial model’ to represent
information management, it is easy to interpret the diagram
in a wider sense. Essentially the tree of life expresses
universal principles and a cognitive strategy, where each
of the ten centres signifies – amongst other things
- the dynamic stages of a creative process. The top centre
is the originating impulse, the bottom shows its final
completion in material form. In between, the process passes
through stages of expansion, contraction, adjustment and
progressive materialisation.
In The Territorial Imperative, Robert
Ardrey (1966: 89) noted that defending territory gives
occupants a new source of strength. Spatial positioning
gives the defender a psychic advantage in confrontational
situations, especially between members of similar animal
species. A few years ago, the Chinese art of feng shui
was fashionable. It was a short-lived trend but it remains
a widely practiced art if not in the West, then certainly
in the East. Underneath the fanciful and superstitious
appearance feng shui is based on strategic psychological
principles, which are not articulated in traditional explanations.
If we put aside the romantic oriental symbolism and the
naive formulas, the philosophy is this: taking responsibility
for surrounding environments and linking them to personal
psychology is empowering. Feng shui is a spatial philosophy
expressed in symbolic behavioural terms. Animals have
a natural feng shui sense when they position themselves
in the environment to gain strategic power. They locate
their nests, lairs, breeding and hunting grounds in the
most favourable way, according to the physical and ecological
terrain. The same principle applies at a psychological
level. We have greater facility and purpose when we are
aligned with a ‘bigger picture’, when our
psychological terrain encompasses important issues and
objectives. We call this a life which has ‘meaning’.
We use the word ‘perspective’ as a metaphor
referring to psychological orientation; spatial cognition
is an old concept, now realised in both digital and information
strategies.
Organising information in terms of patterns
facilitates greater understanding and predictive power.
We compare, contrast and perceive new relationships. We
are more favourably oriented in a cognitive environment.
This spatial strategy is increasingly evident in academic
and business situations, and is both paralleled and informed
by technological developments. For example, Windows ME
and XP feature a system-restore feature where you can
rewind your computer to how it was before you were having
problems or had inadvertently lost or damaged some work.
This control is achieved by software which operates at
a meta-level, monitoring file integrity and recording
all modifications in such a way that prior document versions
or the entire hard drive can be restored. Apart from the
constant X factor – that millions of lines of code
is not reliable – the document/system restore facility
is extremely useful. It provides a new level of emergency
security by taking snapshots of the code at periodic and
sequential stages, and it is based on the principle of
general pattern recognition i.e. spatial strategy. Princeton
University are running a project (http://noosphere.princeton.edu)
with a similar logic: we may be able to identify patterns
in global consciousness. In both cases, a cognitive strategy
is realised through the digital medium. The first concerns
local PC operations (which presumably could be extended
to an intranet), and the second concerns the distributed
cognition that we spatialise as ‘cyberspace’.
In our information age, meta-cognitive
strategies are an essential method of managing and organising
enormous volumes of data. These strategies or not ‘new’
so much as the discovery and implementation of pre-existing
possibilities. That is, as civilisation becomes increasingly
complex and characterised as information exchange, we
draw on latent psychological resources to organise and
manage it. Acquiring and controlling space is related
to power; this used to be a matter of physical territory,
now it also concerns mental space. Whether physical or
mental, the same principle applies: the more space I own
and the more strategically I use it, the more power I
have. Spatial strategies apply in the physical and intellectual
realm; the digital realm mediates between the two, based
as it is on abstract thinking materialised in electromagnetic,
transistorised form.
In The Language of New Media Lev Manovich
(2001: 20) suggests new media and digital technology are
characterised by five factors:
1. Numerical Representation
2. Modularity
3. Automation
4. Variability
5. Transcoding
These five factors describe the realm
of digital architecture; they are also cognitive strategies.
First, all information can be represented mathematically.
Second, the data is most efficiently organised in modular
terms, which usually means a database. Third, the data
can be manipulated using algorithmic and pattern based
operations. Fourth, digitised information arranged in
a database allows us to separate form from content, so
the new media object is not fixed but variable. And fifth,
‘transcoding’ is where something is translated
into another format: “cultural categories and concepts
are substituted, on the level of meaning and/or language,
by new ones that derive from the computer’s ontology,
epistemology and pragmatics” (Manovich 2001: 47).
These characteristics also apply to the tree of life which
has mathematical correspondences, shows the modular stages
of any process, allows for general pattern recognition
thus (conceptual) automation, is dynamic and changeable,
and provides a template for philosophical understanding.
In these three articles I have explored
wider implications of the term ‘information management’,
suggesting that it is both an old science, and one that
is not confined to business. I especially highlight the
growing prevalence of spatial thinking in relation to
general strategy, cognition, and digital media.
References
Ardrey, Robert (1966) The Territorial
Imperative
Manovich, Lev (2001) The Language of New Media
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