Reading Response Week2

This week’s readings both explored and argued the positives and negatives of how we share, record, and learn information through “artifacts”. What made their approach so interesting for me was they they both begin from a purely analogue perspective. Escaping Flatland deals mainly with how we preserve visual datasets that cannot be observed directly, in our multidimensional space. It addresses the analogue by giving a retrospect on  out techniques of bridging the gap between 2d and 3d. Conversely, The Power of Representation deals with how we interact with textual datasets, citing the changing role of books, reading, and language throughout history. It collectively defines these tools as “cognitive artifacts”, and states how they rely of representation to convey information. I personally liked how the The Power of Representation used the perspective of Socrates to illustrate the negative effect that books could have on society, as it’s easy to see this aspect in many types writing today. Writing as a discipline has essentially becomes a craft of changing the readers opinions through arbitrary wording and selective supporting information. However, I can understand the argument that this is a fault with the reader and not the technology itself. In Escaping Flatland, I liked how the reading sited both abstract methods of conveying 3d information in 2 dimensions (such as the frog skin), as well as “brute force” solutions to the disconnection (such as models and stereo illustrations). In the end, my opinion is that 2 dimensional displays of information are really more successful when the user doesn’t have the means to naturally interact with 3d information. I think of how 3d artists user their software as opposed to traditional clay sculptors. Both are essentially accomplishing the same goal, but 3d artists usually prefer having multiple (orthographic) flat perspectives of their work in progress, where as sculptors prefer the physicality of clay and sense of touch.