Lucid Minds    

The Coming Lucid Electronic Communication Revolution

Karl Loren is a prolific author -- with thousands of pages that have been published on public and restricted web sites over may years.  Here is one of those pages that might just excite you into an exchange of intense communication with Karl.  See what you think of these ideas.

The Bane Of Email

Mysterious Complexities Of Modern Communication

How Good Does A Web Page Have To Be?

Table Of Contents

I was "musing" the other day, as my wife asked me just a bit for some explanation of "languages" used for producing web pages.
 
I offer you a thought on this that may help all of us understand the philosophy of web page design. 
 

Communication:

Normally we think of "communication" as being between two living beings -- John, the teacher, is lecturing from the front of the classroom.  He gives a question to Bill, in the course room.  I could go into the mechanics of what is communication, but the essential factor here is that there are two living beings -- say within sight and hearing of one another.

 

Consider that this example of communication is the ideal -- or perhaps standard for the comparisons I would now make.

Now we take the thoughts in John's mind and put them as "words" on paper -- and pass that paper to Bill.  This is a substitute for the live communication we use as standard, but see what a tremendous multiplication of effects we can create.

Instead of the teacher teaching verbally, in person, one person, Bill, John can now teach millions through the via of putting his message on a piece of paper rather than deliver it "live."

The paper can be reproduced, distributed, and the thoughts are now "communicated" to thousands or millions of people.

It should go without saying that if John and Bill do not have mutually agreed definitions for the words being used between them, then the communication does not take place.  In fact this one "proviso" is so critical, and so much missing in society, that improvement on the mechanics of communication technology (such as the internet) are useless without some improvement in the nature of study -- in the understanding on the need for mutual understanding of words, including their specific definitions and the definitions, in turn, of the words within those definitions.

Likewise, if John talks to Bill and Bill is a bit drunk, his mind will be fuzzy and that has the same effect of "no definitions available."

Here is a graphic example of this concept:

 
At This Bill Is Looking This Is What his Mental Picture is Comment  
Here is a sober guy who is in good mental condition!  

Something happens to this guy -- we don't know what!

At This Bill Is Looking This Is What his Mental Picture is Comment  
Here is a guy who MAY have a problem!  

The guy drinks a small amount of alcohol -- after previously seeing a cat.

At This Bill Is Looking This Is What his Mental Picture is Comment  
Here is a guy who has just drunk some alcohol. You tell him there is a "cat" there and he say, "no," there is only a dog!  

The above is not likely to happen after ONE drink, but it does happen.

The guy drinks more alcohol.  It is VERY unpredictable as to what he will SEE when he looks at the cat.  He may see the cat, he may see Aunt Mary, he may see a tiger.  He may turn in fear to escape the tiger, he may try to kiss the cat since he SEES his girlfriend.

At This Bill Is Looking This Is What his Mental Picture is Comment  
Here is a guy who has just drunk lots of alcohol. You tell him there is a "cat" there and he say, "no," there is a tiger -- and shoots it!  Or, he runs!  

Maybe he sees only a fuzzy image, instead of a "wrong item."

At This Bill Is Looking This Is What his ACTUAL Sight is Comment  
Here is a guy who has just drunk lots of alcohol. He SEES that his view is fuzzy.  He knows that he is under the influence.  

Here is a different phenomenon.  Many people who have drunk too much alcohol have experienced that their vision gets blurred.  They know they can't see straight.  In many of the other examples in this series the drunk sees very clearly, but sees something that is not there.  In this example he sees what is there, but the picture is blurred or fuzzy. 

When John tries to communicate with Bill, Bill can "receive" the words and "hear" something different than what was said.  This obviously applies to Bill seeing words on paper.  This is the plague of so-called modern communication.   

The type of fuzziness caused by wrong definitions or different definitions (between John and Bill) are of the same nature -- but harder to detect.

Nonetheless, we seem to have SO much need to communicate, and putting our communications on paper, multiplied by the millions just makes this whole process even more problematic.

