Introduction

Within the text of Bridging Physics and Communications: Experimental Detection and Analysis of Web Site Users’ Paths in an Environment of Free Choice, the thesis I wrote in 2000 for my master of arts degree in journalism, I embedded seven essays that each stand alone, yet work together to present the thoughts underlying the thesis itself. These essays originally served as the content appearing in the test Web site.

This is the first essay.

Essay

Poets and engineers don’t often share the same tools.

Engineers live in the realm of computer-assisted design software modeling unbuilt structures; poets linger in the reaches of language straining to capture unseen truths. One is a world of tensile strengths, compression ratios, the challenge of joints and seams; the other is a world of verbal images, reaches for expression, the charm of jarring similes.

Engineers and poets don’t often share the same tools. But they do share the same world—the world inhabited by people who mold and shape their environments to fashion homes, to alter the landscape to suit human desires. The world described by people who tell stories of their past, who make films about a possible future, who talk and write and shout and post words—unending streams of words—about their worlds.

The world we share is one. The sense we make of it and the works we create within it are many. And yet we live in one world, despite our differences and distinctions.

A question to ask is this: “If we share one world—and we do—are there links, are there bonds among the senses we make of the world?” Another way to ask it is this: “If we share one world—and we do—can poets and engineers share the same tools?” Or yet again: “If we share one world—and we do—can we share a truth, a rule across the boundaries of our disciplines?”
In short, is there a way to connect what we do and learn within one focus, one discipline, with what we make and discover within another focus, another discipline? That is a question. Here is an answer.

One of the basic, guiding principles followed by Richard Coyne in his work, Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor, is this observation about the link between people and technology: “We are shaped by our technologies as much as we fashion them” (p. 7). Coyne views the relation between people and tools as a system, whose components mutually influence one another. Some examples may help.

When indigenous peoples traveled the Plains of North America and derived their livelihood from hunting, their tools—arrows and snares and spears—influenced their perception of their environment. The Plains were, for them, hunting grounds. When transplanted (note the term) Europeans began to move westward with sod-busting plows in hand, the Plains became for them a vast planting ground. Same place, same world, but different tools, and thus a different perception. When your tool is the bow and arrow, your tool shapes your view of the world, just as you have shaped the world to sharpen your stone point and wooden arrow shaft. When your tool is the steel plow, your tool molds your view of the world, just as you have mined the world for ore to smelt and hammer and have logged the forest to cut and carve.

“We are shaped by our technologies as much as we fashion them.”

But technology is more than bows and arrows, yokes and plows. Technology comprises all of the tools we use in our world. And not all of the tools are wood and steel, or even silicon and plastic. Language itself is a tool, as are the concepts and rules, the guidelines and stories we express using language. In fact, some argue that the lines demarcating the boundaries between the world and our conversations about it are arbitrary. “This emerging way of thinking about how life organizes itself [the science of complex systems] argues that life itself is information. Not the particular embodiment but the information embodied provides the essence of life,” writes Richard A. Lanham in The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (p. 247).

A complex system, such as the world, or the mutual co-creation of people and their technology, is itself when it is about itself. That is, a word about a truth embodies the truth it expresses. Or the reality we perceive when use certain tools is a reality we create with the tools we use to perceive. It’s not that the world is arbitrary, but that the world creates itself as it goes along through the actions of the components of the system comprising the world.

This is the nature of a complex system. It means that when we use words to speak about the system, our expression is not distinct from the system we seek to explain. It also means that what we discover to be true about a component of the system is, in some way, at some scale, a truth about the whole system and each component of the system. This is so because the system’s information-basis means that just as the whole is an expression of the life of the parts (as we perceive them to be parts), so it the life of the whole embodied in the existence of each part.

“We are shaped by our technologies as much as we fashion them,” then becomes, “We are informed by our words as much as we speak them.”

Because the world is a complex system, the observations we make, the words we speak, about how the world appears to work at one level contain useful observations, speakable words, about how the world appears to work at another level. Our observations are scalable, because the world maintains a consistency across its scales. In other words, reality is fractal. Zooming between scales reveals consistent patterns of organization and behavior because the information-basis is the same. For example, without a frame of reference, one cannot easily distinguish a close-up of a jagged rock with a wide-angle shot of a rocky mountainside. Or again, consider the similarity of traffic lights admitting packets of cars along a street and of a heart valve admitting packets of corpuscles along an artery and servers sending bursts of data along varying paths across the Internet.

The realization that real-life systems are complex, and that our apprehension and expression of them is fractal, and thus scalable, provides the explanation for the glimmers of truth that Ludwig von Bertalanffy traced in General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. He wrote:

A unitary conception of the world may be based, not upon the possible futile and certainly farfetched hope finally to reduce all levels of reality to the level of physics, but rather on the isomorphy of laws in different fields…. Speaking in ‘material’ language, it means that the world, i.e., the total of observable events, shows structural uniformities, manifesting themselves by isomorphic traces of order in the different levels or realms (pp.48-49).

In the end, what does this mean for us? It means that our actions, on a small scale, can give us clues about our actions on a grand scale, because the whole is contained, in some way, in the parts, just as the parts comprise the whole. It means that our words, even when spoken about a locality, communicate a picture of the universality, because the parts comprise the whole, just as the whole is contained, in some way, in each of its parts. It means that people and technology together co-create one another.

It means that the tools of the engineer and the poet are more alike than we first thought. It means that a poet can build a poem and can calculate the stresses and strains of its parts. But it also means that an engineer who uses metaphors is not just hand-waving, but is revealing the truth about the world at one level by identifying it with a truth known about another level. The folder icon in a window on a screen of a computer is just as real and just as able to hold a document as a folder in a drawer of a filing cabinet in an office.

Poets and engineers don’t often appear to share the same tools. But the appearance of disparity is merely the artifact of perception. Both seek to make sense of the world, to tell the world about itself to itself, so that people and their technology, both verbal and manual, can continually co-create one another.

Poets and engineers don’t often share the same focus, but they do share similar tools.