 As I was reading Edward Hall's The Hidden Dimension
I began to realize how staggeringly differently each of us perceives
the world. Hall speaks mostly about differences in perception between
six different human 'cultures' -- the Germans, French, British,
Americans, Japanese and Arabs. But his ideas find echo in Jeff Masson's
books about the huge variability of animal intelligence and emotion due
to differences in sense acuity, evolutionary needs and environment,
and made me realize just how intelligent animals that are able to learn
our languages must be --
their entire sensory mechanism, the way they perceive everything, the
way the neurons of their brains are commensurately ordered, is utterly,
perhaps unimaginably different from ours.
These ideas also resonate with some of the findings of leading educators and linguists that we learn
in completely different ways, and that communication is a maddeningly
imprecise and largely futile process, a never-ending 'raid on the
inarticulate' as TS Eliot put it.
I've concluded that if we ever develop the technology to be able to put
ourselves in another's brain, and tap in directly to what they are
thinking, perceiving and feeling, we will likely be astonished at how
alien the experience will be.
Aside from explaining how easy it is to misunderstand each other, and
just how 'alone' we really are, what does all this mean? I think it has
six very important implications:
- Stories are the essence of all communication:
They are effective as a means of conveying information and persuading,
because they allow each of us to internalize and enrich what the
story-teller is relating from our own perspective, and hence fill in
some of the space in the vast chasm of perception and understanding
between each of us. Such communication is fraudulent, even subversive.
But it works. Throw out your Powerpoint slides and your slick, rigorous
analyses, and just tell stories. Induction trumps deduction.
- We need to reclaim the arts for the people: Art,
which Hall tells us has been around as a means of communication and
"making sense" of the world three times longer than language, has a
depth and texture much richer than written languages, and is far more
important as a means of conveying ideas and emotion, and of changing
minds, than we recognize. Not surprisingly, much 'primitive' art told a
story, rather than depicting things scientifically. Except for music
and film and musical theatre, which have been stolen from the people,
dumbed down, robbed of their creative variety and coopted and perverted
for commercial purposes, the arts -- visual arts and architecture and
sculpture and theatre and dance and even photography -- have become
elitist, 'unpopular' activities. Their very recent inaccessibility
represents, if we can recover from it, a huge opportunity for us to
better connect with and understand each other, learn and become richer
as human beings.
- Our art can tell us how we differ, and therefore who we are: There are huge clues in art to our differences of perception, and hence huge possibilities for understanding, in studying the differences
in all our creative processes and productions. Example: Much Inuit art,
Hall says, shows Picasso-like depictions of what cannot be seen from
one place, or one time, or even in some cases seen at all, because the
visual homogeneity of their environment has led them to promote other
compensatory sense perceptions and to 'paint them in' to their visual
representation, which is not, as in our culture, a purely reflective,
raster-like representation. As another example, Hall points out that
perspective and proportion are relatively new innovations in visual
art, suggesting that 'modern' man parses what he sees far more
literally and contextually and 'scientifically' than even Renaissance
man did.
- Western society is returning to its natural, oral tradition:
The popularity of cellular phones, and instant messaging that 'mimics'
oral language in style and tempo, among those in their teens and
twenties, signals a rejection of the recent cultural dominance of
stultifying, unnatural written language, in favour of oral language.
Watch a teenager use either of these media and you'll see how quickly,
by a whole series of successive approximations, clarifications and
restatements they achieve a rich, powerful emotional communication.
This generation doesn't read the newspaper, and doesn't care that much
about the communication of intellectual concepts. That may be because
oral language is more right-brained, and more concerned with sensation
and emotion, where written language is more left-brained, more precise
and considered, concerned with logic and concept. The most important
cultural evolution in the next generation will therefore probably be a
huge increase in oral fluency and sensitivity (practice makes perfect).
If we're going to save, or even change, the world, we'll do it by
telling great, infectious stories, orally. Bloggers and print
journalists: our time has past -- We're condemned to the margins of the
future world.
- Knowledge is viral and has negligible 'stored' value:
When I predicted that Knowledge Management would evolve into Social
Networking and that centralized repositories would give way to Personal
Content Management systems, I may not have been radical enough in my
thinking. About a decade ago, some brilliant soul (can't remember who,
and Google doesn't help, but just to prove my point I bet one of my
readers reminds me who it was) said "I keep my knowledge in my
network". In other words, forget about storing stuff anywhere. If it has value, it will be floating around on the tip of someone's lips right now. No
one needs to write it down, no one needs to put it in a database or on
a website or in a book. It will always be out there, in the air,
spreading like a virus and, if it's good, returning often to visit,
without ownership, without 'copyright', being enriched as it's re-told.
The core competency for the next generation will be a great memory.
Librarians will be out. Actors will be in.
- Design that is counter-cultural creates anxiety:
There is an enormous tension as the new designs of our culture -- in
the West, skyscrapers, SUVs, privatized public spaces, 'family' rooms,
'portable entertainment' devices -- begin to change how we behave, and
who we are, while at the same time we push back against these same
designs because they offend our culture -- at once separating and
crowding us in unnatural ways, putting 'road-blocks' that fragment our
communities, isolating us from nature and from each other, forcing us
to adapt to awkward and unintuitive tools. This tension between
'efficient' design and 'natural' culture is perhaps the most important
front in the ever-enlarging and now global war between corporations
(and their artefacts) and people.And this tension is even greater where Western design confronts other
cultures' norms, layering cultural dissonance on top of resentment of Western economic and political imperialism.
Hall also presents some interesting, if over-generalized, observations
about differences between the people of the six countries he studies.
They explain why a closed door or a private office has a completely
different meaning in Germany, the UK and the US, why the French would
never tolerate the sell-off of public space that is occurring in the
US, why the Japanese find Western room layout (and the Arabs find
Western ceiling heights) claustrophobic, and how the difference in
these six peoples' 'intimate' (0-18"), 'personal' (18-48"), 'social'
(4-12') and 'public' (>12') distances cause so many
misunderstandings and conflicts. Tellingly, Hall's generalizations are
often debatable, but his anecdotes, being stories, are entertaining and
compelling.
The Starbucks logo,
shown above, is highly offensive to people in many Arab countries,
where the depiction of the human form (and not merely the naked female
form) is considered sacrilegious and profane. Starbucks' insistence on
displaying it in its stores in those countries has been a major bone of
contention, and is a lightning rod for anti-American sentiment.
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