Margaret Turner, Electronic Media, Computer Based Art and Design, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore, Qld, 4558. mturner@usc.edu.au
The "Chatterbox" is a child's game made of paper: it is also a tool that gives students in multimedia design a way to conceptualise the Internet, or hyperspace. To author effective multimedia for hyperspace we need a tool that makes the structure of cyberspace visible. A metaphor can be such a tool. The metaphor can be commonplace things in our everyday lives that we use to "see" that which is not able to be visible. Using the metaphor tool, the process is to author as if hyperspace were that tool.
There are a plethora of imaginary spatial and non spatial metaphors to use as tools to conceptualise hyperspace and it is challenging to find one that encompasses the dual qualities of depth and surface, or its capacity to make quixotic, serendipitous links that cut across and add to the traditional logic of sense-making. By concretising the concept of hyperspace the Chatterbox tool also makes visible the hidden limitations of any metaphor. It assists the author to make a multimedia product that is much more than just text with moving images. Multimedia that uses to good purpose the unique characteristics of the hyperspace medium will be multimedia that looks like multimedia.
Multimedia is built in a distributed network. The classic distributed network is the Internet, but at base any computer is a distributed network, in that it represents a three dimensional virtual space (hyperspace) in which discrete "islands" of stored content, text, image, video, sound, can be bought together in various ways to achieve different outcomes. Authoring multimedia is the process of directing that action, that is deciding which bits from the "islands" are brought together and what connections and relationships are made. The word authoring encompasses the concept of writing with image, video, sound and other sensory data as well as text. Multimedia may be limited, that is burned on a self-contained CD-Rom or DVD-Rom, or it may be open ended, as in the same CD linked to the Internet. Hyperspace, a "space of more than three dimensions" (Merriam-Webster, 2000)[HREF1], is a data storage retrieval space "par excellence" but also it can seemingly compress distance and connect these data repositories in ways as is not possible in physical space. Well authored, the scintillating surface of multimedia can do much more than just entertain the reader as they glide in search of the novel. It is capable of making that reader a participant in the content, which makes multimedia potentially much more than a text with moving pictures.
These and other unique hyperspace characteristics are what can give multimedia a shape distinctive from other forms of presentation. An engineer knows that it is the inherent qualities and constraints of a medium which give shape to the material. So it is with design. For instance, the structure of a book - binding, pages, numbering - shapes the linear unfolding of its contents - chapter 1 leading to chapter 2 and so on through to a determined end. The best "shape" of multimedia is determined by the unique qualities of hyperspace. What we know of hyperspace often comes from the shape of the machines we use to access it - computers, telephones, modems, mobiles - slick boxes wrapped in plastic, each with a discreet presence in our lives. But these machines are not hyperspace. They are poor tools with which to conceptualise the way hyperspace is different from other presentation mediums.
Hyperspace is many things to many people and therefore different metaphoric tools will utilise or foreground different qualities of the medium. The challenge is to find a model, image or metaphor that adequately demonstrates hyperspace's distinctive qualities so that they can be used to author effective multimedia. It is commonplace with new technologies to invent a metaphor that links what is known, what can be seen or what we are used to, with the unknowable, new "thing". We imagine or see the new, unknown "thing", as we do our gods, in our own image. In other words, we use the tools of our current lives and equate the unknown "thing" with the known tool. We then see and work with the unknown "thing" as if it were that tool. The visual "Desktop" metaphor used by Macs and Windows is an example of this (McBeath, & Webb, 1997; Morley & Robins, 1996). We see a "desktop" on the screen with folders and trash can, but the metaphor does not represent what is actually taking place inside the "box". For hyperspace, this equating process has generated a plethora of imaginary spatial and non-spatial concepts. Among the more everyday of these is information superhighway, or "infobahn" and shopping mall, another, a chat room. Just these three urban geographical examples already represent very different kinds of space, rooms are internal, often intimate; malls crowded and demanding, highways are open, expanding. These different qualities and all the others imagined into cyberspace will each have their modifying effect on content and the way that we structure and present content.
