Table of contents for Zen and the Art of Knowledge Maintenance
- Zen and the Art of Knowledge Maintenance, Part I: Ashes to Ashes, Zeroes to Zeroes
- Zen and the Art of Knowledge Maintenance, Part II: Ideas Worth Spreading
- Zen and the Art of Knowledge Maintenance, Part III: Our Digital DNA
- Zen and the Art of Knowledge Maintenance, Part IV: No Bit Left Behind
It’s a simple but vital distinction: knowledge and its container are two different things. Preserving knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean keeping an old book on life support in a climate-controlled vault like a museum piece–that’s no good at all, in fact, if the contents of that book never get read. Shakespeare himself wouldn’t care about the rotting paper ‘pon which he jotted his verse, he’d want the words to live on. The works of William Shakespeare survive today in large part because they have been copied so widely and maintained from one generation to the next in whatever media that generation used to tell its stories. His plays, first delivered on the stage, were adapted for radio, and later for film and television. The fact that the works of Shakespeare are not encumbered by modern conventions about copyright has meant that any publisher can make money selling copies of his work without paying anyone any royalties, and as a result you can find the works of Shakespeare in virtually any bookstore and any public library.
Along the lines of Darwinian evolution, Shakespeare’s ideas have endured not because they were necessarily the best or the “fittest”, but because they had an excellent reproductive system. His works are “backed up” in the libraries of every major city on Earth, and in the collections of countless ordinary citizens. They are freely available in their entirety online, and used in classrooms throughout the English-speaking world to educate the next generation, ensuring their familiarity with at least some of his material.
To get to this point, though, Shakespeare’s work had to be valued for its own sake by those who managed the transitions from one medium to another. Publishers had to decide to print copies of his works. Schools had to decide to use his works in support of their curricula. Radio, film, and television producers had to decide to adapt his work to their non-literary media. Archivists had to decide to scan his works into digital form to make available online. If his works had not been sufficiently appealing at any of these points, they might not have survived that key transition.
That old Rivenhelm novel of mine might have survived, had I deemed it worth spending a few thousand dollars to have a data recovery firm do some forensic work on those old disks to read the extremely faint residual magnetic field. I could have taken the time, then, to print a hard copy of the book, or been diligent about maintaining the disks’ magnetic field, had I valued the material enough. It was my decision, ultimately, that caused that novel to perish, and behind every story and every piece of human knowledge that survives there’s a similar decision on someone’s part to keep it alive.
Make no mistake, in other words–knowledge survives only because we choose to maintain it. We have to choose the things we want to archive, and we can’t forget to maintain the archives themselves, because in addition to damage, loss, and deterioration from natural, physical causes we need to ensure that our archived materials can be read with contemporary tools. We can make our lives a bit simpler by choosing forward-thinking standards for the storage of information, so that we don’t have to update the formats too frequently, and by avoiding obscure, proprietary formats that are quickest to become obsolete.
Don’t forget about the reproductive system, either–ideas that stay tightly locked up with intellectual chastity belts will have a hard time changing the world. As a writer I’m keenly aware of the need to be compensated for my work, and I do see some value in the copyright system to that end, but let’s be honest: how many of you would be reading this if you had to pay me a few dollars to read past the subject line? At this stage of the game the onus is on me to convince you that what I have to say is worth hearing; if, down the road, I develop a big enough following, I might consider selling a bit of ad space (hey, I need to eat, after all), but for my ideas to survive they need to be valued by people other than myself. You need to choose to save these ideas, to share them with others, to be influenced by them yourselves, and it’s my job to convince you to do so.
I do this with my software development projects as well, incidentally. Maia Mailguard is open source, free for anyone to use, because I believe that some technologies should be available to everyone, and that if everyone had an effective tool for managing spam and virus filters the Internet as a whole would benefit. More filters out there would mean fewer machines becoming infected with viruses, fewer machines becoming unwitting participants in spam-spewing botnets, fewer people falling victim to phishing scams, and less frustration with unwanted mail in our inboxes. To parrot the TED motto, I believe this is an idea worth spreading, so it’s in my interest to remove the greatest barrier to adoption–cost, in this case.
