Tuesday, December 21, 2004
The Reason Research Works
For the last couple of days, I've been thinking about the practice of research, the web, and that thing out there somewhere we call 'Reality'. I heard a story fragment on NPR about a scientist who discovered evidence of some fossil evidence in Africa supporting the birds-evolved-from-dinosaurs hypothesis and also a series of colorful local folk tales. I heard just enough -- fact fragments: names of species, locations, people -- that I realized if I was interested, I could look up the whole story on the web. I could concoct a Google search, the results of which would serve to embed this strange and fanciful story fragment into the network of things I know, concretely, to be true, i.e. Reality -- which, as Philip K. Dick defined it is "that which when you stop believing in it does not go away." It also occurred to me that, without the web, I would have virtually no way of determining the story's reality without using the kind of advanced -- and all too uncommon -- research skills provided me by my liberal arts education. I would have to trust in the authority of NPR; I would believe the story exactly to the extent that I had faith in NPR. So the first thing here is: the web has made at least some aspects of this process of embedding facts or, maybe more importantly claims, into the network of known-things. With Google, research becomes simply search; and the authority and specialization that surround the protection of the truth -- of Reality -- become a little more widely distributed.
Secondly, this train of thought got me to thinking about why reseach (or search) works, why it yields a believable result about the world. It seems to me that research's authority in this department depends entirely on the ability of available documents to represent the world. That is, research is limitted exactly by the extent, depth, and believability of the texts on which it depends.
Now with this idea I don't want to proceed in the direction of some kind of critique of the knowability of the world through rational means, but instead to take a wild left turn and talk about internet marketing: specifically immersive games, alternative reality games (ARGs), unfictions or whatever you want to call them -- the cultural form that has so far found its highest expression in the Beast, an ARG surrounding the release of Steven Spielberg's film A.I. and I Love Bees, an ARG which acted as viral marketing for the relase of Microsoft's Halo 2. Now, if you are not familiar with these games, follow those links and find out about them; they are very difficult to describe abstractyl. Suffice it to say that they are complex series of narratives/puzzles that are meant to be viewed/solved by emergent communities of networked players in which the clues that advance the story are embedded in normal-seeming content througout the internet. Now much has been said about the way these games immerse their participants in the realities they set up (the best analysis of this I've seen is here by Jane McGonigal of UCBerkeley who worked on I Love Bees). What I want to get at is the relationship borne by the documents -- websites, email addresses, images, recordings of real world conversations, etc. -- that constitute these games to the rest of the documents that constitue the (re)search-sphere. If they extend the reality effect of the (re)search-sphere into their mimetic universes -- as would account for the 'reality effect' encountered by their participants -- don't they also plant a seed of something strange in the wider world of information? The game documents' role in this wider world is two fold: the simultaneously constitue 'false' information about the topic they cover within the mimetic world of the game -- i.e. they may contain data about people and events that are not real. If you reached one of these pages by searching for terms unrelated to the game, you would be getting false data, you would be misled about reality. On the other hand, they are also documents of the game itself proof of its existence in reality. This dual existence is what poses the problem people have with these kinds of games, what generates their nerdy uncoolness -- since this is a constant trope: the nerd or sci-fi addict who can't tell the difference between the game and real life. It seems that ARGs, though, change certain things about this trope by bringing these documents out in the open, as it were, where anyone can mistake them for real. In the ARG community these documents, which one might simply stumble across without seeking a game, are called 'rabbit holes' -- places you come stumbling along following your normal clockwork rabit when suddenly a porthole onto a new world opens up in front of you.
The existence of these rabbit holes in the search-sphere seem to both call its reality claim into question entirely and to greatly enrich it as a place where new human experience can happen rather than simply as that parallel plane which covers Reality, never touching it, always decribing it, pushing it ever further away.
Secondly, this train of thought got me to thinking about why reseach (or search) works, why it yields a believable result about the world. It seems to me that research's authority in this department depends entirely on the ability of available documents to represent the world. That is, research is limitted exactly by the extent, depth, and believability of the texts on which it depends.
Now with this idea I don't want to proceed in the direction of some kind of critique of the knowability of the world through rational means, but instead to take a wild left turn and talk about internet marketing: specifically immersive games, alternative reality games (ARGs), unfictions or whatever you want to call them -- the cultural form that has so far found its highest expression in the Beast, an ARG surrounding the release of Steven Spielberg's film A.I. and I Love Bees, an ARG which acted as viral marketing for the relase of Microsoft's Halo 2. Now, if you are not familiar with these games, follow those links and find out about them; they are very difficult to describe abstractyl. Suffice it to say that they are complex series of narratives/puzzles that are meant to be viewed/solved by emergent communities of networked players in which the clues that advance the story are embedded in normal-seeming content througout the internet. Now much has been said about the way these games immerse their participants in the realities they set up (the best analysis of this I've seen is here by Jane McGonigal of UCBerkeley who worked on I Love Bees). What I want to get at is the relationship borne by the documents -- websites, email addresses, images, recordings of real world conversations, etc. -- that constitute these games to the rest of the documents that constitue the (re)search-sphere. If they extend the reality effect of the (re)search-sphere into their mimetic universes -- as would account for the 'reality effect' encountered by their participants -- don't they also plant a seed of something strange in the wider world of information? The game documents' role in this wider world is two fold: the simultaneously constitue 'false' information about the topic they cover within the mimetic world of the game -- i.e. they may contain data about people and events that are not real. If you reached one of these pages by searching for terms unrelated to the game, you would be getting false data, you would be misled about reality. On the other hand, they are also documents of the game itself proof of its existence in reality. This dual existence is what poses the problem people have with these kinds of games, what generates their nerdy uncoolness -- since this is a constant trope: the nerd or sci-fi addict who can't tell the difference between the game and real life. It seems that ARGs, though, change certain things about this trope by bringing these documents out in the open, as it were, where anyone can mistake them for real. In the ARG community these documents, which one might simply stumble across without seeking a game, are called 'rabbit holes' -- places you come stumbling along following your normal clockwork rabit when suddenly a porthole onto a new world opens up in front of you.
The existence of these rabbit holes in the search-sphere seem to both call its reality claim into question entirely and to greatly enrich it as a place where new human experience can happen rather than simply as that parallel plane which covers Reality, never touching it, always decribing it, pushing it ever further away.
# posted by Greg @ 5:50 AM 