Before proceeding to adopt any particular metaphor, there is a need to look at the consequence of using a metaphor to think about the concept that it represents. According to Heidegger and Ihde ( Heidegger, 1977; Ihde, 1979) a tool will always be part of shaping or modifying what is experienced via the tool. A hammer allows us to experience contact with a nail in a way that is different to touching that same nail with a finger. A tool amplifies certain qualities, for instance the temper of the nail, its "drivenness", and obscures others, its coldness, its smell. An electron microscope reveals the nano world but it does so via the digital printout from a computer. While some of the characteristics of the nano world are made clear in a way that is impossible by ordinary vision, other qualities are not available via that tool, for instance touch, smell and sound are absent from an electron microscopes digital representation. Liken the experience to watching a contemporary big-screen epic movie on a small black and white TV screen with no sound - one's conclusions as to what is going on can only be approximate given that not only is two thirds of the actual content missing but gone also are the relationships that would knit a sensible whole between all three modes of content (Magdalinski,2001).
Using a tool amplifies some of the qualities and reduces others, the problem is we notice the amplification but the reduction is missed because the tool becomes "partially transparent" as the medium of the experience (Ihde, 1979). Any tool through which we experience content in hyperspace will effect that experience. The modifying effects of the metaphor as a tool need to be recognised, since it affects what is included and what excluded from our experience. Any one metaphor will be limited. Thus it may be that a range of metaphors are needed that tease out different qualities.
Probably the greatest fear about multimedia is its capacity to make mincemeat of logical and ordered sense-making. Hyperspace, because it will affect the way we experience, will effect the way we know and make sense. A book is structured so that it builds a persuasive internal sense. This way of constructing a logical argument is often central to our ideas of education. In a multimedia environment, sense needs to be able to encompass a networked text whose logic is different from that of the printed page (Taylor and Saarinen. 1994). Making sense is about the relations between what we experience and how we experience it. A conceptual tool must demonstrate how relationships are modified and created by hyperlinking and it needs to do it simply and directly.
As a design lecturer and academic colleague, I encounter the need for such a powerful and accessible conceptual tool for Internet or multimedia authoring, on a daily basis. This tool is not just critical for multimedia design students but also for subject experts writing content for the web or CDRom. The "book-model" as a conceptual tool often drives their authoring process and the content ends up neither multimedia nor educationally exciting. There is little point in putting the resources, sometimes extraordinary amounts, into a process if it does not enhance the outcomes in the many ways that hyperspace makes possible. One of the reasons that the book metaphor fails is not intrinsic to its limitations. Students and academics alike tend to see the presentation phase as an add-on to the content after it has been written and assembled; somewhat like polish on the duco of a car. They have not "seen" that they currently construct content according to the book-model nor that hyperspace might substantially change the way that their material is assembled and written, or that it may effect the way they think about the subject matter itself.
In Electronic Media Design at the University of the Sunshine Coast, the key learnings focus on interface, navigation and interaction. The interface is conceived as a kind of surface and to be successful on a range of levels it needs to hold the key to the content within the site. To do this the design must start with a thorough understanding of the content, its order and its relationships, internal and the potential of external. The students find it difficult at the beginning to move from page and book concepts to the screen, to translate print ideas so they are appropriate and work for the new medium, let alone to think about how the content structure might influence the design of an interface. They tend to want to make a title page of the site front door; they want to list information alphabetically, to provide hierarchy of information that is different rather than more or less important. Because their internal models for design are by default based on a book, they cannot conceive the kind of disruption that links off site can cause the reader/participant. (Participant is used here and elsewhere in preference to reader as the goal is to make multimedia a participatory environment.) What the designer student needs is a tool that visualises the unique and intangible qualities of hyperspace. I would propose that the tool is required before visual design begins, so that the content is thought about in different ways that are more appropriate for a hyperspatial medium.
