Karsten Januszewski on 'rhizohm'

Bruce Sterling on Interaction Design

Karsten Januszewski — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:17:00 GMT

Just came across this video on Adaptive Path's blog of Bruce Sterling talking about Interaction Design:

Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.

Missed him at SxSW this year, but this video gave me my fix. He's really clear on what spimes are right at the beginning. He has to do this to establish his overall theme, which is to think about interaction design not in literary terms -- "sense of wonder," etc. -- but just "don't make me think" and "reduce my cognitive load." He's dead on right here. And some interesting commentary on Google and Microsoft at about 22:00. Microsoft as "vehicle" compared to Google as "techno-social." And a funny comment about Flickr at about 32:00. His quote from Tony Dunn: "My default mental model of a user is a tortured, existential soul drifting through complex technologically mediated consumer landscape." Nice. And a quote from Bruce: "The net and its adjuncts are becoming a hybrid meta medium that links everyone...the former hierarchies of the creative disciplines are coming violently apart, right in front of our eyes. Yet at the same historic moment, profoundly powerful networks are assembling." Sterling is an elder for this era.

On The Propagation of Rhizohms

Karsten Januszewski — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:25:00 GMT

Sometimes one wants to encourage rhizomatic behavior. This is possible and rhizohms will thrive when provided care.

But controlling rhizohms is difficult. They resist being shaped or trained.

There is the case when a rhizohm that has been nurtured can grow out of control. As such, an intervention is necessary.

More concerning are unwanted rhizohms. They can be quelled be having expectations that they will be stopped will likely lead to disappointment.

When two or more rhizohms come into contact, there can be competition but this is not an inevitability. Rhizohms can coexist, although competition for resources is inevitable.

A situation of multiple rhizohms calls for supervision and likely intervention.

Welcome to the (Open)Social

Karsten Januszewski — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:55:00 GMT

I've spent the morning playing with OpenSocial. After all, OpenSocial fits in with my conceptualization of the rhizohm and my general interest in web APIs. Plus, I want to be ready to get at all that data on MySpace. I'm always interested in abstractions of data, which is really what the APIs attempt to do (What is part of a person object? An activity object? etc.), not unlike what WinFS was attempting to tackle, in terms of creating schema that everyone adheres to, or, to go back a PDC or two, Hailstorm.

The beginning of my research was attempting to play with the API and look for implementations to see things working. This was an exercise in futility as the sites that actually implement a sandbox for the API's seem to be pretty darned flaky. The only gadgets that I could get to work were "static" gadgets; I was never actually able to see data from one site appear on another site (list of friends, activities, etc.) It is alpha code after all, a 0.5 release. Nonetheless, my conclusion at this point is, from a development point of view, it is pretty much unusable. I imagine the Orkut implementation is a more solid, but I haven't been approved to play there yet. I applied for the Orkut sandbox but haven't heard back yet.

So, after that exercise, I then started reading the various posts in the blogosphere. Perhaps the best was from Dare Obasanjo whose technical and business critique was on the money I thought. He links out to several other bloggers who had some pretty insightful commentary, in fact so much so that I have nothing to add. I did find his link out to Russell Beattie amusing, again hearkening back to the Hailstorm backlash.

I still wonder about the other option for data retrieval, best encapsulated by what the guys are up to over at dapper.net: the notion of the semantic web through strongly typed screenscraping of HTML. This is a different approach than the Facebook approach (closed system) or the OpenSocial approach ("open"* system), in that it doesn't attempt to try to schematize data. This gets back to that argument: you can't fight the web. It will proliferate rhizomatically.

*See Shelley Powers piece on terms for more on what "open" means in this case.

Why Rhizohm?

Karsten Januszewski — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:25:00 GMT

The inspiration for this neologism -- which mashes up rhizome + ohm -- are the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in particular the introduction to their book, A thousand plateaus [1], in which they articulate a vision and explication of rhizomatic systems. A rhizome, in botany, is a horizontal stem of a plant that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes.

[2]

Deleuze and Guattari use the rhizome as a metaphor to think about non-hierarchical, "anexact" systems, which are applicable far beyond botany. They provide examples of animal rhizomes in their pack form such as rats or burrow and my favorite example being ants: "You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed." (p.9)

[3]

(Which makes me think of Rudy Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants [4] but that's another whole post.)

But the most interesting application of rhizomatic structures applies to human systems. They outline four characteristics of rhizomatic systems:

Principle of Connection: "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order." (p.7)
Principle of Heterogeneity: "There is no ideal speaker-listener, nay more than there is a homogenous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich's words, 'an essentially heterogeneous reality.'" (p.7)
Principle of Multiplicity: "Unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding). The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines..." (p.8-9)
Principle of Asignifying Rupture: "Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees." (p.) This last point is very important, in that it complicates the very simple binary or dialectic that starts to appear and is tempting to reduce their thinking to.

[5]

Delueze and Guattari go on to explicate how rhizomatic systems work, especially in contrast to arboreal systems. They provide many other great examples, such as the human brain itself: "Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree." (p.15). Ultimately, I can't do justice to their explication and I would highly recommend reading the introduction on rhizomes -- and the whole book for that matter.

Where things get interesting is in applying some of their theories to computer science, the internet and the Web 2.0 phenomenon, which is the crux of my neologism, rhizohm, where the organic meets the digital, where we witness the marriage of hierarchy (XML, file systems, object hierarchies) with rhizomes (multiple personas, wikis, trackbacks). I see rhizohms as the manifestation of rhizomes online. Consider the following quote:

"To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment - such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency." (p.17)

To me, this single statement can inform and provide models for much of what happens online. The obvious application is to the structure of the web itself. Already, there has been some good work on this front: check out Rhizome Navigation and some of their work:

But I want to extend my thinking about rhizohms beyond navigation and structure to the very concepts of identity and authorship on the web. A single blog entry becomes rhizomatic when on one page exists comments from other "authors", embedded images and videos from other sources, and, of course, hyperlinks. We each create rhizohms of the web, our own sprawls of content and presence on wikis, forums, social networks, etc. And, perhaps most interesting, is this dialectic that unfolds when rhizohms and hierarchies clash. (Wikipedia, anyone?)

Much more to be written on this topic, but that at least gets it going...

[1] Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A thousand plateaus; translation and forward by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

[2] Photo courtesy of flowerfreak from Flickr under Creative Commons License

[3] Photo courtesy of albuam from Flickr under Creative Commons License

[4] Rucker, Rudy. The Hacker and the Ants. Four Walls Eight Windows; Version 2.0 edition, 2002.

[5] Photo courtesy of dimitri66 from Flickr under Creative Commons License