An Information Paradigm

TL;DR version: Something I read for another class (Thomas Kuhn on paradigms) and other stuff happening in my life (applying to doctoral programs) shaped how I understood this week's readings. Living in the "Information Age" requires different modes to even understand what the "Information Age" is.

I began last week thinking about big questions—What's changed, if anything? How would I know?—and I began this week with the same questions.

But the experience has been completely different.

Earlier this week I was jumping back and forth between readings for different classes. I read Preece & Shneiderman's "Reader-to-Leader" framework first, and one of the things I was most struck by while reading was how intuitive their conclusions were. Over my previous year at TC, I have expressed beliefs about technology/design/communication/etc. that echo much of the analysis articulated in Preece & Shneiderman—though certainly not as intelligently or with any kind of supportive evidence. Instead, I felt like much of it I had generally internalized over time (i.e., of course well-organized and attractive layouts positively influence reading!) or I had specific examples from which to draw experience (i.e., when "designing" an educational fan fiction website last semester, some classmates and I talked about kinds of user moderation systems we had seen on other sites). So many of Preece & Shneiderman's conclusions, I thought, must have become universally accepted if they had already reached me, a relative layman in the field. And in such a short amount of time (since 2009), too!

Then I jumped to a reading for another class, Thomas Kuhn's seminal essay The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A description, from Wikipedia, if you're unfamiliar:

Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science." Normal scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. The discovery of "anomalies" during revolutions in science leads to new paradigms. New paradigms then ask new questions of old data, move beyond the mere "puzzle-solving" of the previous paradigm, change the rules of the game and the "map" directing new research.

Kuhn's concept of paradigms—and the model for how they are created/destroyed—was illustrative for me in how I might answer (or at least describe/define) the big questions above. But I was also thinking of Kuhn's paradigms as a way of explaining how I felt while reading Preece & Shneiderman. Much of their framework has become an accepted part of our current paradigm; we no longer feel the need to question it's assumptions, rationale, or conclusions because we can take them as a given (a key signifier in identifying the existence of a paradigm). And this wide acceptance must occurred shockingly fast.

Another part of Kuhn which I couldn't help but connect to this week's readings was how a paradigm is defined not so much by the "puzzle" it is attempting to solve but rather how it attempts to solve the puzzle. After Kuhn, I went back to Webster's chapter on "The Information Society," which, in my new frame of mind, seemed at it's heart to be describing a paradigm. Webster describes the way the world is and how we understand it (the so-called "Information Age"),  but also—importantly—that our understanding is affected by how we go about doing the understanding (what research we do, and how, and what data we collect).

This theme of how we ought to collect data and which data ought to take empirical priority is repeated in the other readings as well. It has also, lately, been especially relevant to me for personal reasons. I'm thinking about applying to doctoral programs this fall, and that process has been monumentally instructive in thinking about kinds of research and their relative relevance to communication. Webster's suggestion that we ought to be more inclusive of qualitative data—that the story of the informational data we're currently collecting actually needs to be told with both words and numbers—is an encouraging signpost.