Frames and Action: E.T. Hall
From CS260SP09
Readings
Chapters 6, 8-11 of of "Beyond Culture" by Edward T. Hall, Anchor Books, 1981.
Discussions
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Seth Horrigan 17:54, 5 March 2009 (PST)
In the discussion of action chains (AC), Hall does not distinguish between different types. He states "in the animal world, outside intervention that short-circuits action chains usually results in vicious, uncontrolled fighting." He also clearly explains that ACs in humans appear to be mostly or wholly culturally determined. Nevertheless, he generalizes the violent results of breaking an AC to human ACs. In the illustrative case of the stickleback (ch. 10, p 142), the AC seems entirely genetically determined. I would be interested to see what aspects of human ACs are genetically determined contrasted with those that are culturally dependent, and within that framework to see what effect breaking an AC has in each case.
KetrinaYim 15:07, 8 March 2009 (PDT)
The concept of high and low context levels in art got me thinking about the work I have seen throughout my life. While I am uncertain about the claim that all good art is "high-context" while all bad art is "low-context", I do agree that good art persists because its message is not immediately decipherable.
Take Da Vinci's Last Supper, for instance. Many would consider this painting an instance of "good art." And aside from the fact that its creator is perhaps the most famous of all the Renaissance artists, it persists because people continue to try to determine the message the painting is trying to convey. Numerous theories have arisen regarding this painting, from one of the figures being Mary Magdalene to the existence of subliminal instances of the Holy Grail. And because Da Vinci is not alive today to explain his work (and even if he was, would he feel the need to?), the painting continues to be fascinating and a perplexing mystery to people.
Brian Tran 22:57, 8 March 2009 (PDT)
The discussion about context and its application to languages made me reflect about my own lingual experiences. When friends would ask me how to say certain phrases in Vietnamese but with different actors, I would always respond the same way. I tried to explain the concept of context to them, but was unfamiliar with words at the time.
As a side note, the discussion about action chains reminded me of ActivityDesigner from the literature from last class. People plan out their activities in order like a reel. It makes comprehending actions much simpler. I just find it interesting that the topic of action chains looked at activities very much the same way. However, I don't agree with the drastic consequences of missing links in the action chain like crime and murder mentioned in Tall's paper.
Himanshu Sharma 04:31, 9 March 2009 (PDT)
It reminded me of the mail-forwards that I have recieved many times asking if I could read - "I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg...Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe..."
Whole reading was extremely interesting and I agree with almost everything but I was not able to relate on how can it be applied to IT System Design.
Simon Tan 04:45, 9 March 2009 (PDT)
I'm really curious as to how the author can determine that American culture is "on the lower end" of the context scale, a little above the German and Scandinavian cultures. I'd think it would take years of ethnography to really determine that, and even then the answer could not be so clear. Perhaps in some situations, Americans can somehow have more internalized context just by being a citizen and having to know something about the country's history, but I highly doubt that it is true in all cases.
If anything, I'd think that Americans have less internalized context due to our "melting pot" culture where people are highly diverse and often have very different backgrounds. That makes us 'low-context', sure, but "considerably above" Germans and Scandinavians, who have a more uniform ethnic composition?
Before I get dangerously un-PC, I think the author perhaps should have focused foremost on the languages themselves and their features instead of the culture outright.
David (Tavi) Nathanson 04:54, 9 March 2009 (PDT)
I was fascinated by the initial discussion of the role of context in interpreting language, mainly because it never occurred to me that there is more information necessary to *understanding* a document than is present in the document itself! Thus, the input to a system that can understand language would have to be the document *and* information about the state of the world (or at least relevant parts of the state of the world).
It also occurred to me that the concept of context is related to the concept of normalizing ratings in a collaborative filtering system. When users rate items (say, when they rate movies on Netflix), some will often rate them high, some will often rate them low, etc. By taking the users' rating patterns into account (by subtracting the users' mean rating), the system can make predictions more accurately. This normalization is essentially taking into account *context* (where the context *is* the users' ratings patterns): a user who rights most items high is likely to rate any given item high, which means that a high rating should be less influential in the prediction.
Nicholas Kong 08:31, 9 March 2009 (PDT)
I found the linguistic and artistic examples of high- versus low-context particularly problematic. I feel that Hall is conflating complexity in orthography with context. His example of needing to know that the Chinese character for star contains the sun radical is specious. It is like saying that in order to look up the English word for "misanthropic" one must know that it is derived from the Greek morphemes for "hate" and "person". It seems to me more a question of knowing the etymology; to be sure, the etymology of Chinese orthography is fascinating and can certainly assist in learning characters, but I would argue that it is not a matter of context. The argument that Chinese tones imply a higher context was also flawed. Technically it is not necessary to know how to pronounce a word in Chinese to be completely literate; the character gives a clue to meaning but not to pronunciation.
As for art, I have a little difficulty wit Hall's argument that good art is always high-context. I am reminded of an exhibit of Suprematist art I saw in the Guggenheim a number of years ago. A number of these works were merely a single, large, monochrome geometric shape (say, a circle) on a blank canvas. It seems that this art is highly contextual: to understand it one must understand the artist's milieu, his motivation, his philosophy, his culture. Yet I do not find it nearly as compelling as, say, Monet's water lilies, a lower context form.
Kenrick Kin 10:10, 9 March 2009 (PDT)
Hmm, given a character, I know how to look up the word in a Chinese dictionary. You index the dictionary using the radical. You count how many remaining strokes there are (sans radical) and use that number to index within the section corresponding to that radical. And then you just have to linearly search through all the words that fit those two criteria. However, I have no idea how to look up a word that I know how to pronounce, and find out how to write it. Without pinyin, a phonetic alphabet, is this even possible? I don't know how culture/context would help you here.
I also find his view on art to be an interesting one. It's almost a passing line, but I wonder what examples he would give of bad art. I value aesthetics in art, but unless the style is truly both unique and beautiful, it will not hold my attention. I admire it, but it's not as interesting. I like contemporary art because of its context, or more specifically, the motivation behind the piece. It's more interesting to try to understand the artist's motivation and see how his point of view is captured in the piece than to look at a pretty picture. If I don't understand the motivation or the significance, then the piece is lost on me.