A distributed network is very much in its infancy as an authoring medium/process. It has inherent restrictions and opportunities that require designers to rethink the way content is structured, written and presented. The qualities required in a conceptual multimedia authoring tool must therefore include
Because they affect the making of sense in multimedia, the two most challenging qualities for the metaphor are hyperlinking and surface. Sense is about the relationships between different contents. Our current expectation from students is logical, coherent, ordered rigorous lines of discourse, which is one of the reasons design students find rethinking structures for multimedia so difficult. Making a link in a hypertext is like travel in hyperspace; it is not an established path, it is an instantaneous connection between two points.
Science fiction writers use the word hyperspace to mean things like faster-than-light (ftl) travel. In many fictional instances, hyperspace travel calls for the terrain of space to be folded in on itself, bringing, however temporarily, two places, that were far apart, into immediate proximity. Dan Simmons has used this hypothetical space to great effect in his quartet, "The Hyperion Cantos" (Simmons, 1990). Simmons' citizens build houses that have different rooms on separate planets; the ordinary-seeming "door" allows the user to go from one room to another as if the rooms were physically linked. His citizens, however, do not encounter the difference in the different worlds. In order for their own lives to make "sense" to them, they obliterate the differences.
With hyperlinks there is the potential (given ubiquitous broadband) for such instantaneous connections to be made between deep repositories of text held in the Internet and this means our notion of what makes sense may be undermined. Travellers in the hyperspace of the Internet should normally be ready for surprise. If the hyperlink connections are between texts in the same subject context, there may not seem to be much in the way of disruption. A jump within strongly related territory will be relatively easy to bridge so that separate contents will still make sense. It is the jump to the more distantly or even cursorily related territory, whether on the same server or on another world, that presents a problem to the process of sense-making and, of course, opens the opportunities. Surprise and disruption - fun for some but anxiety provoking for many others. Those previously isolate islands or worlds of text no longer are, they can be read or experienced within other contexts and their meaning is not set but can change.
The disconnected "instant jumps" between texts within multimeda need not present a problem. Sense is something dynamic, something that occurs as the participant is within the content. Brenda Dervin describes sense, saying that humans "make sense individually and collectively as they move: from order to disorder, from disorder to order" (Dervin, 1999). Order and disorder are trigger terms in multimedia, terms that can inspire deserved dread. Thoughtful design is crucial to adequately present the structure of content so the making of sense is facilitated. The student/participant needs to feel involved and have some control in shaping their path through the content but also they must feel supported. It is important that linear and logical traditions of presentation are not discarded, intentionally or unintentionally, in the process of authoring for multimedia as they remain core to our ways of thinking and knowing. Anxiety generated by feeling lost or powerless will not facilitate learning outcomes.
Multimedia authors cannot provide surety if they do not understand the hyperspace medium. They need to know and use the potentials and limitations with intention and control. Inevitably the Internet will not replace the book but will form a fruitful partnership in which the Internet will be available as an enhancing tool (Danton, 1999). The Internet is after all a supreme containment tool (Sofia, 1999)[HREF2], one that handles great volumes of hierarchical information while it enables non-linear hyperspatial connections between the volumes of content. A good metaphor tool, like the Chatterbox, needs to show the various types of relationships and the different paths that connect to knowledges. Some things need to come before others, others can be browsed in parallel.
The notion of the Internet being a surface also derives from this capacity for instantaneous travel between repositories of text. Commonly held notions of surface equate surface with superficial. Superficial is about something "lying on, not penetrating below, or affecting only the surface" (Merriam-Webster, 2000)[HREF1]. Cursory and shallow are synonyms. Superficial means something is lacking in depth or solidity, it implies a concern only with the obvious. "Shallow is more generally derogatory in implying lack of depth in knowledge, reasoning, emotions, or character" (Merriam-Webster 2000)[HREF 1]. Superficial is conceptually opposed by depth, and depth, commonly, equals the profound or intense, as in "depth" of knowledge or emotion. In an educational setting, celebrating the superficial would, at first glance, seem anathema. Education, is almost by definition, about the depth or profundity of knowledge. Is it possible to think about surface in another way, as inclusive of depth rather than oppositional? In Imagologies, Taylor says "the play of surface exposes depth as another surface" (Taylor and Saarinen 1994) which suggests layering or stratas. Surfaces are the tissues of relationship that flow between, over and under and round.