Once we can separate form from content–grasp the fact that Hamlet is Hamlet whether it’s printed on vellum, on paper, or encoded as ASCII text, in a formatted PDF file, or recorded on audio tape, or filmed for DVD–we can begin to focus on preserving the content without regard for the form, particularly when that form is keeping good and important ideas from reproducing.
No related posts.
The importance of knowledge does not reject the importance of form of knowledge. Knowledge and form are two different things, but they are interrelated. There are two points: the research and our perception.
Let me begin from arguing an importance of form for researchers. Having a document in its origin form may be important for its dating and proving its authenticity. The task becomes more difficult if the original lost. It is easier for me to give examples from my, i.e. Russian, culture. The most famous Old Russian literary monument is The Tale of Igor’s Campaign . This work of literature was considered to be composed in 12th century, but we have no an authentic manuscript. The manuscript dated from the 16th century was discovered in 1795. It contained a story re-written many times for four centuries. The discovered manuscript was burnt down in the 1812 Fire of Moscow (during the Napoleonic Wars). Fortunately, the text was saved in copies; but the loss of the original provoked version that the manuscript was a forgery of 18th century. Discussions were continuing for decades. Finally, historians, linguists and experts in literature proved the authenticity of the document. If the original were saved, scientists would have been able to analyze it for its dating. Now it is impossible. In itself form contains knowledge. It may be knowledge on materials used to save content, on technologies to edit documents, on written language features, even on temper of a person who created or copied or kept a document.
So, “keeping an old book on life support in a climate-controlled vault” makes sense sometimes. Another question is that content should find a general audience in an accessible form, for example, as a book printed in a press or as an online publication. In parallel, content also may be adapted for today’s people. The Tale of Igor’s Campaign was written a very long time ago, and now it requires a translation “from Russian to Russian”, and many its translations exist.
Another point is the peculiarity of our perception. Form influences a perception of content. You will hardly appreciate Hamlet very much, if you read it printed on toilet paper in small barely visible print. You need a readable text for normal perception. Book should be in a good format and well-printed. Opera should be listened in an opera house. Circus is better in an arena, and not on TV. It doesn’t mean that “digital” Hamlet is fake Hamlet . It means that form and content must correspond to each other. At the minimum, form must not hinder a perception of content. That is why we need to care not only of a way to keep knowledge, but also of a way to present in to an audience. Perhaps I wouldn’t read this blog if it was in another colour gamut.
We perceive content and form as a whole. A separation one from another is nothing but theory. They are united in practice. “Keeping” and “presenting” content are two connected aspects of form. We can’t “focus on preserving the content without regard for the form”. We can only to raise a question of better forms for keeping and presenting different contents. Even when you stand up for advantages of digital world, you say about advantages of digital form for keeping and distributing content.
And yet sometimes a digital form is not able to pass an idea entirely. For example, no digital image can pass a Savior on the Spilled Blood visitor’s feeling. It is the beautiful and unique church built on the place where the Russian emperor Alexander II was mortally wounded. He began to implement so needed reforms which – alas! – were halfway rolled back after his death. One thing is to read a textbook on history, and quite another thing is to stay in a few meters from the place where the emperor’s blood was spilled, and to see the beautiful church monument to him. The church is also an idea. This is the idea of people’s gratitude to the emperor (many voluntary donations from throughout the country were made for the building of the church). This is the idea of national roots (the church is closer to Old Russian architecture and non-typical of Saint Petersburg which was built as a European city from the beginning). I am not a monarchist, but it doesn’t prevent me from recognizing Alexander II the Liberator’s great services to Russia.
Ideas in Hamlet are given with words, and the words don’t lose much when they are transformed from a printed document to ASCII text. However, if you want to understand an idea of architectural monument, it is better to see it in “natural form”. Sure, we must have copies of drawings of Savior on the Spilled Blood, replicas of its mosaics and iconostasis etc. Copies are necessary for restoration work. They are necessary in the case of disappear of the monument from the face of the earth (I prefer it will never happen). We need reproductions, pictures, videos to tell of the architectural monument to other people. Digital form is good for these purposes.
