There are two ways to change the meaning of something - you can change the something, or you can change the context in which you say it. If we don't account for this, we will make terrible mistakes in communicating with each other, and even with ourselves. If we grasp this, we can overcome many of the problems that plague our world today, which are results of unrealized context shifts. We have content processors but what we need now are "context-processors."
We all know that a quote, taken "by itself" out of context can be totally different than what it meant at the time. This is often visible in courtroom dramas, where the person is asked by the attorney, "Answer, yes or no, did you say this?" followed by some damning phrase or sentence that sounds totally wrong out of context. We all know this is unfair and somehow wrong, but don't have a strong way to assert that or to understand how pervasive this effect is.
It doesn't just affect communications. It affects our ability to work alone!
My favorite expression of this truth was a cartoon one day by Charles Schultz of Snoopy, the dog, lying on top of his doghouse, staring at the stars and pondering. He said:
Did you ever noticeThis cartoon is profound. Slow down and consider that this means. This says that a correctly functioning human being has a context-sensitive thinker-thingie that produces different answers to the same inputs depending on what larger context it is sitting in at the time.
that if you think about something at 2 AM
and then again at noon the next day
you get two different answers?
This is, in my mind, a "feature not a bug." In fact, this seems to me to be the key to reconciling humans and resolving age old conflicts that have seemed totally impossible to tackle.
This is also a critical insight in trying to figure out how to make decisions today that don't seem totally stupid tomorrow.
That's true whether you are a person, a group, a corporation, or a nation.
We are walking around comparing "content" and failing to account for different "context" in which that content was perceived or generated. In small, local worlds where context is shared and identical among people, we used to be able to get away with that. Once we start trying to cross cultures or "silos" of expertise, and do something interdisciplinary or international, this tends to trip us up every time. We didn't learn the "general case."
Content is explicit, obvious, the kind of thing you can hit with a hammer. Context is implicit, invisible, unstated, and hard to describe even when you try. But it is vital that we learn how to do this, to get by in a diverse world - a world in which different people are operating in different contexts but trying to communicate with each other over space and time.
It is crucial when we try to take some thought or observation, about a patient, say, and "record it" in some electronic database where we will pull it up a year later and compare the two to see what changed. Are we capturing what we need to do that assessment correctly? Are we writing something down in words that will bring up the right thoughts to a different doctor next year?
Tragically, we have failed, socially, to understand the full implications of this issue. The miracle of technology allows us to store or send content across space at the speed of light, but, oopsie, forgot about the context part of the message. What gets delivered is not what was sent, in huge ways.
It does not have to be this way. In the same way that we have built computers that do content-processing correctly, we can build environments that do context-processing correctly. It is critically important that we learn how to do that.Now, these effects are not flaws in humans that would go away if we were all "rational" or "scientists" or if we all based our judgment on "data" and "evidence." These effects are properties of the very nature of space, time, and information itself. We cannot "get around them" or ignore them. We are going to have to learn how to account for them correctly.
It doesn't have to be hard, but it does have to be done, or we'll keep fighting needless wars, between parties that actually agree with each other but don't realize it.
Take the example of "perspective" -- a distortion of space where it appears to each observer that things "far away from them" are small, and things "close to them" are large, and as you move towards a distant building or mountain it "gets larger."
At some point in life as infants we figure out that the thing we're looking at actually isn't changing size at all, it's an illusion, a distortion, caused by where we are looking from, our viewpoint. If we didn't correct for this, we could argue all day about which of two things was "bigger" and what was "fair" and not get a resolution, because A looks bigger to me than B, but looks smaller to you. Once we correct for that perspective distortion, we can resolve that question in a way that makes us both happy. This happened so early in our lives we forget we had to learn it.
There is a popular misconception that because things are "relative", there is no underlying reality, and no way to ever reconcile them. Einstein said the opposite. He said that actually, once you understand what is going on, you can completely reconcile observations made by two competent observers, relative to their own reference frames, all the time, every time. You can totally account for the changes, say, in perspective between two observers, and figure out entirely how the world I see needs to be warped and twisted to give the world you see.