When ONE person communicates to ONE person, there is a chance, at least, that John will "notice" that Bill looks dazed, or doesn't seem to understand.  There is always the chance, in live communication, that Bill can say, "I don't understand that!"

But, communication on paper or the internet is far to huge to ever even consider trying to "go back" to the Socratic days of "one on one" tutoring.  Even Socrates, of course, was subject to the same requirement for mutually agreed definitions.

Communication, whether verbally one-to-one, or multiplied by the billions on TV, the Internet or in print, is just as good, and no better, than the degree of mutual full understanding of the definitions of the words being used.

Print, TV or Internet is certainly not the same as live communication, but they have many advantages that might make up for the less-than-personal nature of the medium.

We can improve this mass communication by being sure to use commonly understood words, or by making sure that we define words in the text where they are used.

Most basically, we could improve the terrible educational system to teach students how to study.  They do NOT learn to study, and thus become ignorant citizens and consumers -- making decisions on the basis of emotion rather than logic and intellect.

We can "improve" the written words by adding pictures -- so the "less-than-personal" communication becomes more personal -- more alive.  Pictures are NOT prone to the same problem of needing mutually agreed-upon definitions.

Making something "personal" is NOT a substitute for having agreed-upon definitions, but personal, live communication is so satisfying, so "good" that we think we've made tremendous progress in communication when we can take the impersonal (and "word-flawed) nature of the internet and improve it a MORE PERSONAL (but still "word-flawed") type of communication.

We can greatly improve on that communication by removing the "material aspects" of the communication while leaving the "significance" there.  The "material aspects" include the paper and ink.  The "significance" includes the thoughts represented by words.  When you can convey the words with less paper and ink, the communication can move far more rapidly to far more people with less effort.


Take, for instance, the days of the Pony Express -- when a piece of paper, with writing on it, was carried by a man on a horse, relayed to another man, on another horse, and thus traversed perhaps a thousand miles on many horses.  There was a certain amount of "effort" in getting that communication from John to Bill.  You could measure that effort in the pounds and tons of horseflesh, rider bodies, feed and time.


Contrast this with an eMail from John to Bill -- where the same thoughts, perhaps the same words, are now carried with a tiny percentage of the mass that accompanied the Pony Express communication.


This is a look into the revolution that is occurring with "communication" in the modern era.  There is much more to come!  Not much more mass can be squeezed out of the new forms for a  message, nor its speed greatly increased.  However, the "liveness" of the communication has vast room for improvement.


One thing that is sorely lacking on that piece of paper or that eMail is "liveness!"


In a live communication John can ask Bill a question and get an answer.

So, the challenge then becomes, "How can you modify that piece of paper so that someone can 'ask the paper' a question and get an answer??"  Well, with Pony Express it might take the question 30 days to arrive at Bill, and another 30 days for the answer to return to John.  With the eMail the question can arrive at Bill in seconds and a response be received by John in more seconds.

And thus, further, has the nature of communication changed.


Could this be improved?


If Bill is absent from his computer the question may lay in his eMail basket for hours or even days before John gets his answer.


So, we move into "instant Messaging" where two people, at some distance apart, agree to set up a simple communication device so that they are "always connected" on the basis of instantaneous -- the communication connection is always "alive" but there are no messages on that live line most of the time.  If John and Bill have this arrangement, each can be busy at work (on their computers) and suddenly John has a thought -- wants to communicate that to Bill.  He puts that thought into his "Instant Messaging" service and Bill receives it just about as fast as if John and Bill were in the same room.

If Bill wants to, he responds to the Instant Message and the communication has become instant, as if John and Bill were in the same room.  Obviously there is a real limit on the number of people you have arrange "instant" messages with. 

This will breed chaos in a large organization where people are loose about company purpose and use the fast and cheap method of communication to send and receive trivial messages.  Many offices are paralyzed by the non-business use of the eMail system within the company, or even more by the "instant messaging" service that sneaks onto employee computers.