I never want to depreciate the role of digital form for keeping and reproducing ideas. I only say on some limitations of digital world.
It is wrong. They are different types of art. Hamlet as a printed play is not equivalent to Hamlet put on a stage or directed as a movie. Any staging is somebody’s interpretation, and there may be plenty of interpretations.
Formerly I thought that a film version had always to follow its literary origin as much as possible. I understood my mistake when I had read the novel Mackenna’s Gold by Will Henry (Henry Wilson Allen). The film Mackenna’s Gold would be very boring, if it followed the novel pedantically. (Actually, the film is boring for many viewers today, but it was popular in its time in the USSR. It was before my birth, but I was told about it). Literature and cinema are different types of art, and they have different principles. That it why I tolerate poetic licence in film versions, although the directors must be careful with classical literature.
Even if we are talking about the same type of art, we can find different interpretations. Different directors put the same play on a stage and give it different names. Sometimes it becomes a tradition to interpret the same play in one vein or another. Thus, the same operetta by Emmerich Kalman is interpreted as Sylva or The Czardas Queen in Russia. The name of a concrete performance depends on how the director makes emphases in his staging.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment; I will try to do it justice with my reply
The central thesis of my argument was that the “form” we use to express our ideas can often distract us from the ideas themselves. You are quite right that every form results in its own unique work of art, be it prose, poetry, painting, sculpture, drama, film, etc., but underneath all of that there was an idea that the artist was trying to convey. Someone with skill as a painter might find it easiest to express that idea on a canvas; someone skilled at visual storytelling might prefer to express that idea in film; a talented writer might find it easiest to convey the idea with words. The same fundamental idea can be expressed in many different ways–many different forms–and while we may marvel at the beauty of the form and how it has been rendered by the artist, I am suggesting that we should be looking past the form to find the core idea that the artist was trying to convey to us in the first place. If we become distracted by the pretty colours, the visual effects, or the witty dialogue, we risk losing sight of the underlying message. It’s surely frustrating for the artist–imagine trying to tell someone that the building is on fire, and having them focus instead on the sound of your voice and not the content of your words!
I also understand your point about “interpretations”; in a way, these are simply editorial responses to the original idea, as different artists either try to emphasize the original message so that it can be understood more easily by a wider audience, or to express a difference of opinion about the original idea. It is always about the original idea, however, even if it is a counter-statement. When this interpretation comes with a change of form, the artistic liberties are usually just what’s required to adapt it to a new medium. A novel is a good medium for introspective works, for instance, but adapting such a work for the screen can be difficult, since film and television are more effective at conveying scenes visually, where actions can be shown but silent thoughts are awkward to present. Plays are very good for conveying ideas through dialogue, while poetry is like painting with words. Sculpture, song, musical composition, even architecture (as you pointed out) can be ways to express an idea.
Just as an artist will choose a medium that offers him or her the broadest vocabulary for expressing that idea, though, the chosen form will be easier for some of us to process than others. For some people, the idea will be grasped most immediately from a written work, while others will “get the message” most easily when it is presented through visual storytelling. Others will find depths and shades of meaning in paintings, poems, music, and monumental architecture. In that sense, having multiple forms to represent an idea is a very good thing, as it makes the idea more accessible to a wider range of individuals.
But once more, I stress that our focus on the outward form becomes an obstacle to understanding the idea that inspired it. We might critique the quality of the acting in a play, for instance, or the crudeness of the special effects in a film, while completely overlooking the story and its implicit message. A singer with an unpleasant voice will distract us from the songwriter’s message–and conversely a particularly skilled singer can distract us for the opposite reason, as we marvel at the virtuosity of the performer and overlook the intended message in the lyrics. Many of us make this mistake with artwork in particular, when we allow ourselves to be preoccupied with the sheer beauty of a painting, and wonder how a human being could have been capable of producing such a masterpiece. We focus too much on the “what” and the “how”, and not enough on the “why”, in other words, and in the process we miss the point the artist was trying to make.
