Getting The Point Across

Language is pretty fantastic as a way of symbolically encoding information into lexemes and then written or verbal data. It's always telling when you learn another way in which culture and language are built around each other, as the translation (lossy compression) process forces the data a ceertain way. To put it another way, thoughtspace is way more infinite than wordspace, and it's hard to express ideas without distorting them a little bit in the telling.

That said, even relatively simple and long-established ideas still get lost in the telling. We're certainly getting better at this; in the last few years usability has become a priority for corporate, academic, and governmental designers. Still, we haven't found a simple lexicon for symbols.

So many of our signs have cultural or lexical meaning attached to them - really they're encoded and not everyone has the keys to get to the data inside, unless they have prior exposure to the symbols used. Yes, I have some examples!

(At this time, please extinguish your cultural mind as far as possible, and use only conscious reasoning for the remainder of this post.)

• Dig this faucet. You just got to a new country, and who knows whether cold is on the right or the left here? Good thing you read English, but if you didn't, you'd be out of luck. That's encoded data. (Also interesting: if instead of 'Hot' and 'Cold', it were heiroglyphics or kanji, would it be fixed? Maybe, if the characters you used weren't too lossy.)

• It's obvious to us which of these is hot and which is cold, but that's because we've all agreed to the standard. But this is still encoded - hot water isn't actually red at all. One could make a case for this simple encoding, though - lakes are blue and coals are red - and it's a pretty good one. There's simply a little bit of intuition and guesswork going on, but it might be necessary. The red/blue temperature grammar is a pretty common one, at any rate.

One totally culture-encoding free way of conveying information is to use an actual representation - the way some bus stops have a picture of a bus. Not easy mistaking that one. However, look what happens here - we'd have to show the water molecules vibrating in place, faster for the hot water, to show what the difference is in the physical world. Well, that assumes a significant amount of prior knowledge of physics, and more people in the world likely speak English than know very much about molecules. We could do it a lot of different ways, but I can't think of a perfect one, so comment if you were able to think of it.

Signs, Symbols, and Icons

The images below all express the same idea.



Do these all communicate the exact same information? Which of these three are you most accustomed to seeing? Which would you prefer to have if you were chilling with someone who wasn't a native English speaker? If you were playing a game with a child? If you were inebriated? Seriously- these are all valid cases for usability.

OLPC, Followup

As long as the world is enduring the perils of globalization (Potential disease outbreaks, religious conflict, more fast food on Earth) we may as well really make it worth our own while - the most effective means of production we've got is also the easiest to divide up and do as chunks in separate hemispheres. I'm aware that international outsourcing is already taking place; that there are call centers and Visual Basic shops in developing countries. I know the setup is not ideal- who would expect it to be at this point? Certainly not those paying for it. But it's a good start, and the quality of output will rapidly catch up.

But isn't it a shame to move all those specialized jobs from the United States to a developing country? Absolutely not. The free market demands it, for one, and it's immensely useful for both American businesses and the global economy I glossed over just a moment ago. If you're not angry when your iPhone is manufactured in China, why would you mind if it's programmed there too? I'm immensely pleased with the process. What the developing world craves is more development, and for that it needs to be transacted with freely. It's far easier to outsource informational tasks than manufacturing orders. I know some people have issues with this:

If you feel protective of American jobs, how would you feel if your state passed a law that no business chartered within its borders was allowed to conduct business in neighboring states? That would harm both affected states and hamper the regional economy. This is a similar situation, if you're of the mind that people on different continents are as important as the ones who live across the street.

Why is it that it's so important for this to occur? Wouldn't it be more desirable to our existing information economy for the second world to continue through the developmental epochs of subsistence agriculture into manufacturing before attempting to broker in information as we do? Absolutely not - any 'leap' over large-scale agriculture or crude manufacturing is desirable. Not only for the environment and public health, but for your own interests.

Incidentally, this kind of information brokering has already occurred, where dollars are exchanged for foreign labor in fair markets.

Rent A Coder is a site where you can post software projects or offer to do them. This is different from Craigslist primarily in that coders attempt to underbid each other for the gig.

Gold Farmers will spend hours playing games online so that they can sell you virtual stuff for $USD. Absurd, but completely rational, and a way for children to earn income in a place with no job market, while playing video games like children ought to be doing.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a beautiful reduction of the information economy into nearly atomic pieces. You can earn seven cents by coming up with a sports trivia question. One can take it as a suggestion that the third world is ready to enter the information age, and that we would all benefit from it.