#transcontextual

[protoslacker]

A figure in a book review by Pille Bunnell in Cybernetics & Human Knowing. An Invitation to Creative Reflection

Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns

Via Nora Bateson

Also from Bunnell’s review:

Furthermore, all distinctions arise in context--situational, historic, and epistemological. It is very difficult to convey a meaning of a distinction that arises in a different epistemology than one that you are trying to communicate in. For example, in a constructivist, or constitutive epistemological view. That meanings that arise in a view that is dissonant with an accepted ontological reality is foreclosed, unless someone finds it of adequate interest to explore. An interest may be triggered by the dissonaces experienced by someone who lives two non-similar laguage groups or someone whose childhood epistemological frame differs from the cultural one they find themselves in, as Nora describes her experiences.

[wwworlding]

“As I delved deeper into the relations between developers and users, it became clear that a kind of communicative tangle was occurring. I used the work of Gregory Bateson, who had studied these sorts of communicative mishaps under the heading of “double binds.” As with Bateson’s work on schizophrenics, and what he called “the transcontextual syndrome,” the messages that were coming at level one from the systems developers were not being heard on that level by the users and vice versa. What was obvious to one was a mystery to another. What was trivial to one was a barrier to another. Yet, clarifying this was never easy. The users liked the interface when they were sat in front of it. Yet, they did not know how to make a reliable working infrastructure out of it. They would ask the … team, who would reply in terms alien to them. I began to see this as a problem of infrastructure–and its relative nature.”