To wit, let me revisit the example of Hamlet. Hamlet’s deep question is essentially this: am I insane, or has the world around me gone mad–and how can I tell? All of the scheming, the plotting, the stabbings, the poisonings, and the betrayals are just set-pieces for the central drama of Hamlet’s struggle to make sense of his world, even as it appears to be falling apart around him. Is his growing paranoia causing the world around him to spiral further into chaos, or is he just doing what’s necessary to survive the treacherous world of his family’s court? None of this requires a specific setting in Denmark, or even a royal court–the tale could be told in the context of the modern world, with Hamlet cast as the heir to his family’s fortune, with jealous relatives or members of a corporate board scheming to usurp his inheritance. It could even be told without a single murder–the essence, after all, is that Hamlet witnesses enough treachery (of one kind of another) to fuel his own paranoid fears, until he finally takes tragic, self-destructive action.
The specific context simply doesn’t matter, so long as it provides an environment for treachery and paranoia–the key ingredients that we can all relate to in our own lives, to one extent or another. The message that Shakespeare wanted us to take from Hamlet is that in life we struggle with both internal and external forces–adversaries both real and imagined–and that dealing with the real problems only becomes more difficult when we allow the imaginary ones to run wild. Be vigilant, in other words, lest paranoia take hold of you and make a bad situation worse. That’s Hamlet in a nutshell (an appropriate receptacle), and as long as that kernel is preserved, it doesn’t matter whether it gets translated to a different language, a different context, or a different medium–it will still be Hamlet, as far as conveying Shakespeare’s central idea is concerned.
You may prefer to appreciate Hamlet in one specific form that is more aesthetically pleasing to you than another, but this is a highly subjective matter–a debate that takes place at the level of the art, not the more fundamental level of the idea. This can impact the preservation of the idea, however, if you find the new form so repugnant that you will not bother to explore it for the ideas within. Ideally an idea should be expressed in as many forms as possible if it is to have the greatest chance of survival. Preserving an idea in just one form is dangerously limiting–it can be lost too easily, and since not everyone absorbs knowledge the same way, a single form is only going to be “pleasing” to one subset of the population.
My concern, in other words, is for the transmission and preservation of those ideas without regard for their form. Form is simply a delivery mechanism for an idea, and when we focus on our artistic appreciation of the form at the expense of the content, we miss the forest because there are too many trees in the way. Focusing on the form is essentially an appreciation of the art, whereas the concern of this series is about the preservation of knowledge–i.e. the ideas contained within the art.
Your point about the experiential appreciation of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood cathedral is a good one–we lack the means at the moment to encode such experiences in any form, which is why there is still no substitute for “being there” in many cases. And yet I will point out that if you had not shared that paragraph of text about your personal experience and the powerful history associated with that site, I would not appreciate “being there” as much as you did, even if I were to visit the cathedral myself. Without appreciating its history, its storied past, the events that made the experience more powerful for you, I would only be able to judge it at face value, on its architectural merits. Your words–encoded digitally, no less–will have made a significant difference in how I would experience the cathedral from now on. Words may be insufficient to capture all of the awe that you experienced of course, but they do help quite a lot, because they explain why you felt that awe. Combined with good photos and perhaps a well-presented history video, all of these digital records could provide a rich context that might approximate “being there” to some (imperfect) extent–better than nothing, certainly.
I will disagree, though, about this: “We perceive content and form as a whole. A separation one from another is nothing but theory. They are united in practice.” Let me put the question to you another way, then. If I were to print out a copy of this blog post and mail it to you, would the contents of the paper document in your hands be significantly different from the contents on this website? The content would be the same, but the form would be different. Yes, you can do different things with each–you can fold the paper document, put it in a drawer, photocopy it, place it in a new envelope and mail it to someone else, etc., while the digital version allows you to easily cut-and-paste sections of text, enlarge the fonts, or process the words with translation software–but the words, the ideas contained in both documents remain the same. You may view one as “a letter” and the other as “a website”, and perhaps because of this difference of form you might experience them differently, psychologically at least. But the content remains the same. The form changes, but the content survives independently.
