'Scanning' while 'stumbling': thinking through and around the antennae metaphor

This is a post about metaphors, and the way that they help to shape and nuance—and sometimes, to constrain—our thinking. Note that I don’t necessarily consider 'constraint' to be a bad thing, intellectually speaking. Sometimes, setting formal boundaries for thinking is precisely what inspires creativity. Think what Bach did with the fugue.

I’m intrigued by the sudden resurgence of the antennae metaphor in the overlapping contexts of information search, personal information management, and resource discovery. The antennae metaphor is handy because it works as a shorthand for both dispositions and activities. It usefully describes info-related user behaviours, such as alertness, vigilance, and the constant scanning of one’s environment for information.

Anna Sfard’s influential paper on metaphors for learning drew attention to the paradox that, while metaphors are powerful intellectual tools, they are also limited and partial. Sfard’s argument—contrasting the ‘acquisition’ and ‘participation’ metaphors for learning—demonstrated clearly how too great a devotion to one particular metaphor can distort thinking and constrain practice. I’ve been thinking about the implications of her work and have realized that it raises a number of interesting issues and questions.

I guess my main question is, to what extent does the antennae metaphor function as (or: to what extent is it limited to) a description of experts and expert behaviour? And/or: to what extent does it describe an expert model that we—the practitioner community—desire to inculcate in others, through our professional practice? What are the limitations of the metaphor, and to what extent does it capture the key information-seeking behaviours and norms that we perceive to be useful and/or desirable?

'Antennae raised' is a good metaphor for our profession. As information practitioners, our basic disposition towards information is that we want as much of it as possible. At the same time, as participants in a professional community, we tend to use—and normalize—particular discourses of information literacy and digital literacy. (This reminds me of the joke about Second Life, that it’s full of educational technologists.) Yes, we are privileged in terms of the richness and diversity of information streams to which we have access, and privileged in terms of our ability to participate in the discourses that surround them. So for our identifiable and vocal minority, the main question about the antennae metaphor may be the one about desired vs actual behaviours: is there a high degree of congruence between the behaviours that we demand of users (e.g. in the training workshops we run) and the behaviours that we embody?

I like the antennae metaphor. To make sure that is as productive and creatively generative as possible, I want to make sure that it encompasses exploratory, experimental, error-prone “grazing”, “browsing” and “stumbling” behaviours, as well as hyper-efficient, technophile “scanning”.

References

Leong, Tuck Wah, Vetere, Frank, Howard, Steve (2006). Randomness as a resource for design. Proceedings of DIS'06: Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, & Techniques p.132-139
Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1142405.1142428

Sfard, Anna (1998). On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One. Educational Researcher, Vol. 27, No. 2., pp. 4-13.
Link: http://www.citeulike.org/group/616/article/507553