Actionable vs. Contextual Information

Just as Microsoft collapsed with the advent of Linux and freeware, and television became the death knell of the movie industry, so does the NY Times predict the end of Facebook, imploding from the sheer force of its time-sucking vacuousness. That argument made me think of earlier comments made by Thoreau in Walden, about a telegraph line to be constructed between Texas and Maine, "...but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." Thoreau points out, "After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages..."

Beyond the galloping messenger, The NY Times article triggered thoughts about other newer technologies for communication. The telegraph, as chastised by Thoreau; and in my lifetime the fax machine, pre-Internet BBS (bulletin board systems), and eventually email.

Aficionados of Mike Kelley may remember seeing (or reading about) an installation at LACMA's Avant-Garde In The Eighties show. While employed as visiting faculty at his alma matter, Kelley photographed and enlarged the cartoon faxes that decorated the walls of the school's physical plant offices. These images (in real life, not the gallery setting) functioned as technological "trial balloons:" entertaining--but non-essential--information used as a placeholder while acquiring a new communication skill. The images from Mike Kelley's From My Institution to Yours are are to fax machines what, "La plume de ma tante est sur la table," is to high-school French. With the advent of email we get warnings about kidney harvesters, and now with Facebook we get 25 Random Things About Me.

At the end of the NY Times' Facebook article, we're given links to further our surfing--information on how to quit Facebook and a place to play Scrabble on line (time wasters as much as Facebook, but more importantly a call descend deeper into the labyrinth of links). Thinking about a new way to parse communications (from links to telegrams, to the printed word), it's possible to divide communication into actionable information and something else (which I'm calling contextual, for lack of a better word). Embedded links, "I'd like a number 3 value meal with a coke," Obama's presidential campaign website, "Call 800-951-7807 in the next 20 minutes," or the junk faxes that offer to sell you toner cartridges for your fax machine, are all examples of actionable communication. Everything else--Madame Bovary, to Mad Men; a peer-reviewed journal article to the Mahabharata--provides contextual information that can be understood and applied to novel situations not spelled out in the original set of zeros and ones.

What becomes most interesting are the contextual bits that cloak themselves in calls to action, and actionable communication that pass themselves off as contextual information. An example that springs to mind is the bible, which is often passed off as a guidebook on how to live one's mortal life (but in reality is a bunch of contextual stories that any reader can use as he or she sees fit). One "for instance" is the book's admonition not to kill, yet the folks who claim to use its writings as a guide to live their life are the same people who claim the most exceptions to the rule (for war, for murderers, for people who break into their homes, for family planning physicians, and/or for queers who look at them funny).

An example of the inverse (calls to action cloaked in contextual information) may best come in the form of Facebook. Promoted as a way to keep in touch with school chums, former colleagues, and acquaintances, the site acts as a promotional forum for various commercial, political, and institutional enterprises. It also provides a treasure trove of information to marketing companies, so they can better target you with advertising.

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