The notion that form and content are inseparable comes, I think, from an inability to see past the form itself. A book and a film might both contain the same central idea, for instance, even if their stories feature different characters in entirely different settings. On the surface it might be difficult to see the connection between the two–they might not even share the same title or author–and so if you fail to look below the surface they simply appear to be two distinct works of art (which they are). When you examine them more closely, however, you may discover that the central message of both works is the same–often the moral of the story is as simple as, “crime doesn’t pay”, or “don’t do drugs”, or “revenge is unsatisfying”, but there are more nuanced and subtle examples (like Hamlet). Underneath very different-looking forms, both of these works are expressing the same central idea that the writers wanted to convey to their audiences.
There are thousands upon thousands of ways to express a single, basic idea, and we see examples of this in film, television, and novels every day. The point of these endless variations of expression is to bombard the audience from as many different angles as possible, hoping that the hidden subtext–the message, the moral, the central idea–will eventually be received successfully. Ideas as seemingly intuitive as “hard work will be rewarded” often require years of repeated examples in the media we consume before we come to believe it (especially when we can point to counter-examples in our own lives which cause us to doubt this essential truth). Every work of art is a message from its artist, and while that message may not be unique, the artist is still hoping that we will absorb the message (consciously or unconsciously) as we appreciate the art.
In preserving these ideas, then, the form becomes unimportant, as long as some forms exist that remain popular enough to survive. There may be thousands of different novels and television programs with the same central idea, but in all likelihood only a handful of those will be popular enough to be passed on, shared, recommended, cherished. They may be popular because they are good stories well told, or simply because they deliver their message more effectively than the rest. Some might survive better as novels, while others achieve better success as films–it doesn’t really matter, as long as the ideas survive in the popular media of the time.
To begin with, let us clarify the definitions. As far as I understand:
idea is a message;
content is an idea in a context;
form is a means to express or/and preserve or/and reproduce a content.
Perhaps an idea is less dependent on form, but content and form are united.
I can answer your question about “a letter” and “a website”. Sure, the content will remain the same. Different forms will not significantly influence perception of the content in this case. These forms are different in internal structure, but they are relatively close from a receiver’s perspective: the receiver will see a text in both cases. However, if you recorded your thoughts and sent me an audio CD, that would be quite another story. I understand real spoken English rather poor, and your audio record most likely would be only empty sounds, but not a meaningful message for me. Now I have a counter-question. I can understand your ideas from text, but I cannot understand the same ideas from audio recording. Why is it possible, if form does not affect the perception? Perhaps, you will answer that I am not ready to understand content in audio form. It is true, I am not ready. And it is true that the form affects my perception in this case.
You say, “having multiple forms to represent an idea is a very good thing, as it makes the idea more accessible to a wider range of individuals”, and several paragraphs below you say, “My concern, in other words, is for the transmission and preservation of those ideas without regard for their form”. If form is unimportant, why is “having multiple forms” a good thing? If form were really unimportant, it would be more reasonable to choose one best form and not to dissipate in multiple forms. De-facto you say not about unimportance of form, but about importance of having multiple forms. It sounds like you claim that form is important.
You begin your comment with the argument that “the “form” we use to express our ideas can often distract us from the ideas themselves”. Then you admit that I “might experience them [“a letter” and “a website”] differently, psychologically at least”. You say that I “may prefer to appreciate Hamlet in one specific form that is more aesthetically pleasing”. You write a whole paragraph where you stress “that our focus on the outward form becomes an obstacle to understanding the idea that inspired it”. At the same time you disagree with my statement “We perceive content and form as a whole. A separation one from another is nothing but theory. They are united in practice.” Can you clarify your position? How can a form distract us from the idea, if we perceive content without regard for a form? Why do you disagree about “We perceive content and form as a whole”, if a form affects our perception of content?
You say that form can “distract us from the ideas themselves”, but it is wrong for really good works. Did you think of form when you were reading Shakespeare’s sonnets? I suppose that you enjoyed good poetry and absorbed the author’s ideas. However, “sonnet” is a literary form. Sonnet consists of 14 lines grouped and rhymed on special system. English (Shakespearean) sonnet consists of three quatrains and one distich. Italian sonnet consists of two quatrains and two tercets. Poets know this. An ordinary reader is not deep in thought of this. An ordinary viewer does not think of methods that a director used to achieve suspense. An ordinary visitor of picture gallery does not think of features of composition of paintings. An ordinary listener does not think of rhythm or time signature of piece of music. It leads us to another aspect of form: form is not only an outward, but it is also an internal structure of work. The question “How did they (he, she) do it?” may arise later, but a receiver should not think of technical details during the first perception of a good work. The creator’s task is to express an idea so that a receiver will not wander or distract from it toward an outward form or unskilful using a form. We perceive content and its key ideas through form, but form and content are brought together in good works of art. Where you say about unimportance of form for perceiving content, I say about their harmony.
