Time's Arrow: A case for affective temporality?

I know this is supposed to be Einstein's year. And being a Bergson fan myself, this should be an opportunity to learn a bit more about relativity. I had this thought last night though. It goes like this> what if both were on to something. What if relativity and duree are combined?

My reasoning was this.

Bergson's lived time, a time that is not divisible because it is not quantitative, but qualitative, and when divided it is changed (discrete time, measured in equal instants, is divisible). This is what Deleuze draws from Bergson in Difference and Repetition. And the concept of duree has had measurable (!) impact on continental sociology. To summarize then, time is not passing presents, but a Past that exists, a present that is the peak of the past and which is alongside it, and future, which is anticipated.

According to Einstein, and against Bergson, we do not all share in one time, but are in relative times.

So here's why I would want to bring them together... Time has a direction (we live, we die, it's inevitable, and we're all moving in that direction). A great deal of our emotions and motivations seem connected to our temporality. We long for people or events or feelings in the past. We yearn for what we anticipate. We miss. ... So many emotions tied up in the dynamic of memory and anticipation—those are emotions, feelings, affective movements that express our experience of time, or how we live time, in time. But not only that. We might say that they are feelings that also express our relative isolation in time, that express our desire to be in the same time with others, to feel that they are on the same page (or wavelength) as us...

The idea then, would suggest that we add to our understanding of our sense of place, belonging (as physical, situated, located) a sense of temporality, and that when it comes to the human experience of living in time, being in time, of living the qualitative temporality of duree (duration), our sense of time also contains already a sense of other people's time. We desire synchronization because we can feel it when it occurs. We have temporal relations with others; others are in temporal relation to us. Time is relative. But so to is it one of indivisible duration, one lived through affective movement we know as loss and hope...

Help, I've lost my iSight!

I had an interesting experience this evening co-presenting a class to students in S. Korea, online. Using a two-way video iChat teleconference, pre-recorded video clips, other pre-recorded clips (audio, video), and a handout.

More on all of that in a bit.

But first, I'd like to suggest a new name for Apple's iSight, though of course the problem w/ a medium shouldnt be hung on one of its contributors...

------uSight

Because when i use my iSight I lose sight of you-----

Interaction design and subject-object relations

I've been getting back to reading sociology recently, and refreshing myself of on interaction design concepts at the same time. I need to be up on both just to finish the white paper i've been working on for so long... I had a thought this morning though while going through alan cooper's section on software posture. We designers use a conceptual framework that treats software applications (and devices too) as objects. As designers, we seek to improve these things, and their interface to us, so that they work better.
It hadnt really jumped out at me that my project to define a "social interaction design" field requires us to think in terms of practices rather than objects. Cooper's chapter on software posture now takes on a different meaning. In it he asks questions that characterize an application's boundaries—it's presence in our routines, its hold on our attention, its ability to do things for us in our absence, its persistence as an auxiliary app (e.g. windows taskbar).
In social software, and communication technologies in general, the object boundary is deceptive. And to think about design in terms of objects may be to misleading, too. Because the crux of interaction design w/ social software and communication technologies is in the user and social practices that develop with, around, and through the technology. The thing itself loses its edges, and thus its interface...
Think about it this way. Take your cell phone. Now dont look at its buttons, screen size, form factors. Just turn it off. Now you can start to think about its interface! How do you feel? What's missing? What's gnawing at you? Why do you want to turn it back on? ....

There's Heidegger hiding in here somewhere.

MIT's Reality Mining project hopes to add data from location and cel phone usage to social networking data. I wonder if they have encountered the Heisenberg principle yet in their studies. That is, the behavioral changes their subjects are likely to show, in anticipation of the fact that their movments are being monitored. But even if their subjects comply willfully and with great pleasure, real world users will subvert the capture and commercialization of location/relation data. We dont want unknown entities involved in the "functioning" of our interactions—as if functional efficiency could be extracted injected into daily routines.

There's an ongoing tendency to view these networks from a biological evolution point of view (memes, communication as transmission, etc). The metaphor doesn't work. It comes apart on the matter of "communication." Transmission (replication) in the biological word is duplication of information passed from one organism (or part) to another. Nothing is lost, everything is created, and information is preserved intact (excepting the case of mutations).

Human communication involves a linguistic medium, and involves meaning. Meaning is subject to a double contingency, which means that a speaker anticipates the hearer's interpretation, and that his utterance reflects this contingency. His utterance, in other words, is contingent on the contingency of the hearer's interpretation.

This handling of ambiguity, and the byproducts of interaction (emotional bonding, trust, etc) make human communication far more complex and wonderful than biological transmission. While MIT might be able to draw its topologies based on networks, and possibly even create another layer of interpretation based on proximity info, will they know what those relationships mean?




From smartmobs, some of MIT's questions:
"How do incoming students' social networks evolve over time?
How entropic (predictable) are most people's lives?
Can the topology of a social network be inferred from only proximity data?
How can we change a group's interactions to promote better functioning?

http://www.smartmobs.com/cgi-bin/mt/_tr4cKb4cK.cgi/4917

"It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame." Marshall McLuhan, 1955

There are two ways to unpack this one. Heidegger and Goffman, both of whom tackled "frames." We'll know soon enough, but I suspect that our many new emerging tools of communication (like this one) have as much of an impact amplifying and stretching time and proximity for us, as they have an impact on the archiving and dissemination of information.