For contemporary students, readers, participants, whose cultural experience is often about the simultaneous viewing of television channels, a book-model presentation with its linear beginning middle and end, does not present enough surface to the content. The dialogue in one television program must have multiple interpretations when remembered in the context of the next snippet of program on the surfing dial. If the Internet encourages surface reading at the expense of indepth reading, then how can that surface be packed with content? There is much empty animation out there on the Internet, displaying skill but little else. It is a surface that can carry content. Perhaps the content can, somehow, be flattened - be width rather than depth.
The name of Wallace Stevens' poem "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" (Stevens, 1984) yields a metaphoric surface packed with content: the reflected image of the clouds. A polished-smooth surface such as a mirror gives a very clear representation of what is around. It is a surface filled with content; it maps the content clearly; it represents to the reader all that the deep structure of the content contains, and displays it in relationship, one bit to another. From this can be imagined an initial interface that is a lake (Turner, 1999)[HREF3] reflecting every part of the content.
There are many metaphors, models and conceptual maps of ways to think about or see hyperspace. For the purposes of generating the appropriate visualisations I sought of my design students, I looked to some early metaphors used to image and concretise the Internet. Those metaphors are net (Internet) and later web (World Wide Web). The word net is both noun and verb. It is "an open-meshed fabric twisted, knotted, or woven together at regular intervals". The "net" is very much part of our existing vocabulary, we "do" with it to net fish, to divide a court (between tennis players), and, as part of the noun/verb "network", it is "an interconnected or interrelated chain, group, or system" (Merriam-Webster, 2000)[HREF1]. "The metaphor of the net connotes an integrated interdependency of all the parts, co-ordinated by a benign structure of rules and regulations" (McBeath & Webb, 1997). A "web" is like a net but different, more delicate and it is sticky. A web operates as shelter and appliance, that is it is both nest "a network of silken thread spun... by various insects... serving as a nest or shelter" (Merriam-Webster, 2000)[HREF1] and the tool by which the spider "nets" her food. A web is also a "membrane" that "unites" as in webbed feet, or something that entangles, obscures, or confuses ie a "web of intrigue", all of which lead back to net or network as in a complex web of relationships (Merriam-Webster, 2000)[HREF1]. These two metaphors are a beginning of a language for talking about the Internet. Language is used here in Heidegger's understanding of language as a mode of "being in-the-world" (Ihde, 1979). A hyperspace tool language will extend what it is possible to think about. "(O)ur machines are not only extensions of our bodies but are a development of our language" (Emmanuel Monier in Ihde, 1979, p15). The ideas of "open-meshed" and "woven together", of catching and dividing, of uniting and sheltering are rich with possibility. And some "stickines" to slow down the surfers would be useful. What these metaphors do not do is adequately describe or demonstrate for my purposes, the surface/depth quality, neither that instantaneous linking to the exotic context that can so confuse the senses. I will argue that the Chatterbox provides a mode of adequately conceptualising these unique qualties of hyperspace and thus facilitates good multimedia.
The Chatterbox, a game of seeming random consequences, offers an immediate visualisation of the enfolded, hyperspatial qualities of the Internet. Chatterbox is a "girl's" (play) tool, one that is usually so completely left behind that few women can remember its name. Among children who use it today, it is also known as fortuneteller, cootie catcher, and clacker. Chatterbox is derived from the Spanish stream of Ikebana and was introduced to Australia early this century with Kindergarten education founded by Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852). A Chatterbox is accessible, robust, cheap. It is simply a piece of paper folded; it does not require downloads or special software; it can be made, inexpensively, in a few minutes; and is suitable for creating multiple experiments into different structures of content. The Chatterbox encompasses many of the qualities required in a conceptual tool for authoring multimedia and it makes the metaphor concrete, which means its enhancements and limitations as a conceptual tool can be discussed.