Idea or content does not exist for our perception out of form. You can pass your idea in the form of printed, written or digitally encoded words. You can pass your idea in the form of oral speech. But you cannot pass your idea out of any form.
You are right when you say about multiple forms and transformation of content from one form to another. New better forms often allow preserving and distributing ideas (and contents) more effectively. I do not dispute against it. The main cause of this discussion was your statement “we can separate form from content.” We cannot. We can provide the transformation of the content from one form to another. We can destroy a form together with the content. But we cannot operate with content without a form, and a form can exist without content only as an ideal model. Practically content and form of any document exist as a whole in every point of time. Our task is to choose the best, up-to-date form for our knowledge and to achieve the harmony of content and form, their fitting together.
Transformation from one form to another may be without negative consequences often. For example, we can easy get rid of paper document after scanning it in the most cases. However, sometimes changing form may cause changing and misrepresentation of content. Changed content, in turn, may affect key idea. That is why a film version may express the director’s idea, but may misrepresent the writer’s idea. Any playwright should be ready to directors’ own interpretations of his plays. Different directors can make more or less different performances from the same play. The playwright’s main idea – a message – is kept in most cases, but nuance are different. It would not be a problem, maybe, if nuances did not affect the main idea. Moreover, the work may contain more than one idea, and different interpretation may emphasize only one message to the detriment of others. Complicated epic novels, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, may hardly be filmed without omitting some ideas. That is why people, who want to understand the writer, take the novel.
It does not mean that interpretations are unimportant. Interpretations give a notion of the deep idea and original content, and may rouse a person to further searching. Some people read Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame after they had listened to the famous musical by Riccardo Cocciante. It is your choice to be satisfied with an interpretation or to acquaint yourself with the original. Sure, “bombard the audience from as many different angles as possible” is useful, but it does not cancel the value of the original work of art in its original form.
If Hamlet is filmed “in the context of the modern world, with Hamlet cast as the heir to his family’s fortune, with jealous relatives or members of a corporate board scheming to usurp his inheritance”, will it remain Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Most likely it will be the director’s Hamlet. I think, it would be more honest to announce it as a film based on Shakespeare’s play. By the way, setting in Denmark does not mean that Shakespeare wanted to universalize his ideas. European authors often set the action to other countries to exclude any allusion to the powers that be in their countries. It was a precaution against making influential enemies. It is interesting that this trick was untypical of Russian classical literature. Some examples of European literature are The Marriage of Figaro by French Beaumarchais (setting in Spain), The Dog in the Manger by Spanish Lope de Vega (setting in Italy).
I think our disagreement is caused partly by different approaches to form and content. It seems to me that you tell about “physical” preservation and distribution of knowledge, and hence it leads to your preference for digital form which is really good in many cases. I remember the words “form” and “content” as they were used in philosophy course where these concepts were analysed in interrelation. “Unity of form and content” is a very famous formulation here.
I also understand the limitations of our discussion. It has moved toward arguing about works of art where the central idea (message) is a moral. Preservation of scientific knowledge (facts without moral message) does not require so multiple forms. Digital form is perfect for preservation and reproducing new scientific knowledge. However, there are special cases. Old forms themselves are objects for study. I said “form contains knowledge” in my first comment, and you did not dispute against it. If form contains knowledge, it may become a part of content, and this fact points to the interrelation and two-way influence of form and content.
I began my comment with clarifying the definitions. Let us clarify the formulation. I say that the statement “we can separate form from content” is wrong. It is right that we can provide the transformation the content to better forms and thus achieve better preservation and easier access to knowledge.