The number of daily e-mails in North America has tripled since 1999, to 11.9 billion, according to IDC, a Framingham, Mass., research firm. That figure doesn't include spam e-mails, which are another problem entirely.

All these messages, of course, take time to read. The ePolicy Institute, a Columbus, Ohio, consulting firm, says 48% of all office workers spend one to two hours a day on e-mail. Some 10% spend more than half the day on the stuff.  (source restricted)
And so does the concept of "communication" continue to be tweaked by modern technology -- not always to the benefit of organizational health.


Let me move ahead rapidly and leave out some of the other changes that have occurred.


"Live Two Way Communication" is the essence of life -- John interacts with Bill, using communication.


Life is not the passive receipt of pieces of paper with the thoughts of John on those papers, but the interactivity of John with a million Bill's!  How can this be done?


What you need is a piece of paper with built in ability to respond to questions from John.  Can you devise a piece of paper, or a web page, that emulates "John" where "John" can ask a question, without being truly alive, and Bill can answer that piece of paper and get a further response from John.


We might be able to approximate "live two-way communication" with one living being communicating with a very clever piece of paper -- the web page in a shopping cart!



Bill comes to the shopping cart -- he knows that the "cart" is not a live being, but he still wants to "communicate" TO the cart -- he wants to convey his thoughts to the cart.  He wants to ask questions of the cart.  He wants to get answers to HIS questions from the cart.  And, he wants that to be as instantaneous as it would be between John and himself, in the same room.



The closer our shopping cart can approximate live communication between two people the closer we are to a truly modern miracle in the new age.

The language, HTML, is well suited to present words, thoughts of John, to Bill, but certainly not well suited for interactivity.  Interactivity could hardly exist without "cookies" so there is another new subject to maser:

Cookies are a very important method for maintaining state on the Web. "State" in this case refers to an application's ability to work interactively with a user, remembering all data since the application started, and differentiating between users and their individual data sets.

An analogy I like to use is a laundry cleaner's shop. You drop something off, and get a ticket. When you return with the ticket, you get your clothes back. If you don't have the ticket, then the laundry man doesn't know which clothes are yours. In fact, he won't be able to tell whether you are there to pick up clothes, or a brand new customer. As such, the ticket is critical to maintaining state between you and the laundry man. (Source Restricted)

You get some "interactivity" with Java Script, but it would be "mindless" and certainly not personal interactivity.  You run your mouse over a drop down menu and get the impersonal interactivity of the expanded menu -- but this interactivity is NOT personal to you.

With PHP and MySQL, and very clever programming and design, AND THE USE OF COOKIES, you get not only interactivity but personalization of the communication.  There are not only other languages, but languages yet to be developed.  The "tools" of web design are constantly evolving as webmasters try to reach the ultimate of personalized interactivity -- approximating live communication.  "How well must a webmaster use these tools?"  There is a parallel to that question HERE, worth referring to.

In general, dynamic Web pages are pages that interact with users, so that each site visitor sees customized information. In the case of PHP, dynamic also means that data is pulled from a database. Dynamic Web applications are prevalent in commercial (e-commerce) sites, where the content displayed is generated from information that is accessed from a database or other external source. (Source:  Front Page Help Menus)

Dream on with me a bit and look into the future.

When the teacher knows his student SO well that he can anticipate the student's every question, even if unvoiced you'd have a virtually perfect teaching system.

When you have cookies properly used then every page on any of my 100,000 pages is capturing data and "telling the teacher" just what the student has read.The web pages capture and keep a record of Bill, the student, and every page he has read (or elecotronic quizz he has taken and been graded on). This system can then DELIVER exactly the page shich is next needed in this learning experience.

 

The PHP and the character of the database that it works with will have a great deal to do with the quality of the communication, and the speed of an accurate response to a "question."  The more personalized data you can build into the tables of the database the more alive can be the resulting communication.

