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 fifth essay.

Essay

The point of choosing a path and walking along it is to experience life by choosing and walking.

One of the trends gaining currency in the business world is the notion of outcome-based measures of performance. In the field of developmental disabilities services, for example, some state agencies allot dollars to service providers with no stipulations attached to dictate the ways in which those providers deliver services. But the continuation of funding depends upon the state agency’s ability to measure specific outcomes in the lives of the people who receive those state-funded services. If the service provider can achieve those measurable outcomes without spending all of the money, then the provider gains an opportunity to turn a profit. If the provider spends more than the allotted amount in order to achieve the desired outcomes, then the state agency is under no obligation to make up the difference. The provider faces operating at a loss.

What matters is simply and solely the desired, measurable outcome. The path taken to get there, so long as it is legal, is irrelevant to the state agency. This path-transparency stands at one end of a continuum of attitudes toward the relation of a path in life to any related goals. At the other end, one can envision the languorous conversation of two lovers. They have no agenda, no desired outcomes to their conversation. They revel in the moment, in the ebb and flow of thoughts and feelings, of passions and fulfillments. Their goal, if they were to articulate it, is not to get anywhere, but simply, as is often said, “To be in the moment.” In a way, a lovers’ conversation is path-transparent as well. Its intention distracts the lovers from any awareness of the passage of time, of the ebb and flow of the process of their conversation.

There exists a third way, at least, to approach the meaning of the path one takes. This way rejects the idea that the goal is simply to achieve the outcome or equally simply to exist in the moment. Participants using this way are keenly aware that they are moving along a path, that changes are taking place among them and in relation to their surroundings, and that the goal is not to get to the end or to ignore the past and the future, but to embrace the journey in its richness.

James P. Carse’s strange and slender volume, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, paints a striking picture of living along this third way. Carse writes:

In one respect, but only one, an infinite game is identical to a finite game. Of infinite players we can also say that if they play they play freely; if they must play, they cannot play.

Otherwise, infinite and finite play stand in the sharpest possible contrast.

Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play.
There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite game. No world is marked with the barriers of infinite play, and there is no question of eligibility since anyone who wishes may play an infinite game.

While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time.

For this reason it is impossible to say how long an infinite game has been played, or even can be played, since duration cane be measured only externally to that which endures. It is also impossible to say in which world an infinite game is played, though there can be any number of worlds within an infinite game (James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), 7-8.).

One can recast Carse’s insight about the nature of infinite games by saying, “The point of choosing a path and walking along it is to experience life by choosing and walking.” This means that path and play form a pair; one plays when one chooses and walks along a path, just as the tracing of one’s path is a narrative about one’s play. This way asserts that the goal is not to get to the end of the path, or to move along the path with any particular velocity, but merely to live by making one’s way along the path.

The next step is to make the observation that communication happens among people who choose and walk a path together. Someone who takes on the role of a professional communicator within a community whose members are living along a path has a particular and precise function within that community. While people who live in the community find their fulfillment in experiencing their lives by choosing and walking along a path together, the professional communicator has a focused role of supporting the community in its life along the path.

The professional communicator is not trying to devise systems that will encourage people to get to the “end” of their path, to structure communications to achieve desired outcomes, to control or to limit communications, or to summarize (and thus end) any conversation. Instead the professional communicator encourages participation in the conversation, fosters choices along the path that open opportunities for more choices, and acts as a catalyst for relationships to grow among the members of the community who have chosen to travel along a path together.

The point of choosing a path and walking along it is to experience life by choosing and walking.