Some time ago I blogged about friendships that “dry out”. But there’s also the reconnecting, when you pick up from where you once parted with a person or an art.
Over the weekend I went skateboarding for the first time this season in Helsinki. Going up for a move there’s this instant when one realizes that it’s too late to turn back. Then: Thud! On landing the reflexes kick in and it’s either a complete mental and physical reunion with the knowledge of the board’s behaviour – or a painful encounter with the concrete pavement.
Which brings up the Dreyfusian observation that virtuosity (what Dreyfus calls the stage of expertise) has to do with this uncodifiable capability to connect with the world and be one with whatever one is practicing: to take something mundane like riding a piece of plywood (or preparing food, booking meetings, whatever) and turn in into a form of art. What would it mean to apply that attitude to one’s entire lifestyle? Introducing the skater ethic :)
Dvora Yanow recently quoted a study from the 1970s according to which only 7% of face-to-face communication is verbal (some claim the percentage is around 10). In online interaction, such as the sending and receiveing of social network-service invitations, the ‘rich’ embodied expressions and gestures have to be inferred from ‘poor’ codified information (e.g. tickboxes and a few lines of text explanation). The forced codification that such invitations require has annoyed even the most prolific of the online textual expressionists.
Social sofware developers appear to be grappling with the broad issue of codifying embodied knowledge into computer-readable ‘information’ on many fronts (annotating photos, simplifying moblogging, FOAF… the list goes on). Much of this very interesting work is characterised by a strong epistemological buy-in to the cybernetic worldview formalized by Shannon and Wiener, according to which the world is made of definite entities and ‘information’ can be abstracted from its material embodiment.