At some point you start realizing that PHP and MySQL (and other such languages) are not alive -- even if they allow approximation of life, and that it then becomes the cleverness of the designer to anticipate the thought processes of the visitor and be ready, mechanically, to respond to what is very likely to be the communication from the one living being in this equation.

Electronic communication has other dimensions of approximating "life," as seen in the amazing popularity of flat screen TVs and computer monitors:

Revenue from flat-screen production is expected to exceed $60 billion this year, 40% above last year's level and three times greater than market levels in 2001, market researchers say. That doesn't include sales of related components, manufacturing equipment or end products such as computers, cell phones and TVs. The revenue figure is around a third of the much older and more diverse semiconductor industry.

Two years ago, desktop monitors passed notebook PCs as the biggest application for flat screens. And last year, computer buyers purchased more flat-screen monitors than traditional tube-based models for the first time.  (Source Restricted)
Flat screens may seem just "cute" but the image is better -- that is often not mentioned.  The image more closely approximates living communication.

When we finally get to three-dimensional, in-the-room images (holographs ala Star Track) we will have arrived at yet another milestone on the journey to copy life with a machine.

There are "trouble shooting" help features, increasingly, in many programs -- they are wisely moving in the direction of the "machine" presents a question with, say, two possible answers.  The live being chooses one of those answers, and gets the next question, with the next set of possible answers.  If the designer is smart enough, the whole experience can approximate Bill asking John a fairly complex question and getting the answer.

I recall just such a scenario recently, for me, when I couldn't get my new scanner to work.  I went through the trouble-shooting routine.  About the first question was, "Is the scanner plugged into a live power source?"  I looked.  It was not.  I had spent some hours trying to get a new scanner to work while it was plugged into a power strip where half of the strip was alive with power but the part I had plugged into was NOT alive.


The skill of the shopping cart designer STARTS with a full knowledge of the tools by which the shopping cart (or any web page) is constructed.  For many purposes, and pages, HTML is still the sine qua non, but for the further advancement of our electronic age we need to leave the static world of HTML and find other languages which allow for "personalized interactivity."


THEN we go beyond the mere tools and conceive of the thought processes of our visitor -- to anticipate what his purpose is upon entering a page of a web or a page of a shopping cart.


That is where the word "clutter" raises its ugly head.  "Clutter" is the unnecessary "answers" waiting for the question to be asked.  It is not unusual for a person to visit a shopping cart, knowing what they want to order, only to find that they are deluged with dozens of other choices that have nothing to do with the simple purpose.


When there is no effort to anticipate the thought processes of the visitor, the web designer feels compelled to answer ALL possible questions on every page -- so we get complex drop down menus that allow the visitor to ask ANY question -- choose any change of venue.

This whole subject gets more complicated when you figure that people don't read on the web, but scan!!

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In a recent study John Morkes and I found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (source restricted)

It takes courage to design without clutter because your failures, now, will be in "guessing" wrongly about what the visitor wants out of a page -- so that, in effect, there is no way by which the visitor can pull out of the page the answers he wants.


The "shopping cart experience" is an excellent place to start -- but it is only a start compared to what can be done with "ordinary web pages" that are made "extraordinary" with the magic of personalized interactivity -- and personalized with no wrong guesses as to the questions that will be asked, or the answers which will satisfy.



In the long run, no machine can equal a live being who duplicates a question and provides an answer.  But that technique brings us back to the Pony Express days.  As much as we can be brilliant in using the tools, and anticipating the thought process of the visitor -- to that extent will our shopping cart, and then all web pages which are designed with this in mind -- that extent will we be successful.

Others will be doing this -- it is not a matter of "taking it easy."  These concepts are too natural to the electronic era and I hold no monopoly on these concepts, but we can be among the first to recognize their validity, and to design around them.

There are some brilliant people, some "lucid minds" working on many improvements for communication on the internet, and in any other medium, but unless these brilliant people recognize, as I do here, at "Lucid Minds" the vital and basic necessity for clearing up basic communication, no matter how it is delivered, by assuring that both the originator and the recipient have the same definitions for the words being used.

Karl Loren