You announced the topic “the stuff that won’t survive” in one of your posts. I wondered what you would say on this. As content and form exist as a whole, then stuff that cannot be contained into a long-lived form won’t survive.
Once again, another well-considered comment, thank you
The definitions you provided explain, I think, why we seem to view this “form versus content” issue differently. The way you have defined content and form makes the link between them not just obvious, but tautological, because the context implies an appropriate form. Much depends on the context of the context, of course
In the context of a playhouse, the implied form is a play; in a cinema, a film; in a library, a book; around a campfire, an oral story. If you define content to be “an idea in a context”, then of course content and form are inseparable, because whatever context you choose will determine the appropriate form.
But perhaps by “context” you mean the story which embodies the idea, such that the story is the content. In that case the story consists of a narrative structure of some sort, which takes on a form the moment it leaves your mind to become words on paper, spoken words, a series of panels in a graphic novel, etc. The story is still independent of the form, since it can be “told” in many different ways (forms). It could also be argued that if the story “embodies” the idea, then the story is itself a container–a form.
I don’t think “context” is particularly useful to either of our arguments; it renders yours tautological and mine more nuanced. If it clarifies my intent, you can safely substitute “idea” wherever I have written “content”; to my mind an “idea in a context” is a “form”.
Ideas themselves are formless (at least until such time as we develop the technology to map the neural connections in our brains). In order to share ideas with others, we must give them a form. We could choose spoken language, written words, some form of artwork, etc. At that point the idea is embodied in a form, formatted according to the styles and conventions of that form, and delivered to the recipients in the hope that they will be able to reverse the process and end up with the same idea in their minds.
Clearly this ability to transfer an idea from one mind to another depends on the sender’s ability to “encode” the message in a form that the receiver can readily “decode”; if the receiver has not studied the particular form, the communication will fail. So it is that we learn the formulas, the patterns, the conventions of many different forms, because by doing so we gain access to so much more information. We learn the various forms of poetry, literary styles, genre conventions, three-act drama structures, and how to “parse” this information for its meaning. We learn to recognize the use of symbols in artwork, and what they are traditionally intended to convey. We train our ears to identify the structural differences between a sonata and a symphony, jazz from blues, and to infer different emotional messages from major and minor keys. It is these conventions–these “standards”–that make it possible for people to communicate ideas to one another.
I took this long road to answer some of your questions, albeit indirectly. Let me build on this to address an apparent contradiction that you pointed out:
I was not saying that form is unimportant, I was saying that as far as the idea itself is concerned the form is irrelevant. If I can read a document written in French as well as in English, then it doesn’t matter to me whether I receive it in one language or the other, because I am equipped to “decode” the message equally, and the message can be “encoded” in either form. But that speaks only for me–if the message is only available in English and French, but the only language you speak is Russian, then you cannot “decode” the message. For an idea to have the greatest chance of survival, then, it should be “encoded” in as many different forms as possible, to increase the probability that whoever finds it will be able to “decode” it.
To put it another way, it is through forms that ideas reproduce, so it is advantageous for an idea to assume as many different forms as possible. That said, the idea is unaffected by the form (if it is “encoded” correctly, of course), so no matter how many different forms embody that idea, the idea itself is invariant. I am not suggesting that we need only choose one form of the idea to preserve–indeed we “preserve” an idea by continually giving it new forms, updating it to new media, remaking films for a new generation, revisiting the classics, publishing new editions, translating it into more languages, etc. This is very different from the notion of archiving data in a vault somewhere–ideas are best preserved by sharing them as widely as possible, in as many forms as possible, so that they can live on in the minds of others, and inspire them in turn.
You also wrote:
Very true, and this speaks to the limited vocabularies of any given form. Even within the realm of written language this is a frequent difficulty, because there are words in some languages which have no precise equivalents in others. If an Arctic culture has 30 different words for types and textures of snow, a translation of their language into English will require a lot of care (and a lot of adjectives!).
It is also true that some forms are more capable of expressing certain types of ideas than others. The respective vocabularies of each form have evolved over the years to reflect these differences. Music, for example, is well-known for its ability to communicate emotion very powerfully, but it would be difficult (if not impossible) for the information in this paragraph to be conveyed effectively in musical form. Painting, too, affects us on an emotional level, playing with the psychological use of colour and perspective, but with elements aimed at our rational minds in the form of symbols and representational messages–but lacks the ability to articulate more detailed and specific ideas.