A Chatterbox tool starts with assembling the clusters of ideas or concepts. These are placed in the net or web created by the foldlines in the Chatterbox schema. Before folding, the chatterbox (fig 1) is like a lake surface into which ideas spread from around the edges and proliferate towards each other, like ripples in water, with interfereance and overlap.
Figure 1: Chatterbox "net" or "web" schema (left); filled with content before folding (right).
The four corners give eight entry points formed by the two triangles at each of the four corners. The structure of the "Chatterbox" is balanced, uniform or even equal, that is, it confers no particular ranking or hierarchy. In this case the content is clustered into four broad themes. The Chatterbox will work with fewer clusters but more than eight is outside the scope of this metaphor. The entry or starting points, or just provocative ideas, are placed around the perimeter. The development ideas go inward toward the centre. Order in this filling process may or may not be important. Into the centre goes possible conclusions or links to futher exploration. This stage of the tool will generate collisions and coincidence that requires ideas already entered on to the surface to change, be rubbed out, be confirmed and amplified.
The fold into a Chatterbox tool produces more opportunity for development as ideas are layered over and under each other. Some ideas are concealed from things they ought to belong to, others make unforeseen alliances, still others reveal themselves as crucia strandsl. Immediately it is obvious that that the folding creates a lateral flow around the circumference of the Chatterbox that links different corners (ideas) in a new and intense way (Figs 2&3).
Figure 2: Lateral flow around circumference. (Photo: D Livingstone)
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i. the future education needs to |
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| iii. graphics as surface for content | iv. a Chatterbox, is a surface but not superficial |
To animate the Chatterbox, the operator uses the finger and thumb of each hand. By opening and closing these digits, in different directions, the tool operates (Fig 4). More revelation and confirmation of content are revealed with the tool in operation.
Figure 4. (Still from video: D livingstone)
The operation of the Chatterbox can be opportunistic according to the wishes of the participants, or it can be determined and choices based on prior knowledge, that is the control of the outcomes can be given to the participant. At the beginning of any interaction, the tool is quiessant. Bring it to life and the surface activates a process of unfolding action. The action of the tool opens some possibilities while closing other, brings some things together and separates others. It allows movement between ideas, it teases out complexities and joins the unexpected. Flaps lift up and yet more is available (Fig 5). The tool represents a permeable information space in which are a range of possible answers or conclusions or links to additional, complex, and maybe more complete information.
Figure 5. More is available under the flaps. (Photo: D Livingtone)
The connections on the demonstrated "Chatterbox" are not of themselves deep (or wide) but the potential is demonstrated. This folded surface can both mimick a user's experience of hyperspace and hyperlinking and indicate the width of data and its relationships. Where two bits of dissimilar information came into close proximity, their collision generates new ideas. The progression through the content via manipulation of the tool unfolds the surfaces of branching connections and relationships. In this explicaiton it can be seen that the Chatterbox's flat surface of content operates in more than two dimensions. The surface is not superficial at all.
The Chatterbox answers a whole bundle of the authoring/design needs as a desired tool metaphor
or plane.) Of course the Chatterbox is a metaphor that stands in for a distributed networked hyperspace. It is not that network. What is useful in making a metaphor into a concrete form is that the workings of the tool are made visible, thus its modifying effect on content can be known and discussed. The Chatterbox is capable of delivering to the multimedia content writer and presentation author, a visual demonstration of many of the unique characteristics of a hyperspatial multimedia authoring environment. Together with other metaphor tools, it is certain that a tool such as the Chatterbox will improve the quality of multimedia, especially the involvment of participants in non-linear sense-making and allow multimedia to come into the light as a distinct medium of its own with all its strengths, opportunities and limitations. The "Chatterbox" is an exemplar of the ideas of polyphony, surface and hyperlinks.
Acknowledgments to Lesley Instone, Tara Magdalinski and Barbara Bolt who,
in personal conversations and critical feedback on this paper, contributed provocative
and eloquent ideas.
Thanks to photographer, Debbie Livingstone.
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