Computer animators and virtual worlds have to deal with this "perspective" or "viewpoint" transformation all the time. It's a lot of bookkeeping under the covers, but straight-forward if you do it carefully.
Unfortunately, there are other shifts in context that are less familiar to us that impact our ability to reach agreement. The problem is very deep, as I said, built into the nature of space and time itself.
Once, in my astrophysics grad student days, I took a course in Cosmology and General Relativity. I didn't get it all, but I got enough to get the story, which is not that hard to tell, and does not require math. Please don't flee. There will be no quiz. Everyone one here gets an "A".The essence of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity could be distilled down to three insights, widely misunderstood. You don't need to be Einstein to understand these ideas.
The insights are that
- content and context are completely equivalent in what can be said, though widely different in what can be expressed easily in each;
- you cannot change one without affecting the other;
- if you do your sums right, the changes are completely predictable.
In the world described by relativity, the meaning of a very concrete phrase or physical expression or very real measurement of velocity, say, changes as you slide it around in space and time, most famously if you attach the observation to different observers traveling at different speeds. I can only observe your speed "relative to me", so depending on how fast I'm going, I'll measure something different.
This is no big deal. People in a car on the highway appear stationary to each other, even though the car is speeding down the road.
Or, if I'm standing on the Earth, I see the sun, obviously moving across the sky, going around the Earth. If I'm standing in some space ship off to the side, I see the earth spinning and the sun remaining fixed. These observations are both right, relative to the "reference frame" in which they were made. To reconcile them you have to account for the different in frames used by two completely competent observers.
Implications
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Well, what does this mean? For one thing, it means that where you work or spend time thinking or talking to each other affects what result you'll come up with. A decision that is "obvious", made in a bunker-like dimly-lit War-Room deep underground might not be at all the same decision that would have been made, given the "same facts", in a cheery, sunny deck in a woodsy retreat on a warm spring day.
It means that an "obvious" decision about what to do next, made standing in an urban war zone with explosions in the distance is not the same decision, given the same information, that is "obvious" viewed by people safely out of harm's way, at their leisure, later, reviewing the tapes over coffee and some nice Danish.
In fact, as a child, I observed that the behaviors that seemed to make the great leaders "great" in war movies wasn't that they were brilliant, but that they simply managed to remain stable and sane when the world around them had gone to hell. They remained connected to a larger, stable world despite the fact that their body was located in a locally unstable one.
Maybe, there is value in having content-intensive work like "science" embedded in larger stabler social frameworks that religions have sometimes produced in the past. I find it fascinating that, according to a recent issue of New Scientist, geneticists are discovering that far from being "junk DNA", the DNA between the 22,000 genes that code for proteins (content) may be even more important, and this "junk" codes for the larger context that decides when and whether that content should be expressed, or modified in the way it is expressed. (Junking the Junk DNA, New Scientist, July 11, 2007).
Yesterday, I did a post on the software world "Second Life" and possible roles of virtual reality in getting people to experience worlds they couldn't get to on their own. Today, I want to add to that the idea that virtual worlds are virtual contexts, which means that you can conceivably adjust not just the contents of a scene, but the context of the scene in which those contents are embedded.
This may be the tool we need to explore more how context and content interact with each other for humans, and to learn how susceptible we all are to "framing" of an issue. We can understand how advertisers or demagogues try to use propaganda techniques to shift the frames of discussions so that, even though we seem to be the same people, we end up making different decisions. Even though we don't feel manipulated, we have been - by Madison Avenue agencies that know how to send broadband messages in context-modulation that bypass all our cognitive protections against content-manipulation. That's what TV is all about, to them.
Dirty pool aside, honest and diligent CEO's and civic leaders need to understand what an idea will sound like, or be taken to mean, in hundreds of different contexts, to know how to process the input they get, or how to say anything that won't offend one group or another.
If nothing else, cars for Latin America, for example, shouldn't be named "Nova" - since "No va" in Spanish means "won't go." Underarm deodorant shouldn't be advertised in Tokyo using a happy octopus logo, since in Japan an octopus doesn't have 8 arms -- it has 8 legs. Oopsie.
(photo Walking Alone, by me, on Flickr)