In that sense, the simplest and most general ideas are the ones best-equipped to survive, since they can be conveyed in more forms without loss. Concepts like love, death, happiness, and sadness are vague, but they define the universal realities of our lives, across cultures, languages, races, religions, etc. Without understanding the spoken words, you can still “decode” the emotions of the characters in a foreign-language film; without knowing anything about the musical conventions of another culture you can still “decode” the mood–the emotional content–of their music.
The idea is “encoded” in the form, so whether we manage to extract the idea or not depends on whether we possess the necessary skill to “decode” it, and whether we bother to use that skill. The mistake that many of us make is to forget that we should be trying to “decode” a message, and we content ourselves with enjoying the story/art/film/music/etc. for its own sake–we focus so much on the aesthetic pleasures of the form that we forget that it contains a message for us to “decode” (or we are simply too lazy to analyze these things critically because it would detract from our enjoyment of them).
The best forms are designed to make the “decoding” process unconscious, so that while we can continue to enjoy the experience on a conscious level, we are unconsciously “decoding” and internalizing the idea. The less effort this requires on the receiver’s part, the more effectively the message is transmitted. At the same time, however, sometimes the “decoding” process is part of the fun, as we see in mysteries, detective stories, and other sorts of engaging puzzles, sometimes cleverly disguised as art.
Exactly! And here we find our consensus: Since ideas are formless and cannot be preserved on their own, they require a form if they are to be stored anywhere outside of our own minds. For an idea to survive over time it needs to survive the transition from one form to another, re-”encoded” to whatever the prevailing forms happen to be, in order to reach the largest number of potential “decoders” out there to receive it and help it reproduce further through inspiration. Many people will receive the form and enjoy it only at that surface level, oblivious to the encoded message within, but for those who possess the “decoding” skill and the determination to look deeper, the idea should still be there to be found.
Thank you for this discussion.
I suspected that different definitions were the cause of our disagreement. Now I am glad to see the word “consensus”, but a few aspects have remained not clarified. I would like to give a more precise definition to “context”, although you think it is useless.
As I see it, “context” is the stuff that supports the idea; it is “the story which embodies the idea” in your words. I mean “story” in the broad sense: a novel, a film, music etc. Idea in the context becomes the content, and the content is realized in one or another form.
Let us try to revisit the example of Hamlet again. Let its idea (the message) is “in life we struggle with both internal and external forces–adversaries both real and imagined–and that dealing with the real problems only becomes more difficult when we allow the imaginary ones to run wild” (as you formulated it). Denmark, the characters, the plot, the environment are stuff that supports the idea and provides with the nuances. It is that make the content, but it is not a form.
Form is the means to transmit the content. Form as an ideal model doesn’t contain any ideas, and it doesn’t provide nuances to support an idea. Form only provides with the vocabulary and implies the limitations to express and transmit the content. For example, book is the form that may be used to transmit Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, or Rowling’s Harry Potter. Film is the form that may represent the same plot (which embodies the same message) with the same characters, but by the use of other methods. Opera is also may be based on a novel plot, but it is another form. When the idea is realized in a form, it becomes “a story” and begins to exist inside the content, and content in my definition can’t be independent from its form.
“Story” (the idea and context supporting it) and the means to express it (form) are inseparable. That is why if we consider “form” as a “context”, then it is not “context of idea”, but it is “context of perception”. In this case it is fair to tell about context of a playhouse or context of a book.
We perceive the idea embodied in the story (context) by means of the form. They fit together well in good works of art. That is why I say not only about importance of choosing a form, but also about importance of skilful using of a chosen form and harmony of content and form.
Some forms give an opportunity to preserve content for a long time, and other forms do not. For example, video recording of the performance is not equal to the live performance because a viewer in the latter case sees acting on the stage and is affected by the audience’s emotion. The audience is different every time, and that is why every live performance is unique. It exists in the “live” form and cannot be equally preserved on tape or DVD. This is the example of the stuff that won’t survive.